Warning: learning Japanese can lead to addictive behaviour

...But at least the manfacturers of my new dictionary have recognised the threat and printed directions for help in the inside cover.

The New Nelson Japanese English Character Dictionary was recommended by our teacher at the end of last semester. At 1600 pages, it was certainly one of the heaviest presents I recieved this Christmas, but I'm just working out it might well be one of the most useful.

The handout for our translation module this semester included as the first of its objectives that students would be able to "read, translate, summarise, and discuss Japanese texts that are NOT altered for ease of comprehension." While the texts we were given last semester were fairly complex, last week's work (an extract from a book on General MacArthur and the post-war occupation of Japan) included some characters and vocabulary that completely defeated my trusty electronic dictionary. Working with my three-year-old miniature model and the newly acquired paper monster, I was able to work through the text and unearth the most obscure and specialist vocabulary, including this gem: 公娼制度, or the pre-war system of licenced prostitution. If that isn't specialist, I don't know what is.

In short, if like me you're at a fairly advanced level in Japanese study and know you're going to continue at it for a long time, the New Nelson or a dictionary like it is basically invaluable.

Connecting, translating, pok(er)ing

We now have broadband in our house, and I am currently tapping away at this post on my laptop. Makes posting a bit more civilised (and easier) when you don't have to go out of the house and head to the computer clusters on campus.

In other news, Level 2 Japanese is working me very hard. I'm staying on top, just about. In translation classes, we are working on an op-ed piece by Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, right-wing icon and lover of things robotic. It's an unintentionally hilarious rant against Chinese immigration, featuring some unduly convoluted language which would be a real pain even if I was actually good at translating. We have a great teacher though. It's a shame that I'm firmly in her bad books for missing lessons.

In happier news, I won my first poker game last night. My housemates are fiends for card games, and we play Texas Hold 'Em for small stakes sometimes. Not sure what I'll do with my winnings yet. Oh, who am I kidding, I'll spend 'em all on booze.

English (and) Abroad

I appear to have missed this - Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand has been writing a food column for the Guardian. His last one has a nice aside on the distinction between tourists and "travellers":

A tourist in his early 20s is explaining to another tourist in her early 20s that he is not a tourist: he is a "traveller". They have a tourist map spread on the cafe table in front of them, by the English translation of the menu. He is saying that his experience is richer. He looks, smells and acts like a tourist. I don't get it. Because he stays in a hostel rather than a hotel, is the veritas more veritable? Or is he just a git?

I'm a tourist. I tour the world. I don't feel I have to excuse myself. The travelling bit is dull. In my mind, that is standing around baggage belts hoping that my case hasn't been lost again. Of course I'm a bloody tourist. I don't have the insider's perspective. I feel like a stranger everywhere I go. I like that perspective.

Quite. Living in Japan gives you a lot of that outsider's perspective, because as however well you speak the language and understand the culture, you'll never really belong. This isn't a gripe, just an observation that even longtime residents have to deal with being treated like a newcomers, with all that entails. However, as I've said before, speaking the lingo does make the difference between the outsider's perspective (which will lose its appeal with long-term residency) and a genuine insight.

This leads into a long essay from today's edition about another pet annoyance of mine: the British education system's pisspoor attitude to teaching foreign languages. Agnès Poirier writes from a French perspective on the problem Britain has with teaching languages. This is a really important issue, for a few of the reasons listed in the article. Numbers of pupils taking GCSEs in the subject are already falling, and now universities are dropping languages:

Back in 2002, the University Council of Modern Languages carried out a survey of 30 universities in Britain: three-quarters had substantially or partly cut their modern languages departments. Between 1999 and 2002, 130 university posts in languages had disappeared. In July last year, Oxford Brookes University, one among many others, announced it was dropping its German, Spanish and Italian degree courses. Overall, the languages that have ceased to be taught at some British universities over the past few years have included Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Spanish.

This is beyond belief. Of course we don't need Arabic! It's not like we have a large strategic investment in the Middle East, and are likely to do so for a long time. This really does make me bloody angry. The government has ended compulsory language studies for 14- to 16-year-olds, and then bleats on about the decline in languages. The thing is, if you're going to learn a language, the best time to do is when you're young and you brain is more receptive (this is why I'm jealous of kids brought up in bilingual households). And kids, as I'm sure you're aware, are not going to do anything like studying unless it's compulsory. Trust me on this. This is why I'm in favour of Continental-style compulsory language teaching, as is Poirier:

Why can't languages be taught as compulsory subjects from nursery to A-level, as they are in almost every country in Europe? I didn't have much say in what languages I learnt back in France. It was obligatoire, no bargaining possible. I had to learn two new langues vivantes (though I could choose which two among a poor choice of five) and one or two langues mortes, Latin and Greek. If I had been given the choice, I probably wouldn't have chosen any, and right now I would be writing in French and living in Paris. What does a child know?

But, once exposed, the curiosity grew in me. I naturally asked for more and added a third langue vivante at the age of 13. As a result, my horizons have widened considerably. Once you have tasted exotic fruit, you are hungry for more.

The practical or utilitarian reasons are covered well in the article, but it's the intangibles that she really writes well about:

There is no secret: to really get to see things as others do, and thus to understand them, one must master their language and, in the process, endure hardship and ridicule. Not a job for the faint-hearted. Try it and you'll be mocked for your accent; you'll struggle to make yourself heard, let alone be understood; you will stumble on words, fall silent, unable to keep up the pace of the conversation; you'll suffer a thousand deaths, that of continual misunderstandings, the kind newly arrived immigrants face every day, everywhere in the world.

[...]

When somebody refuses to learn someone else's language on the grounds that it is not useful, they implicitly reject the other's culture and their way of seeing the world - not a very good start for universal peace and understanding. Not a helpful way to make the world a more complex and richer place to live in either. Rather a recipe for unilateral, over-simplistic dogmas, such as the war on terror.

If this government really wants Britain to have an influential position in the world, make the teaching of languages a priority (along with sorting out the general crappiness of the education system. If we work at it, it'll make the difference between tourists and confident, independant citizens of the world.

Messing about in boats/language update

On the weekend I went on a boat trip on the Hozu River with some friends. We were taken from Kameoka to Arashiyama, just outide Kyoto, by a group of (very tough) boatmen who rowed our wide wooden boat downstream through occasional rapids:


Cue lots of screaming from impressionable girls every time we got splashed. It was good fun, and to do it at this time of year with the sakura in bloom along the banks was very beautiful.


Currently writing some begging letters aimed at securing both my research project and my place in Japan once term ends. The fact that I have to make up an original composition in Japanese that says what I want it to say is doing wonders for my language skills. In Level 4, there are so many tests, homework assignments and the like that you have no time to actually do anything with the language beyond the class schedule. Make of that what you will.

I have a rare week where the workload has slackened, so I'm going home to try and read a Japanese magazine article. I used to do it with French magazines all the time, so getting through an article (however laboriously) will be a milestone of sorts.

UPDATE: I found the IMDB entry for the sumo film I mentioned at the end of an earlier post. It's actually rather good, in a laid-back, droll, charming kind of way. It was done by the same guy who did "Shall We Dance?" which was a huge hit in Japan and eventually got its own American remake. And the strange dance of Japan-U.S. relations goes round and round, oblivious to cack-handed attempts to write it off...

Character acting

Following on from the short aside about studying kanji a couple of posts ago, I remembered an article I read some time ago on the story behind a Chinese word. Among the kanji I'm plowing my way through at the moment is "危機" (きき, or kiki), which means crisis. The two characters which make up the word are '危' (danger) and '機'(opportunity). This is exactly the same as the Chinese word which gave rise to the belief that "in Chinese, danger + opportunity = crisis". It's been the springboard for a mysteries-of-the-orient view that the best time for finding opportunity is in a crisis. Seems to me a slightly patronising, orientalist view of things, like those businessmen who read samurai texts to improve their business skills. The article debunks this view very nicely, and you learn a bit about the Chinese language as well. What more could you want?

Also, I referred to kanji as 'ideograms' in the previous post. I've since edited it, as Prof. Mair puts me right in the third paragraph of his article:

Linguists and writing theorists avoid "ideogram" as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes. (For similar reasons, the same caveat holds for another frequently encountered label, pictogram.) It is far better to refer to the hanzi / kanji / hanja as logographs, sinographs, hanograms, tetragraphs (from their square shapes [i.e., as fangkuaizi]), morphosyllabographs, etc., or -- since most of those renditions may strike the average reader as unduly arcane or clunky -- simply as characters.

So now you know.