Speak Like A Man

The Christian Science Monitor has a great little article about gaijin who speak like women in Japan. This is hilarious, because I was just having a conversation with a Japanese girl the other night about this. "Americans speak like women!" she said in my response to wanting to find a male to practice Japanese with.

The Japanese spoken by men and women is pretty different. Everything from words used to rhythms, pronunciation styles, pitch of voice—all very different. Women tend to raise their voices in pitch, use more polite words, refer to themselves in the third person, and end sentences with the particle "wa." (This is an oversimplification, but it works for the purposes of this story.) Men tend to speak much more lower, clipped, use less polite words, and end sentences with "sa" or "zo."

The problem for the writer of the piece, who suffers from speaking like a girl, is that his only model for Japanese comes from his girlfriend. If you work all day with other English speakers at an English school and then go home to the wife or girlfriend, you're only going to hear her style of Japanese. Unless you've grown up in Japan and have hung around with the guys, you're going to miss out on their speaking style.

For us learning Japanese in America, we only hear Japanese from our teachers, who are overwhelmingly female. Of course, most of us men want Japanese girlfriends, so the language exchange partners we tend to seek out are women as well. If we're unaware of the disparity between male and female Japanese, like the author of the article, we may never even know that we're speaking a highly femininzed form of the language. (Although he really should have known better. All you have to do is read a book to find out the differences.)

So, any male Japanese out there want to do a language exchange?

Comments

[TigerYogi]

I never knew that! Fascinating!

[rupan777]

Let's also not forget how many JFL (Japanese as a Foreign Language) instructors are women. Doing a sensei count, 4/6 of mine were and I'm sure that if we took a greater sample of Japanese language students that this percentage could be even higher granted that JFL teachers have always been predominantly female.

Also, phonemically, it's much easier for English speakers to pick up on feminine Japanese because it's relatively closer to how we speak English in terms of pitch, accent, intonation, etc.

I'll admit that it took me a while to shake off the 'feminine' aspects of my Japanese (still not 100%) but there are a lot of underlying issues to the situation. Until then ganbarou....er...zo! ;)