yakihito

Oita Dispatch 3: Catching Up With Adam

Yes, been very busy as of late. My nine classes continue to test my diligence with homework, tests and presentations. I've also been traveling on the weekends which is very rewarding but not so good when it comes to studying. This weekend I'm staying in and I thought I'd take the chance to get caught up on some things.

First off, I was supposed to participate in a sake tasting competition (for foreigners I think) today. The top prize was a trip to Tokyo to compete in the nationals. I canceled at the last minute though. I feel bad about it but I also have A LOT to do this weekend. I'm also DJing a friend's birthday party tomorrow which means I'll be out of commission from 6pm tomorrow until pretty much Tuesday. The last thing I need is more drinking.

Like I mentioned the other day, it's wet. Rainy season. Never stops. I have a little clothes washer on my veranda but no dryer. So my room has been full of damp clothes for the past few days. I've got the AC on full blast, which may actually be freezing the clothes into ice rather than drying them.

Bought a few plane tickets this weekend. One is for Tokyo. I'll be heading out there in August to see friends, eat good food and climb Mt. Fuji. I'll take the train back to Oita, leisurely stopping at sites along the way. I also bought round-trip tickets to Seoul, South Korea, for a September trip. (Interestingly enough, it takes the same amount of time to fly from here to Tokyo as it does to Seoul. Only 1 1/2 hours!) I'm really excited about this. I've been reading through Lonely Planet's guide to Korea and it sounds amazing. I'm going to do both big cities and small, quiet areas, maybe an island for a bit of beach relaxation. To make sure I don't pick up some unwelcome bug while across the Japan Sea I have to get some shots over the next month. Korea isn't Africa but Hep A is not unheard of there. No thank you!

At the dorm where I live, the students are primarily American, Korean, and Chinese. I've noticed an interesting grouping lately. The Koreans tend to hang out with Japanese students, and the Chinese with Americans. This is not always true of course, but I think there's something here. Korea and Japan have very similar cultures. Both are small, relatively homogeneous countries with histories of isolation. They are also both heavily influenced by Confucius, and thus have hierarchical societies. China and America, in contrast, are large, multi-ethnic nations that both consider themselves the center of the world. Americans and Chinese are both outspoken and refuse to take any shit. You'd think this would lead to more differences than similarities but somehow we put our nationalities aside and just make a lot of noise. Yes, both Americans and Chinese are loud. At least, the ones in my dorm are. (Oh, and lest you think it's a language thing, while most of the Americans can not speak Japanese so well, limiting our ability to communicate with them, the Chinese do speak it well. But they still always hang out with us.)

So there you go, that's what's going on right now. Oh, I still have pictures from last weekend's trip to Kumamoto to post. Hopefully this weekend...

Learning Japanese I Really Think So

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. When you're taking 9 classes, midterms are really a bitch. Two last week, three next week plus a presentation, and then two more presentations and another midterm the week after that. They really like presentations in this school. No papers, lots of presentations. Oh, and I gave a speech at school last week too. Maybe I'll get around to posting about that some day.

When it comes to learning Japanese, us English speakers are the slowest of the slow. Compared to the Koreans and the Chinese, we're Zambonis to their F-1 Racers. Granted, a lot of them have been taking Japanese since middle school, at least in the case of the Koreans. Japanese for them is like French or Spanish for us. The grammar is pretty similar, from what I hear, and the two languages share a lot of loan words from Chinese.

As for the Chinese, they've got the kanji advantage, as Japan imported the Chinese writing system about 1400 years ago. Yes, there are some differences in the way a few characters are written, and yes, the pronunciations are different, but in most cases the general meaning is the same. They're able to see a new word and know the meaning, even if they still have to study the way it's pronounced. And there's about 2000 of these things we're supposed to know, minimum.

However, we English speakers do have one advantage: English loan words. Just as Japanese took in a lot of loan words from Chinese in the past, now it's taking in tons of loan words from English. These are all handily written in katakana, a phonetic syllabary. Even if we've never seen the word before, we can sound it out and recognize it as an English word.

For example:

パーティー (Pahtee) Party
コンピューター (Conpyootah) Computer
レベルウップ！(Reberu-appu!) Level Up!

As you can see from the last example, the word doesn't always make sense from an English perspective. "Level up" here means to improve yourself, as in go up a level. I think it comes from video games. Recently, I had some trouble with サービス (sabeesu), or "service." It can mean service like we're familiar with, but it can also mean "complimentary," like in a restaurant. I was recently handed a coupon that said:

サービス (Sabeesu)
プチアイス　(Poochi Aisu)

Complimentary
Small Ice Cream

The "poochi" part I think comes from Italian, and "aisu" of course is ice cream. No, there's no confusion with the ice you put in your drink because they still use the Japanese word for that, "koori." Interestingly enough, the kanji for koori is 氷, which is exactly the same as for pretty close to 水 "mizu," water. How do you know if you're getting ice or water? Context. Look closely. If the 氷 is on a bag of frozen water, then you can bet it's ice.

The Chinese complain they have to know English to learn Japanese. We complain that we have to know Chinese to learn Japanese. Meanwhile the Koreans happily leapfrog over us both. I have no idea how the Thai and Arabic kids keep up.

Wakarimasen

It's official: culture shock has settled in. I've been here about three weeks and I'm truthfully pretty sick of Japan right now. Don't get me wrong, I love it. But I also hate it.

I hate it because I hate myself for not understanding what's being said to me. Of course I'm no super-human language machine, but I thought that after two years of studying Japanese I'd be better than this. But no. I suck.

What makes it worse is everybody is so nice and apologetic about it. Especially the Korean students, who speak Japanese like champs but no English. When I don't understand what they're saying—and this isn't quantum physics or something we're discussing, it's, "How was dinner?"—they apologize for their accent, or their poor Japanese. Jeez, you speak like a native! Stop being so nice! Ahh!

So I say, "Wakarimasen." I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't understand. My God, I must have said that 1000 times today. It got to the point with my tutor that I started holding up my fingers in a W formation because I got so sick of saying it.

I know this will pass. I know that the longer I stay, the more I will understand, and the more I can respond. But right now it's REALLY HARD feeling stupid all the time. I actually avoided going to a party for new students tonight because I just couldn't bear to say, "wakarimasen" again. Thank God there are Americans here to speak with.

Ah, culture shock, you are a true bitch.

Looking Up Kanji

Harvey over at JapanNewbie posted recently on the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which reminded me that I myself had recently picked it up again after buying it and never really using it.

A year ago, when I started studying kanji seriously at San Francisco State, our sensei told us to go to the Kinokuniya in Japan Town and buy a kanji dictionary. "Just buy the one that seems best to you," she said. So I bought the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary because it was for learners, which is what I was. I got it home, tried to look up something, and was totally mystified. So I put it on the shelf and bought a Canon Wordtank V80 instead.

The Canon Wordtank V80 is an electronic Japanese/English dictionary with the ability to input kanji directly on the screen with an included stylus. Actually, the Wordtank V80 also has Japanese/Japanese, Japanese/Chinese, English/Chinese, and English/English dictionaries, but it's the kanji functionality that attracted me to it.

I use it all the time. I see kanji I don't know, I draw it on the screen, and there it is. Or something close. The nice thing about the dictionary is not only is it forgiving on stroke order, it gives you a number of similar-looking kanji that you can choose from in case your writing was sloppy. You can also do compounds. Write the next kanji in the word and it'll give you the word. You can then jump to the dictionary to see the meaning. What's cool is you can use the stylus to jump. The keyboard is of a good size too.

My problem with the Wordtank V80 is it doesn't have nearly as many compounds as I'd like. Which is why I've gone back to the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. I've never used a "real" kanji dictionary so I don't know how the Learner's Dictionary differs, but looking up characters isn't all that difficult once you know a little about how kanji works. As long as you understand how many strokes there are per radical, you can look up any character quickly. And it gives you lots of compounds and meanings. Very nice. I'll definitely be using this more from now on. Now if it were only more portable...

Oh, a lot of people in my kanji class use the Nintendo DS and the Sono Mama program to look up kanji. I've never used it, but there's a comparison between my Wordtank V80 and the DS here. Apparently it's pretty useful. I was watching a guy looking up characters for what I guessed was a business Japanese class (the book cover said ビジネス, "business" rendered in katakana). If it has what he needs, I'm sure it has most of the important kanji.

At the Asian: Chinese or Japanese?

For a while now I've been volunteering a few afternoons a month at the Asian Art Museum, a great museum in downtown San Francisco with an absolutely stellar collection of artifacts from around Asia. I finally remembered to bring my camera in (on my last day, even) so I'll be putting up pics that I like over the next week or so.

To start off, I'm posting this picture of a banner that hangs over the main entry way. The information booth, in which I often sat, directing patrons to the bathrooms and escalators, is right under this banner, which gave me ample time to stare at it and wonder if those characters are indeed Chinese. They look like hiragana to me. Perhaps not modern hiragana, although there are a few in there, but more of the old hiragana, often called hentaigana.

I'm no scholar of classic Japanese. I'm barely even a scholar of modern Japanese. And the only Chinese characters I know are the kanji I've learned. But those characters look pretty Japanese to me.

I asked about it and someone at the museum promised to get back to me but never did. The scroll depicted in the banner isn't on display in the museum, nor is it on the Asian Art Museum's website. Any scholars out there who can shed some light on his for me?

Language and Gender Identity

Recently, as I've been studying Japanese, I've been thinking about how differently English and Japanese handle gender, specifically as it relates to the way you address someone. For two years I worked with a man who was born biologically female. Although I fully respected and comprehended that he lived as a man, I would still occasionally slip up and say "she" in reference to him, even in his presence. I always felt bad and apologized, but it made me realize how ingrained gender conditioning was.

Recently I wondered: if I hadn't been burdened with a choice in pronouns, would I still have made a similar mistake? Japanese doesn't often use pronouns. Generally, if you use a subject in a sentence (Japanese often omits subjects if the meaning is implied by context), you refer to someone by their name or a gender-neutral "you." Even name suffixes tend to be gender neutral. "San" can mean Mr. or Mrs. or whatever. True, the diminutives "chan" and "kun" tend to be for girls and guys, respectively, but the rules aren't hard and fast. Recently there's been a move in workplaces (or so I've read) to affix "kun" to women's names rather than "chan," which can have a tone of sexual harassment. Going the other way, men can have the "chan" applied, such as for grandfathers (Ojiichan) or little kids.

Contrast this to English, which has to specify a subject, whether it be name or pronoun. Once the name has been said once, it's all pronouns after that. Third-person pronouns are gender-defining. To reference someone is to codify their gender identity. This is very interesting and doesn't have to happen in Japanese. You can say 彼 "kare" for "he" or 彼女 "kanojo" for "her," but it's not as common. (In fact, these two words more often refer to boyfriend and girlfriend.) As I stated before, you generally use the person's name until it becomes obvious about whom you are speaking. It would appear that in English, gender identity is largely reinforced from without.

In Japanese, gender identity is projected from within. It's not the words others use to refer to you, it's the words you use to refer to yourself that make this distinction. In English we say "I." Gender neutral. In Japanese, you can use the polite (and gender neutral) わたし "watashi" but, depending on whether you identify as male or female, you will more often use a different word. Men have the choice of 俺 "ore" or 僕 "boku," while women use あたし "atashi." Actually, it goes deeper than this. Japanese is spoken very differently by men and women. The words you use, the way you end sentences, many things demonstrate this. Thus, gender identity—at least where the language is concerned—appears to come from within in Japanese.

Returning to my original question, if I hadn't been burdened with pronouns, would I still had made the name gender mistake? I don't know how growing up speaking Japanese would affect me, but had I been speaking Japanese at the time, it wouldn't have even been an issue, as I would have just used his name (or no subject at all).

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?