Whenever people learn that I lived in Japan for two years, the exclaim,"Oh, so you know Japanese pretty well, then!" "Actually no," I sigh, partly in irritation at the assumption and partly in embarrassment at my failure.
Indeed. Why not? Why didn't I learn Japanese when I lived in Japan? I'm not stupid. I had (and have) a great desire to learn it. And I was totally immersed in the language. Still, I didn't learn it.
The first barrier was my job. I was in Japan to teach English and everyone at work and in my neighborhood wanted to show me the bit of English they knew...not to show off, but to be friendly, to be inclusive. Whenever I went to the post office, I'd hand the clerk my letter with a "kokubin de onegaishimasu". He'd smile in recognition and reply, "Ah. Air mail!" Yes. It seemed we all knew the same 100 words or so in each other's language.
At school, I'd hope to exchange language practice with the other teachers during our free time in the staff room. I held a couple of English practice sessions, but once the school year kicked into high gear, none of the regular teachers had any free time. So not only did the English practice session slowly disappear, no one ever reciprocated with Japanese practice.
Once I brought one of my beginner textbooks in, and Abe-sensei (the science teacher who sat at the desk to the right of mine) looked at it and shook his head, "This is bad Japanese." True. "Kore wa pen desu." is not quite poetry. Example sentences in English-language textbooks aren't exactly sterling examples of English style, either, but we all must begin somewhere.
My best friend and best teacher was Washizuka-sensei, who taught Japanese literature. He was the only true intellectual among the teachers (my high school was vocational, not academic, school). By intellectual, I mean, he possessed a curiousity and a willingness to explore, undiminished by age or circumstance. He was semi-retired and had plenty of free time. We often circumvented the language barrier, but we never bridged it. He knew beautiful, literary Japanese. But trying to teach me would be like trying to teach a college course to a toddler who had only the most rudimentary vocabulary and grammar.
Just because someone is a native speaker of a language, doesn't mean that they can teach their language to a non-native. No doubt success depends a lot on the student. I'm a student who requires analogies, comparisons, and contrasts. I need a teacher who is fluent enough in both languages to mark a path so that I can draw the connections.
The ideal situation would have been to study enough Japanese in America to have a foundation. Then I would have been able to practice what I'd learned in the classroom and expand on it. At the time, as a working mom, I had neither the time or money to go school to study Japanese. In fact, I got my job in Japan years before I had planned to go. The opportunity arose, and I grabbed it.
I suppose I could have overcome all of these barriers and learned Japanese anyway. The core of my problem is just that I'm too shy--rather I'm too afraid to make mistakes and look foolish. Students of foreign languages must be fearless.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
September 18, 2002
Comments
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I think all of these things are definitely factors, but the keys to your unfortunate situation were these two: Not having friends or acquaintances willing to speak Japanese with you, and being too shy to sound stupid (which everyone inevitably does... ;) )
I was in a much different situation with regard to friends, but I definitely wasn't shy. I couldn't afford to be -- I would have had no friends at all... In fact, I didn't for the first year and it was very hard to deal with for a 10-year-old kid...
But I wonder what one in that situation could do to find a more conducive social circle... It's definitely a tough proposition, when your job and contacts all want to speak English... I think maybe the best thing would be to go find a cafe and just strike up conversations with artsy looking people with beards or crazy hair. Even the kids in Harajuku or something... Maybe you'd be able to sort-of wiggle into a Japanese social circle part-time. Of course, you'd have to have quite a bit of chutzpah to pull that off. ;)
Comment by: Trevor Hill. Posted September 20, 2002 04:46 PM.
My afterschool social life was pretty much confined to hanging out with my own (equally shy) ten-year-old and doing Mom-type things. We tried practicing Japanese together, but often were too exhausted after a day in our separate Japanese-only environments. Watching Japanese TV was one of our best resources. We also became excellent interpreters of body language and context clues.
After all these excuses, though, I'm truly convinced that our biggest barrier lay within. We're both working on overcoming our shyness. (Your post was very inspiring and had some excellent specific examples of different learning strategies.) Think of us as tortoises...after thirteen years we're both still at it, still studying Japanese, and still planning to return (we've been back once already). We're not quick, but we're damn persistent.
Comment by: M Sinclair Stevens. Posted September 21, 2002 07:25 AM.
From the sound of it, I had a couple of advantages in learning Japanese, though I by no means achieved a high level of fluency and unlike you, concentrated on speaking it and not writing or reading. I got to the point where I could chatter on about mundane things or enter into slightly more intellectual conversations if they revolved around subjects I had had practice discussing.
For starters, living in L.A. before going to Japan, working as an ESL/EFL teacher and being friendly with my Japanese students, I started to pick up a few words and phrases. As I had majored in Spanish in college, and the phonetics is similar, I didn't find the pronunciation too daunting. L.A. boasts a significant Japanese community too, Little Tokyo, where I began to take lessons once a week several months before actually moving to Japan. By the time I arrived there, I was at the stage you mentioned, ready to use the little bit I had learned and go from there.
The next advantage I had was the type of institution I worked in, the university, which, unlike the vocational school, had a sufficiently intellectual faculty among whom I found friendly and interesting acquaintances. One of these professors and I set up an exchange, and being a teacher myself and knowing which text I wanted to work out of, I was able to study more formally and in a way that suited me. The campus was full of friendly people like the custodian and his wife and the coffee shop ladies who spoke no English and were happy to monitor my progress. It was a very motivating atmosphere.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, (dare I mention this?) I had a Japanese lover. (I am opting for this word to avoid the awkward use of "boyfriend" to describe a man well into his 30's.) This man, a photographer whom I met through a wonderful group of interesting people including an art professor from the university and "Tono-sama", the owner of a Yakitori bar popular among some of the gaijin, spoke no English whatsoever. But, as he was fond of saying about us, "kokoro ga onaji." And it was. When the urgent desire to communicate and connect and share is there, the words lodge themselves in your brain. And since repetition is the key to learning a foreign language, this relationship gave me the opportunity to constantly review and practice in an environment that was accepting of my mistakes. I am thankful to him, to Marumitsu, for more than helping me learn Japanese. But that is another story.
Comment by: jbl. Posted October 1, 2002 10:50 AM.
I think that another barrier not to be underestimated when discussing how and whether foreigners in Japan learn Japanese, is the availability of and quality of teaching available in the country.
In larger cities (you know the four) there are no shortage of private institutions from which one may choose, though the quality of instruction in many of them, like their eikawa counterparts, is often less than admirable.
However in smaller provincial towns, one is often faced with a choice of one or perhaps two options. Most of these are funded to some extend by respective local governments' "internationalization" budgets which is a great thing for it means we don't have to pay much.
However it is a bad thing because they almost all use the same 2 texts- "shin nihongo no kiso" or more recently "mina no nihongo." these texts are grammatically fairly comprehensive and yet they make very little allowance for people who merely want to learn to communicate in Japanese and have no interest in learning to read and write the language.
These texts, incidentally, published by the 3A Corporation are the government sanctioned "official" method of learning Japanese.
After approximately 70 hours of classroom time, these texts finally start to touch very lightly upon futsu-kei or the form in which over 90% of verbal transactions take place in Japan. It is also almost always the form used in everyday written communications. And then, two chapters later, all lessons are back to the full polite form. I think that when your colleague said it was bad Japanese, he was perhaps meaning more that people simply do not speak like that. We've all heard that comment time and time again here when Japanese friends spot what we're studying.
There are thousand of us walking around for over a year of study speaking at a ridiculously high level of politeness that makes people laugh behind our backs, rather than thinking it quaint. The reason for this is the same reason that all the many tons of pulp every year go into publishing official "how not to offend the Japanese people" pamphlets and books.
Somebody, somewhere in the Japanese government (more likely a whole department of 1500 semi-retired "amakudari"!!) is very concerned that foreigners do everything in their power and beyond, not to offend anyone in their country!
As jbl points out - the Japanese people in the main, believe the same as everyone else - that people are all the same. A few foreigners making a little slip now and then by using the wrong tense is not going to cost too much in international relations. So, let us learn to speak Japanese the way the Japanese speak it, for the love of God!
The Japanese government, if it is going to be getting involved in publishing and selecting texts anyway, needs to sanction a few more texts and courses to enable people to learn at various levels rather than assuming that everyone wants to learn kanji and be able to read at full speed in Japanese. It is perfectly viable to speak foreign languages without reading or writing a lick of them. Language is above all, for communication.
As a footnote - this is not meant to sound ungrateful at all - the fact that the government makes any attempt at all to help foreigners learn their language is a great thing. Merely the observations of one in his second year of wrestling with the WWF-worthy Japanese language in the "main ring," as it were.
Comment by: Derek. Posted November 1, 2002 05:38 AM.
I went through the same thing only when i came back from Mexico. Everyone expected me to be a pro. It pisses me off!
Comment by: Laura. Posted January 8, 2004 04:03 PM.
Share Your Thoughts
As Kurt Easterwood points out, contrary to popular belief, just living in a country is no guarantee that you will suddently begin spouting the language. One doesn't learn language by osmosis. At least some of us don't. Japanese requires a motivated student, an understanding teacher, and chutzpah (which Trevor Hill obviously had).