What's up with my Japanese, anyway?

Living in a foreign country is like being a child again.  It's not at all like visiting as a tourist, when you are primarily interested in taking in the sights, being entertained, trying exotic foods, maybe taking some pictures and posting them on your blog for your friends to look at.  But if you stay, if you try to live a local life, then you frequently find yourself reduced to childlike bafflement.  You are bewildered by much of what goes on around you.  You suspect there is a reason, an underlying logic, for what is happening, but only the grownups -- the locals -- seem to understand and control it.

Of course, as a grownup, this situation is far more frustrating to you than when you were a child.  For a child, bewilderment is all you know.  For a grownup, bewilderment can be terrifying, disconcerting, disorienting.  To survive, you have to learn to be comfortable as a child again.  To roll with the uncertainties.  To look, to observe, to absorb.  It's not easy, this functioning like a child while saddled with the logical mind of an adult.  But there are compensations, rewards.  The masteries that come to a child only after many years may come to the adult ex-patriot within a period of only months, or perhaps a year or two.  And these masteries offer great satisfaction, a sense of achievement that is enhanced by knowing that one has passed a threshold.

If you know something of the language of the place you are visiting, the period of adjustment can be shortened.  Of course, even with linguistic competence, fully mastering a second culture is a lifelong affair.  But achieving a degree of comfort and understanding can come fairly quickly if one has the ability to read and communicate with locals.  After only three weeks, I'm starting to feel less out of control in certain social situations, starting to understand how mastery of a few conventionalized phrases can grease social interactions.  In short, I'm just beginning to grow up here.

Well, that brings this topic to me and my rather unusual constellation of capabilities (or lack thereof) in Japanese.  I am a most unusual foreign language learner.  With three years of formal language study in my distant past (20 years ago), good knowledge of Chinese, a working ability in Korean, and native English, I am an extreme illustration of the potential gap between passive and active foreign language knowledge.

My Japanese ability is hard to describe.  I have a misshapen, ill-formed, poorly deteriorated knowledge of bits and pieces of the spoken language; I have a more confident command of certain aspects of the written language; but wield almost no vocabulary to speak of.  I can barely say anything, but I can understand a lot, especially if it's in written form.

After studying Japanese in college, and taking the occasional reading refresher course (including one under the tutelage of a regular reader of this blog), my understanding of the structure of the language is strong.  I know how to properly order words in a sentence; how to mark the nouns for their proper roles; how to conjugate verbs.  I understand the notion of topic, which is fundamental to the cognitive structuring of Japanese sentences.  And, thanks to a writing system that primarily uses Chinese characters to represent verb and noun roots, and makes use of a particular script dedicated almost exclusively to English borrowings, I can read with surprising confidence.  Yet I barely can recall any actual words of the language.

The Japanese writing system is without doubt the most complex and baffling in the world, which is why I love it.  Three scripts are commonly employed together.  To oversimplify a great deal, they are: kanji, or Chinese characters, to indicate verb and noun roots; katakana, a syllabary used to spell out words borrowed from European languages (and also employed for a number of other sundry purposes); and hiragana, a syllabary used for writing grammatical elements, adverbs, and anything else that kanji and katakana aren't appropriate for.  Generally speaking, kanji write Japanese roots that are more or less synonymous with the words that the same Chinese characters write in Chinese, which means I have a good shot at guessing their meaning correctly.  But pronunciation is another matter.  Sometimes these kanji write native Japanese roots, most of which I've long forgotten; in some other cases, they write borrowed Chinese words, in which their pronunciations are related to, but often quite different from, the equivalent Chinese pronunciations.

If I scan a stretch of Japanese text, I can get basic word meanings from the kanji; I can isolate and puzzle out the words that are English borrowings; and I can connect those all together with the grammatical glue represented by the hiragana.  But I usually can't pronounce those sentences aloud in their entirety, because I don't know how all those kanji are to be pronounced.  As a result, the gap between my passive ability and my active ability in the language is about as wide as it can get for a person.  If I'm trying to figure out how to operate a washing machine, I can do pretty well.  If I'm trying to ask directions or explain what I want to buy, I'm generally in trouble.

The other odd thing about my Japanese is that I generally do better with more formal language.  I still don't know how to say "Where's the bathroom" (I really should learn that), but I'm pretty good at saying things like "I'm working with a professor at Ehime University on research related to Chinese dialects".  That's because the more formal the Japanese, the more the words are likely to be Chinese borrowings.  It's rather similar to the way the more formal words in English tend to be Latinate in origin.  You might imagine a scenario in which an Italian speaker has an easier time remembering how to say a sentence like "I desire to acquire edible products"--in which nearly every word has a similar-sounding "friend" in Italian--than a sentence like "I want to get some food".

But what makes me really different from your average language learner is my knowledge of historical linguistics.  I know what the Chinese words sounded like in ancient times when they were borrowed into Japanese, and how those words have changed their pronunciations in both languages over subsequent decades.

For example, I know that if a Chinese syllable is pronounced jing, its borrowed form in Japanese has got to be kei or kyō or sei or shō.  And if I happen to know the specific Cantonese or Ancient Chinese or Korean pronunciation of the word in question (which I often do), I can eliminate two of those possibilities.

The other day the TV was on at breakfast in the guesthouse, and a news conference was being televised.  All of these enormously fat people in suits walked in, and you could tell immediately that they were sumo wrestlers.  I already knew that a big sumo competition was coming up, and that there had been a big scandal (sumo wrestlers implicated in betting on baseball games) that might threaten those games.  I figured the news conference must be related to that.  I said to the manager, "sumo desu ka?" 'Is it sumo?'.  She said yes, and then explained that there would be no hōsō of the sumo match.  Hōsō is probably a word I've learned at some point in the past, but I certainly didn't remember it.  Nevertheless, I was able to figure out very quickly what it must mean.  hō corresponds to the syllable fang in Chinese, and sō to the syllable song, so I just had to think of a Chinese word pronounced fangsong that would make sense in that context, and there it was: "broadcast".  (As I saw in the paper later, this is the first time since TV broadcasts began in the 1950s that the sumo competition isn't being shown on NHK.  People are apparently too turned off by the scandal to want to watch.)

That afternoon, when I came back from campus, the manager told me that she wanted to make fried rice for my next-day's breakfast.  As with the omu-raisu she made for me last week, this dish has to be eaten just-cooked, so she told me I should be ready at precisely 7:45.  I nodded and said "Seven-forty-five; I understand".  Then she said, as if a sudden realization had struck her: "You understand everything I say, don't you?"   I think up until recently she's considered me as someone who simply can't understand any Japanese.

One thing that's really helped me over the last week is a book I happened to find on the shelves in the office I'm using on the campus of Ehime University.  The office functions partly as a classroom; partly as overflow shelving for my professor host's collection of books on China and Chinese linguistics; and partly as a small English-language library, with a small but eclectic selection of books including The Feminine Mystique, The Norton Book of Science Fiction, Bowling Alone, and The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville.  The book I found is called Mastering Japanese.  From the design elements I took it to date back to the 1970s, but in fact it was written in 1989, and it was for me the perfect review.  It's entirely in Rômaji -- that is to say, all of the Japanese is transcribed in the Roman alphabet.  But that's okay for me because I don't need to practice reading the script.  I need review of words and common grammatical structures.

The texts are well organized; useful vocabulary is introduced in a sensible order and the grammar explanations are succinct and accurate.  More amusingly, the book's author is British.  The first dialogue in Chapter 9, On the Ginza, is titled "Mr Itô and Mr Foster have elevenses."  The use of the sentence-final emphatic modal particle yo is illustrated with the sentence "Watakushi no kaban desu yo", which is translated as "It jolly well is my case".  And kudamonoya is glossed as "fruiterer's".

Everything in the lessons is surprisingly familiar: the grammar, the vocabulary.  I've learned it all in a former life, and most of it hasn't had a neuron fire on its behalf in 20 years.  Each word, each grammatical structure, strikes an immediate chord and yet feels strange in its familiarity, like a well-known object seen through several feet of murky water.

Unfortunately, my stay in Japan is coming to an end soon, and the progress I've made in the language will certainly slip away within a few week's time.