Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

[Doug McLean <dmclean635@example.com>]

Excellent comments all.

I've had experience living in other Asian countries briefly while as a
grad student (Asia Studies...somehow I managed to get into IT with
that degree, life is weird), and Japanese is not the first Asian
language I've studied either.  From my view, Japan and Japanese are no
more mystical than any other such culture, once you're sufficiently
immersed.  It becomes kind of mundane, but pleasantly familiar.  Japan
is a cool place and all, but it's just another world culture, that
happens to have particularly good food.  ;)

I lived in Hanoi, Vietnam for a time with other grad students, and it
became clear right away which students were succeeding in the language
and which weren't.  Unlike Japanese, Vietnamese is easy to read, but
quite difficult to pronounce due to tones, homophones, and sounds that
just don't exist in english ("th" vs. "t" vs. "d" vs. "d" with a slash
through it).  Some of the students I met there had good strict
teachers that enforced proper pronunciation from the start, while
others were lazy and didn't make the effort.  Some students really
branched out, watched (awful) Vietnamese state TV, others kind of
"turtled" and just hung out at expat bars all the time.  You can
imagine how each student turned out.

I think this experience could just as easily apply to foreigners in
Japan.  I am fortunate to have married my wife, whose taught me a lot
of Japanese (not appropriate for work), but useful in day to day
conversation.  Plus, her family lives outside Tokyo so *noone* can
speak English, thus when I visit, it's weeks of language immersion,
and learning funny dialects like Tochigi dialect, Kanagawa's "country"
dialect and so on.  :)  Sadly, as soon as I leave, it leaks out my
brain again, hence I'd like to stay much longer and really let things
sink in.

Again, from my experience, the most important things to learning a
language are humility and exposure.  Exposure means that the more
you're exposed to a language, the more naturally pick it up.  Kanji
are not really intuitive, but if you see a kanji like 禁止 50 times,
you'll get familiar with it.  If you see it *two hundred times* it
becomes rote.  :D  Same with listening, which is by far the hardest
skill to acquire.  Humility is required to swallow your pride and keep
learning in spite of your temporary mistakes.

My wife has lived in the US for 10 years, and speaks English almost
like a native speaker (no accent either).  She keeps assuring me that
language is really a long-term investment, and not something that can
be rushed.  Based on my experience, I believe she's right.  :)



On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 8:08 AM, JC Helary <brandelune@example.com> wrote:
>
>> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> You cannot speak Japanese
>>> properly to a person unless you know the standing of both in the
>>> social total order, and gaijin are, well, gaijin.
>
>
> I like this comment because it is only partly wrong. What it says is
> that speaking fluently means being socially fluent. And _that_ takes
> more than time and study and conversations with learned (or not)
> Japanese. It requires plenty of _social_ interaction with a huge lot
> of trial/error.
>
>
>
>
>
> Jean-Christophe Helary
>
>
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-- 
Doug McLean

Blog: http://nihonshukyo.wordpress.com/