Learning Japanese #1: Misconceptions
The Japanese language is not user-friendly. It revels in its own difficulty. It delights in punishment. I’ve often compared it to an icy mountain slope that I’m forced to climb up backwards. A close friend has compared it to needing to use the bathroom on an endless highway with no rest-stops. I didn’t understand that one, either, but I think that it captures some of the feelings of trepidation and anxiety.
Despite this, learning Japanese is one of the greatest joys of my life, and I would like to designate a number of blog entries describing my thoughts on this fascinating language.
First, though, some misconceptions.
I’m sometimes told that Japanese is easy because sounds easy. In a way, this is true. Practically nyone could learn to convincingly pronounce Japanese’s small set of sounds. For native English speakers learning Japanese, there’s a tricky “r” that you have to master, elongated vowels and the ocassional double consonant to get used to, and that’s about it.
This superficially seems simple, but it isn’t. Japanese’s vanishingly few sounds means that double-ups are common, and near-identical sounds are a constant hassle. “Soar” and “saw”, “through” and “threw”, and the other dozen or so homophones in English create some confusion, and I’m sure they are frustating to English learners, but Japanese takes it to another level.
I watched table tennis (卓球 takkyuu) on NHK BSP last night and was alarmed to hear こうせい (kousei) used to describe a player’s play style. こうせい (kousei) has a few very common meanings, such as “organisation” or “justice”. Being that “organisation” is the most common meaning of こうせい (kousei), though, I assumed that the player’s play style was “organised”, i.e. well-thought out and planned.
I was wrong. こうせい (kousei) here meant “offensive”, as in an “offensive stance/position”. The competitor needed to be more aggressive if they were going to win.
Similar-sounding words are also abundant. こうせい (kousei) is similar to こせい (kosei), which usually means “individuality” or “personality”, and きょせい (kyosei) means “castration” — a far-cry from “organisation”.
In fact, there are so many homophones in Japanese, that puns are common, as this delightful polar bear shows.
A related misconception is that Japanese is easy because it is phonetic, like I’m told Italian is. This is true. Japanese characters are nearly always pronounced the same. The subtle differences that arise when they are placed in words and sentences have to be learnt like they do in any other language, but they are nearly always recognisable from the way you first learn them in Japanese 101 classes. Not so for English. The “a” in “apple”, the first “a” in “awkward” or the “a” in “art” starts to scratch the surface of what a nightmare English pronunciation is.
Japanese’s relative “strictness” to prononciation, counter-intuitively, means that early mastery is crucial. Miniscule variations are acceptable, but everything else will garner a dreaded “Eh?” and confused looks. Compare this with an innocuous word like “beach” in English, which can be twisted in turned like a tumble dryer inside your mouth and still be comprehensible to native English speakers.
Try telling a friend:
“I went to the boiich”
“I went to the biiiich”
“I went to the be-ATCH”
“I went to the booch”
You’ll sound odd, to be sure, but comprehensible. Not so in Japanese.
Simply put, Japanese isn’t easy. But who would expect the language of samurai, Noh theatre and tea ceremonies to be easy? Japanese is steeped in culture, tradition and class stratificatoin, including its language. Furthermore, Japan is old and has gone through a lot of twists and turns, including protracted periods of relative isolation, where the language has been left to evolve in interesting ways, unimpeded by foreign intereference.
In future blog posts, I plan to impart some of my trials while I continue to study and grow within this gorgeous, magnificent language.
I also make ambient music. Here’s a recent track:
