Foreign Dispatches

Why Learn Japanese?

Irked by this jaundiced response to a query on Slashdot asking for advice on learning Japanese, I thought I'd expantiate a bit on whether and why it's worth learning at all. Why should a Westerner bother with a language so difficult to master when much easier and more readily useful alternatives like Spanish and French are so widely taught?

How Many Words Does One Need?

A few months ago I finally decided that I'd had enough of repeatedly forgetting most of the Japanese I knew and then spending time getting back to an intermediate comprehension level, and that what I ought to aim for once and for all was to attain native-level fluency, at which point I'd then be able to rely on reading newspapers and listening to radio and TV broadcasts to maintain my newfound proficiency. This effort has thus far been surprisingly successful, in that I can now follow most TV dramas without much difficulty and can now read Japanese newspapers well enough that I regularly see stories in them that are only translated days later if at all, but one fairly obvious point my efforts to reach this level have alerted me to is that by far the biggest obstacle adults face in learning languages like Japanese which have very regular grammars and which are unrelated to the ones they already know isn't mastering grammatical rules but vocabulary: reasonable languages* have at most a few hundred rules of grammar to master, but in order to comprehend most of what people are talking about in a language without continuously reaching for a dictionary, one has to be able to effortlessly recall several thousand terms at the very least.

Compulsory Mandarin in British Schools?

I'm not quite sure what to make of this article about an initiative by a school called Brighton College to make Mandarin Chinese a compulsory subject for 13 to 18 year olds. On the one hand I'm happy to see some awareness in at least one British educational institution that there are languages out there worth studying other than the usual French, Spanish and German, but on the other hand I don't see how it could possibly be a good thing to make Mandarin compulsory, especially on such a flimsy basis as doing so in order "to reflect China's position as the fastest-growing economy in the world": what happens when China loses the "fastest-growing" title, as it inevitably must, or if some unforseen event derails the shimmering vision of a Chinese-dominated century which has so strong an allure for the likes of Brighton College's head-teacher? Will we see a repeat of the Japanese boom of the 1980s bubble era, when hundreds of thousands began trying to pick up the language, only to halt their efforts as soon as the bubble burst?

Besides my concern about the "trendy" thinking which motivates this initiative, there is also a much more concrete issue to consider; as foreign languages go, Mandarin is among the most difficult, sharing virtually no vocabulary in common with English, and having a dependence on tonality which most Westerners will find difficult to come to terms with; in addition to this it also has an extremely cumbersome orthography which even native speakers take at least 12 years to sufficiently master, and without mastery of which it is difficult for foreigners to gain enough exposure to the language to solidify their usage of it - just mastering the 800-1000 most frequently used characters in order to be able read basic texts such as short magazine articles and the like could easily take Brighton's students the entirety of their years at the school. Mr. Cairns also evidently seems to be under the delusion that the "dozen native Chinese speakers" currently attending his school will somehow be able to find the spare time to act as unpaid teaching staff for the entirety of their schoolmates, despite the high likelihood that the very reason they're studying at a British institution is in order to be forced to master English themselves, and somehow I get the feeling the parents of these children won't be too happy to hear about the hopes he's placing on them. How exactly is someone who speaks not a word of Mandarin ("I have also agreed to join the first Mandarin Chinese class") or (almost certainly) any other East Asian language supposed to be aware of all these issues, much less be prepared to deal with them?

As I said in the beginning, I don't think offering Mandarin or any other Asian language in British secondary schools is at all a bad idea; I just don't have any illusions that beginning to learn them so late in the day is something all but the brightest or most motivated students will be able to easily cope with while juggling many other subjects, and making any language which relies on Chinese characters compulsory only when the students are already 13 is likely as foolish an educational policy as they come - even at selective universities, and even amongst those who major in a language, rare is the student who is able to master in 4-6 years what it takes East Asians 16 to 18 to accomplish.

If schools absolutely have to make a language like Mandarin compulsory - and I don't really see why they should - the best time to start would be at age 5 or 6, at which time the children should ideally also start watching hours of undubbed Mandarin programming on a daily basis: instead I'm sure what will happen is the same old half-assed British language teaching which churns out masses of graduates who "speak" [sic] what they mistakenly assume to be French and Spanish, with the only difference being that the results with the Brighton College program will likely be even more pathetic.

Rising Mandarin, Falling Cantonese

While browsing this blog I came across this interesting story on the declining international fortunes of Cantonese* as Mandarin-dominated China continues its economic rise. Although I can well appreciate the likely economic benefits which can accrue from all of the "Chinese" world converging on a single shared language, in a way I find it highly regrettable that Mandarin should have come out the victor, for eminently self-interested reasons: Cantonese remains far closer to the way in which "official" Chinese was spoken in the Tang-era than Mandarin does, which means that one who has a good grasp of the 音読み readings of the kanji characters used in Japanese has a much bigger leg up in grasping Cantonese than the highly-divergent Mandarin, and much the same is true for Koreans who can fluently read hanja.

It's for much the same reason that I find the use of simplified Chinese characters detestable - apart from their being rather ugly (what else can one expect from communists?), they also diminish the value of my investment in learning the old-style orthography, leading to the perverse situation in which I find it easier to make sense of historical Chinese texts than I do most of what's being written today on the mainland. The fact that Taiwan and Japan have both managed to establish universal literacy using the traditional character set only goes to show how superfluous the simplification of characters was, and I for one hope that the classical orthography eventually wins out even as the more classical-sounding spoken Cantonese is losing to Mandarin.

*Which, contra the LA Times, is not a "dialect", but a full-blown language in its own right.

Hangul

Bill Poser has an interesting post up on (한글), the writing system invented in 1446 by Korea's King Sejong. As Poser makes clear, Koreans do indeed have something to be genuinely proud of in how well the alphabet fits with the language it was created for (even if they do have a tendency to exaggerate the sheer extent of its originality): by comparison with, say, the mess that is Japanese orthography, Hangul is a foreign language learner's dream come true, easily learnable in just 2 or 3 sittings. Alas, as I can attest, having learnt and forgotten Hangul at least twice, it's just as easily forgettable if you don't have a good rationale for solidifying your knowledge of it.

Of course, the funny thing about all of the well-deserved praise directed at Hangul above is that knowledge of the alphabet alone is definitely not enough to be considered literate (as in the "cultured man of letters" sense) in Korean society, and only within the last two decades have Korean newspapers been printed without hefty sprinklings of Chinese characters called "Hanja" (한자), of which there are some 1,800, or roughly the same number as the 1,945 Joyo kanji (常用漢字) all Japanese students are expected to master by the time they leave high school. Knowing how insistent Korea's traditional Yangban elite was about rejecting all cultural influences which threatened to undermine their monopoly on status and power, it would be interesting to investigate the degree to which Korean society's shift from restricted literacy, mainly through the medium of Hanja, towards universal Hangul-based literacy, was stimulated by the systematic Japanese efforts at destroying Korean culture, though I'm sure it'll be a cold day in hell before any such exercise will be looked upon favorably in Korea.

Euphemism of the Day

"Delivery Health", or, to give the Japanese shorthand, デリヘル ("deriheru"). Needless to say, while something is being delivered, it has nothing to do with "health" as traditionally understood. A closely related term is "fashion health" (ファッションヘルス), which is, if anything, even more misleading as to what it entails.

国際化

One thing that's long irritated me about all the hype over the opportunities for transcultural, one-to-one communication made possible by the Internet is that in practice it's often extremely hard to breach the barriers thrown up by language, especially for those looking for windows into Asian countries like Japan and China, whose ideographical writing systems are so arduous to learn that even near-native verbal fluency in their languages will not suffice to make understanding possible: this is especially noticeable in the world of blogging, where the extremely low levels of reciprocity between English-speakers and others falls to almost nothing once we look at a country with as vibrant a blogging culture as Japan.

Luckily for the determined internationalist, however, there are tools which can aid the effort at understanding, at least where Japanese is concerned, especially if one already has some prior knowledge of how the language works. One such tool is Rikai, a website created by a guy called Todd Rudick*, which acts as a proxy through which kanji on pages of interest are automatically translated into furigana whenever the mouse pointer is passed over them: the tool is really very good, and seems to draw on the WWWJDIC server created by Jim Breen for its underlying linguistic functionality. If you're looking for blogs on which to try it out, I suggest taking a look at the 人気ブログランキング blog-ranking service (the punditry section has some really ... err, "interesting" - as in frothingly anti-Korean - sites at the top, including this one and this one) or look around on Global Voices Online's Japan section for interesting candidates (the entire Global Voices Online site is highly recommended, by the way, so much so that I'm adding it to my blogroll).

*Who, strangely, is dressed in Chinese garb in the image on the page I linked to ...

PS: Windows users who either already have or are willing to install the .NET Framework can also give the CJEDictionary a look. It supports not just Japanese, but simplified and traditional Chinese as well.

Transliterations in Chinese

Seeing as the East Asian language I know best is one with a syllabary which can easily accommodate foreign words, it hardly ever occurs to me to think about the often odd and unflattering ways in which terms for foreign people are transcribed into Chinese.

The Chinese language is comprised of thousands of characters and combinations of characters, each composed of various strokes. Now a human rights group in Taiwan is calling on Chinese journalists and academics around the world to stop the "discriminatory" way that characters for "Jewish people" are written in Mandarin.

Slutspurt Med Bra Fart

Subbing for Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage spots a false friend with highly misleading connotations, at least to English-reading eyes.

What do you think the title of this post means, anyway?

The NYT Discovers Ethnologue

You know a linguistic resource has gone mainstream when an entire article in the world's most self-regarding paper is devoted to it. I don't like religion in general, if only because of the irrational tendencies it engenders, but I must say that this database is one of those examples of how good things can come even from otherwise malign phenomena.

Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.

Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.

Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."

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