Japan Language

In Japan, Buddhists don't eat Christmas cookies, but Shintos love them. That's because they're jinja-bread.

KRISTEN DRQUFUTAI on a delivery notice from Nippon Express.

I think I shall spam people using this name:

Hello, my new friend. I am KRISTEN DRQUFUTAI, a citizen of the Republic of ZOGISTAN where my family was persecuted when my father hid 14.3% of the national debt in our attic. The total sum in gold, which I have removed from the attic upon my father's death, etc...

One of the interesting things about Japanese lessons is learning new things about my own language. Here's somethign I learned last week.

In Japanese, each sort of sugar-based sweet treat has its own name: chocolate is チョコ (choco) ; old fashioned hard candies are 飴 (ame); soft chewy sweets are カンディー (candy) and so on through jelly beans, caramels and gum...each one is its own thing and there's no general category into which they all fit except the very broad category of "snacks"

So I figured that "candy" as a category was an English language thing. But I am wrong. It's an American English thing. In Australia, candy is chewy gummy things just like in Japan, and each sweet stands on its own. I don't know about the Queen's English. Is there a general category for all sugar-based treats in the UK?

I bit the bullet, swallowed my guilt and shame, and quit my Japanese class. Last week's lesson had me near tears; I just wasn't getting the finer points of wake. Why put myself through that any longer?

So I wrote a note to Oyama sensei, explaining that I needed to take a break and maybe after a while I'd be able to to return to language study with a fresh enthusiasm (not bloody likely, really).

And this morning I got this reply (translated from her Japanese original, of course)

Dear Kristen. I received your mail. I'm very sad and it's such a shame but it can't be helped. Take a little break.

Thanks, Oyama sensei. For all your good instruction and for being so understanding.

Once a week for the last five years and some, Tod & I've had a Japanese lesson together. Anyone who has heard us speak Japanese will marvel at our different abilities. Tod's approaching fluency. I flail with any conjugation more complex than negative past tense.

So this evening, when we rounded the corner on the current grammar review, I indicated that I would be quite happy to be done when we reach the end of these handouts.

Oyama-sensei looked less than surprised, though she encouraged me to continue. "The next thing is a new book and it's not so much grammar, mostly conversations. You're really good at those," she said in Japanese. Ha, right!

Tod was horrified. He loves learning Japanese so much that he can't fathom that I might not share his enthusiasm. Or maybe he enjoys watching me struggle. Either way, he looked disappointed.

I told them I'd think about it. But really, I don't want to take lessons anymore. I see light at the end of the tunnel and I'm hurrying towards it as fast as I can.

One of the Japanese members of the Foreign Correspondents Club asked me to explain "raincheck" to him today. He sometimes pops into my office while I'm working and asks me to help him understand idiomatic English. I'm glad that I usually know the meaning and also the origin of the phrases he asks about.

A raincheck is a promise to deliver a service after a postponement. You might get a raincheck if the supermarket runs out of the toilet paper that's on sale. They give you a voucher that allows you to buy the toilet paper at the reduced price when it's in stock again. Or you might say "Can I take a raincheck?" if someone invites you out to dinner on a night that you are busy. This means that you hope they will invite you again on another night.

The original raincheck was a special ticket issued when a baseball game was cancelled due to bad weather. The raincheck allowed you to come to another game instead. Rainchecks have been around since 1884.

Assisting friends and colleagues with language is par for the course* around here. Tod explained "that old chestnut" to Ota-san today and even UltraBob recently needed some help translating muchi to ame (literally whip and candy) into "carrot and stick."

* yet another idiom--this time relating to golf.

I met Sayaka when we were volunteering for a local magazine called Yanesen.

Actually, Sayaka found me through my weblog, figured out that I lived in the neighborhood and recruited me. I was happy to help, though I don't think the English edition we worked on together ever went to press.

Now Sayaka lives in Oita and publishes a weekly mail magazine for Japanese speakers wanting to improve their English. It's called "Sayaka and Kristen's Simple and Useful Lunchtime English."

Despite the prominence of my name in the title, I don't do anything. Sayaka uses entries from my weblog and other sources, deconstructs them, explains the weird things that I write, gives a brief lesson on vocabulary, idiom or a grammar point, then asks comprehension questions.

Tuesday's lesson is followed by the answers on Friday. On Fridays our names are reversed in the masthead--Kristen and Sayaka. That's Sayaka being very humble (though she does all the work and should take all the credit) but I think it's also quietly proving that I have all the answers. Hehehehe.

I've noticed that Sayaka is catching up with me. It used to be that the entries she selected were older ones, but this week's issue featured the one on shopping for the U101. I'd better write a few exclusives for the magazine, otherwise Sayaka's going to have to deconstruct and explain the kitten post!

If you're interested in paging through the back issues or subscribing (it's free), visit Macky, a Japanese e-zine clearinghouse.

Sumomo mo momo mo momo no uchi.
Plum and peach are both in the peach family.

This tongue twister turns around the word momo which means peach. Sumomo is a plum and all those extra mo are roughly equivalent to 'and' and 'also.'

Niwa no niwa ni wa, niwa no niwatori wa niwaka ni wani wo tabeta.
In Mr. Niwa's garden, two chickens suddenly ate a crocodile.

The key word here is niwa which means garden. Niwatori is a chicken, niwa means two chickens, niwaka ni means suddenly and wani is a crocodile. All the extra ni and wa are particles that emphasis the preceding words or give them a location, sort of like 'in the.'

There is another "niwa" tongue twister that I can't say:

Uraniwa niwa niwa niwa niwa niwa niwatori ga iru.
There are two chickens in the back yard and two in the front yard.

Uraniwa is the backyard. I can't figure out which of the niwa are 'two', 'in the' and 'garden.' Ack!

An interesting conversation is going on over at the DigitalEve Japan discussion list about searching in Japanese vs English. One poster commented that searching for red Pajero at images.google.com and images.google.co.jp doesn't bring up the same results. Later she revealed that she was searching for it in Japanese on the Japanese Google, and in English on the English Google.

Which is not the same search at all. Why not?

Well, as I explained on the list, if you search for aka pajero and for akai pajero (with aka/akai in kanji and pajero in katakana) you get different results: 11 for aka pajero and 3 for akai pajero. If you spell out aka or akai in hiragana you get 0 results.

Yet all four variations are definitely the same idea of "red Pajero" that any Japanese reader would understand.

This must give Japanese search engine developers nightmares. I didn't even start on the variations of spaces between words or not. Generally, there are not spaces between words in Japanese. I usually search with spaces between words, though.

If you search for red Pajero in English on either images.google.co.jp or images.google.com you get 49 hits. Quite a few more than searching in Japanese.

So there are two issues involved:

1. There's more than one way to write "red Pajero" in Japanese.
2. There are more results in English than in Japanese.

Regarding 1, you must try all variations to find all results. No way around it.

As for 2, I'm not sure whether there are more hits on this search in English than in Japanese becasue there are simply more pages on the web in English, or whether Japanese webmasters tend to name their images and pages in English or romaji even on otherwise Japanese pages.

Does anyone know the breakdown of English pages to Japanese pages? I assume a whole lot more English than Japanese, but I don't know where to dredge up the actual numbers.

Linguistic Deductions

"Remain Heart is a funny name for a restaurant," I said as we approached this sign at Iidabashi station.

"Maybe they meant remain heartful," Tod suggested. In katakana English, heartful seems to mean 'loving and caring.'

"Maybe. But why is the picture a brain with a heart in it?"

"That's not a brain. It's a lettuce."

"Do you think they meant 'Romaine Heart'?"

"Aha, hearts of Romaine! Of course."

next week: deciphering the menu. stay tuned...

The education ministry is setting up a committee "to propose ways to prevent too many imported words from entering the Japanese language."

Spoken Japanese is a mishmash of Japanese and 'loan words' from English, French, German, Dutch & other languages. Rendered in katakana, often both the pronunciation and the meaning change from the original.

Are loan words necessary? There are plenty of Japanese words that are being forced out of service in favor of 'cooler' loan words. In those cases, loan words aren't necessary and only confuse things. But some words, such as computer terms, are new in every language. Why not use a common jargon in those cases?

The French have been fighting this same losing battle for decades. Maybe the education ministry should go have a chat with the people who tried to ban "le weekend."

In video stores in Japan, foreign movies make up the bulk of films for rent. And they come in two varieties: dubbed in Japanese and subtitled in Japanese. Which means the unwary English speaker sometimes ends up with a subtitled movie where the original language isn't English.

As an example, we rented Jackie Chan's Accidental Spy. It incorporates Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Turkish, English, and French. Fortunately, the key plot points are given in English by a reporter who seems to turn up exclusively to do so. And it's not necessary to follow the plot in a Jackie Chan movie--it's the action sequences that are the fun, anyway.

I'm usually pretty careful to check the "country of origin" on the tape, since that's the only clue about which language the film's in. Accidental Spy fooled me completely--it had the English title (instead of the Chinese one) and I didn't check!

Translation is slow and painstaking work. Not my favorite, but I'm faced with an e-mail full of Japanese answers to my English interview questions.

It's easy enough to get the general meaning of text by reading for the nouns and verbs. but the nuances are in all of the joining phrases and particles. Using ga instead of wo casts the entire sentence in a different light. Conjugations are key, too. "Can not know" and "do not know" are close but not exactly the same, are they?

I need to quote this interviewee for my current article but in English, not in Japanese. So I'm sitting here with my dictionaries, grammar books and online translation aids trying to get the shades of meaning right. I will never be a professional translator, that's very clear!

Intersecting interesting English with strange building names, we get Himalayan Hights. Check out that cool 1950s script typeface.

This is a pretty typical Tokyo apartment building--six blocky stories of yellow brick, dark brown trim, and not a mountain in sight.

I would like to own apartment buildings to that I can give them names. I'd try to base them on some realities of Japanese dwellings.

• The Ice Palace
• Mildew Mansion
• Mini Heights

Words I've learned this week:

buji: safe, untouched
chukei: live video
tero-jiken: terror event
minkanki: commercial airplane
fumei: unknown, no information
zenbun: full story
doujitahatsu: simultaneous occurance

Although there's no phrase for "tongue twister" in Japanese, the language has quite a few words that are challenging to say.

Japanese has 5 vowel sounds (plus a few dipthongs) ah (a), ee (i), oo (u), eh (e), & oh (o). Paired with the 11 consonant sounds, this means pronunciation is very regular. Ko is always ko. Bu is bu.

But it means you have to be careful in the words you say. A slip of the tongue can cause you to lose all meaning. For example, kabu means turnip but kaba is hippopotamus. I'm sure I've gone to the produce section and asked a question that made me sound like I was on safari.

But the words I have most trouble with are the long strings of similar syllables. In class this week, I encountered mitsukerarerusou desu. I've been practicing it for the past couple of days and it still comes haltingly from my lips. Mitsu-ka... rats. Mitsu-ke-rrrrrrra-re-ru.

What does mitsukerarerusou desu mean? "It is said that you can find" Fortunately that doesn't come up in conversation too often.

Computers in another language.

Being presented with a consistent user interface on applications is a boon when confronted with menus and files in a language that is unfamiliar.

Sit me at any computer running Japanese MacOS or Windows and I can stumble my way through getting an Internet connection up and running. Even in Japanese applications I've never used before, I can open a document, make changes and save it.

Of course when I make an error I must struggle to read and obey the message box.

"Hmmmm. What does this say? 'Tadaima...kanji kanji wo kanji-masen.' Looks like we have a problem," I am forced to admit. I select whichever option is highlighted as the default and try another tack.

Without a consistent interface, there would be no hope of bilingual computing for me. So thank you very much, Jobs, Wozniak, & Gates!

Monbusho, the Japan's Ministry of Education, maintains a list of kanji that must be learned in each grade from 1st through 12th. By the time you graduate from high school, you have over 1800 under your belt.

Kanji are tricky. Some like tree or dog mean something when standing alone on a page. Others have no strong meaning--they must be combined with other kanji to form words. Even those which stand on their own take on new shades of meaning in combination with others.

Kanji usually have multiple "readings" or ways to pronounce them, so the kanji that stands for 'left' can be pronounced |hidari| or |sa| and combined with other kanji to form words like hidarigawa (left side) or sasetsu (left turn).

Which recently lead to Tod & I heatedly discussing whether the Monbusho's kanji lists are spelling or vocabulary. I argued for vocabulary since kanji carries meaning even when it's not in combination. Tod stood for the other side--saying that the lists are only for learning how to read and write the kanji, not for their meaning.

Of course we realise that the proper answer is "These are neither spelling nor vocabulary" because Japanese doesn't work the same way as English.

But two different sources have confirmed that Tod is more correct with his defense of spelling. Children are not drilled in the meaning of the kanji they are learning--they are expected to be able to write them. Meaning comes later on, especially with the more complicated kanji learned in the upper grades.

Which might explain why I'm having such a tough time memorizing kanji.

It's taken two years, but I've finally found a way to send e-mail in Japanese.

This is a minor triumph in my life as I belong to some groups that have a mixed membership of English and Japanese speakers. Now I can send messages that everyone can understand (if they can parse my bad Japanese grammar, that is).

"Why don't you get an account at Yahoo Japan?" my friend suggested. Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Twenty minutes later, I was all signed up on Yahoo Japan and it works like a charm.

If you'd like some e-mail in Japanese, just let me know...

I don't know who dreamed up the idea that Japanese needs to be softened when spoken, but I'd like to box his ears.

It's fine to write "Atsui desu," it's hot. But if you're saying that, or almost anything else that expresses an opinon, you must add "ne" at the end. "Atsui desu, ne...." Draw out the "ne" for added squishy fun.

Heaven forbid you ever express your desires without adding the bells and whistles. "Atarashiku kutsu kaitai desu," I want to buy new shoes, becomes the spoken "Atarashiku kutsu kaitai-n desu ga..."

I forget. In my excited rush to communicate, I form a sentence and blurt it out. I coo "The kitten is very cute" without the "ne." People look at me askance. Apparently, leaving off "ne" is the verbal equivalent of TYPING WITH THE CAPS LOCK ON, ne...