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 Words of Truth and Wisdom: Japanese in Practice OR Say Again?Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley Hey, everybody! I know it's only been the normal two weeks since our last column, but it feels like it's been ages. See, Athena and I just got back from our first trip ever to Japan. Hm, come to think of it, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to admit that we had never been there before. It's the truth so I guess there's no point in hiding it, but I wonder if it seems wrong that someone be translating manga if they've never even been to Japan. Obviously we think it's okay, or we wouldn't have been doing it for so many years. So is it possible for somebody to be fluent in Japanese without ever having been to Japan? I think the answer to that is yes, especially if you consider someone who was born outside of Japan to Japanese parents. That obviously doesn't apply to us. I think in our case, it depends on your definition of the word “fluent.” So let's talk about our experience in Japan as far as speaking the language. The two of us are actually the type to be very very afraid of new experiences, which certainly didn't help matters. One of the first things we saw when we got to our hotel room was a TV show called “Tameshite Gatten,” which means “Experience and Learn.” It's a show that teaches about concepts using various experiments, visual aids, object lessons, etc. We saw an episode on the plane to Japan, too; it was all about the science behind making the perfect cup of coffee. But the episode we saw in the hotel was about the sense of hearing. It explained that you not only hear with your ears, but also with your eyes and your brain. For example, they had a group of old people and a group of young people listen to specific words over a bunch of noise and identify them. The first time they used some more modern words and the young people did better, and the second time they used a bunch of flower arranging terms and the old people, who all liked flower arranging, did better. So it's easier for you to hear and understand things when your brain is more in tune. And that explains why we always have such a hard time hearing people when they say, “Oh, you know Japanese?” and then start talking to us in Japanese. We're just not used to it. When we got to Japan, we were very overwhelmed by everything. Our brains were kind of overloaded, so we weren't registering anything properly. It was even pretty hard to hear each other speaking English, even when we weren't in exceptionally noisy areas. That being the case, it was also very difficult for us to understand any Japanese spoken to us. Fortunately, since we're obviously not Japanese, at first, people mostly spoke English to us, but I did feel kind of guilty for not trying to be better about practicing Japanese. Not guilty enough though. Things gradually improved as we got more used to our new situation. For example, at the hotel, we had to talk to the woman who checked us in about extending our stay. I was having a really hard time understanding her, even though she was speaking English (a lot of it probably had to do with still being pretty freaked out about everything). I asked her to explain in Japanese instead, but she used so many honorifics I had a hard time following (note: when actually speaking Japanese, honorifics refers less to the titles you stick after someone's name (san, chan, etc.), and more to different verbs and conjugations used to show different levels of respect). Okay, maybe it wasn't the honorifics' fault, but still. Anyway, the next day, when we paid for admission to Disneyland, the cast member explained everything in Japanese to begin with, and I didn't have any problems understanding her. Athena points out that this probably had a lot to do with our obsession with Disneyland in any country, which made it easy to expect what she would be saying. Goes back to listening with your brain. Needless to say, we had no trouble at all remembering that “Nanmei-sama desu ka?” means “How many in your party?” Another thing we noticed at Disneyland, though we already had an idea that this was the case from watching anime and then watching voice actor commentaries, is that it's a lot easier to understand someone when they're performing than it is to understand them when they're just talking. It seems pretty obvious now that I say it, but it probably has a lot to do with performers speaking more clearly and enunciating and stuff, while people conversing don't worry about if they're slurring or anything like that. An interesting thing to note here is that while the stage shows are obviously spoken like a performance, tours like the Jungle Cruise are more like just talking. We'd gotten used to everything enough by the time we met our pen pal and went to Akihabara, but it was the first time we had to talk much to anybody other than each other. Maybe we should have practiced more at Disneyland. We managed to talk well enough, but I was constantly going back to correct myself and wishing I had a denki jiten (electronic dictionary; we really ought to invest in one of those), and sometimes I was afraid to say stuff because I didn't know how. As it turned out, all we needed was a confidence boost. When we went to church on Sunday, we were asked to read from the handouts passed out in class. There was an English translation (actually it was originally in English, so most everybody was reading from the Japanese translation), but reading is the thing we're most confident in, so we said we would try reading the Japanese anyway. The lesson had a lot of really hard words, but we managed to read a bunch of them without help, and everyone was very impressed. They said a lot of Japanese people can't read some of the kanji we read! (I'm only partially saying this to show off--I'm actually far more concerned about rebuilding our image as competent translators that I'm afraid I may have destroyed with the rest of this column.) After that, we talked to a lot of people in Japanese without too many problems, although I did mostly revert to English when I got stuck and was talking to somebody I knew would understand. But that's just because I'm lazy. Well, I'm not sure if that answered the question about whether or not someone can be fluent in Japanese without ever having been to the country, but hopefully it was an interesting account of what it's like to study Japanese for years and years and then finally go put those lessons to the test. As for being able to speak a language without going to its country of origin... well, people still study ancient Greek and Latin, right? |
7 May 2008 30 April 2008 23 April 2008 16 April 2008
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