Nihongojouzu

Easy-peasey, Japanesey

I have been going though my file of "things to post to Nihongojouzu" and I had a moment of nostalgia when I hit Easy-peasey, Japanesey, a page of advice on learning Japanese written by Edmund Edgar, the man behind the Three Wise Monkeys language resource page. I had the pleasure of meeting Ed way back in 2000 when he was kind enough to put me up for the night when I was passing through Saitama (you can read about that meeting in the Genki English Tour Diary). Not only a lovely chap, Ed makes good use of his grey cells and he has put together a vocabulary learner tool called Japanese Wordinator ("...because you're too lazy to write vocabulary down in a little notebook...")  which you can even use from your mobile phone. However, the best part of Ed's site is his collection of mnemonics, and his advice on how to use them:

....the more bizarre and twisted the better. And under no circumstances should you throw them away. (I made this mistake.) Or file them, which comes to the same thing. (I made this one too.) Pin them up on your walls. Sellotape them to your friends. Get drunk and hide them from yourself. (That way you will be reminded of them every time you open a book, move a cushion or try to figure out why your cornflakes aren't pouring out of the box in the usual way.)

He even has a page on Tochigi-ben.

Scary Totoro

The films produced by Studio Ghibli have long been favourites of those studying Japanese, not only for the enigma of whether Nausicaa was wearing pants or not, but also for the inspiring characters, imaginative storylines and marvelous animation (just don't bother watching Geddo Senki - it sucked BIG TIME, although I did feel well rested after snoozing through most of the second half). The very name of the forest spirit "totoro" in Tonari no Totoro,  is young Mei-chan's mispronunciation of the Japanese word for troll, torōru (one less translation issue for those working on the Japanese version of Lord of the Rings). I also seem to recall that Mei, instead of saying tomorokoshi, said tomokoroshi, which is only amusing when you listen with your Japanese ear and realise that she transformed a "cob of corn"* into "friend-killer". And this segues into the real reason for the post - I just wanted an excuse to post the most disturbing Totoro image I have ever seen. If you value the innocence of childhood memories please don't click on this link. (thanks to Deas)

*トウモロコシ
**ともころし/友殺し

Japan Times Job Fair 2007

The Japan Times is holding a job fair in Tokyo on Friday October 12, at the Izumi Garden Gallery in Roppongi. A whole bunch of organisations will be in attendance, from IBM and Bloomberg to Oxford University Press and the World Bank. The fair is targeted at people proficient in English, but given there are a number of Japanese firms I'm guessing the skillset is actually proficiency in both English and Japanese. For readers looking for a job where they can use their Japanese skills this sounds like a great chance to see what kind of opportunities exist.

Japanese English that isn't English at all

What Japan Thinks is a marvelous website which features Japanese opinion polls and surveys translated into English. The man behind the blog, Ken Y-N,  provides a fantastic service by providing the English speaking world with not only facts and figures about Japan but hard data on what the average Japanese person thinks. Ken always links to the source data so keen beans can check out the original Japanese for themselves. One of his recent post deals with 和製英語 - Japanese style English. Although a lot of words enter the Japanese lexicon from English and retain something close to their original meaning, there are many sneaky katakana words which look like their English forebears but whose meanings are vastly different. For example, the "Note" in DeathNote (デスノート）actually means notebook (but I'm onboard here: while DeathNote sounds edgy and sexy,  DeathNotebook sounds nerdy and desperate). The film クローズド・ノート is another example - an English note is neither closed nor open because it's a single piece of paper, but a Japanese ノート is a book.* These false friends lie in wait for neophyte learners who employ that often useful linguistic strategy "when in doubt, just katakana-ize it", so before you wedge your English foot in your Japanese mouth check out the list on What Japan Thinks and be careful out there.

*Don't Japanese kids have a hard enough time learning English without having movie posters confusing them too? Next to the big English title "Closed Note" we have a picture of....an open book.

Metropolis Directory of Tokyo Language Schools

I just took a look at Metropolis magazine and discovered that they have compiled a list of Japanese language schools in Tokyo. I can't vouch for any of these places, but the URLs are provided and for Tokyo based people looking for some formal learning, this could save you some Googling. There is also a short article on successful bilingual foreigners, but it's light on details and could be summed up in the words "knowing Japanese will increase your opportunities for success."

Salaryman Neo

Courtesy of Harvey at JapanNewbie I watched my first clip of NHK comedy series Salaryman Neo via YouTube, where user Lungfish has kindly uploaded a bunch of episodes - the show is worth watching for the Sexy Bucho character alone. If you are procrastinating by watching YouTube you might as well use the structured procrastination technique and learn some office Japanese. But don't blame me if the Sexy Bucho lines don't work when you try them yourself.

Reading on the toilet

Another hint from the "a little bit every day adds up" school of language learning. In the same way as I have a book for the train, I have a book for the toilet. It shares the top of the cistern with a fern called Shida-kun and only gets read when I go to the toilet, or more specifically, when I go 大きい方.  Now some people frown on the idea of reading material in the toilet area - the Seinfeldian concept of contamination springs to mind - but I adopt a more pragmatic approach: being a biological entity with a large appetite I am obliged to evacuate my bowels on a daily basis, and in the 5, 10 or 15 minutes this takes I read a few pages of my toilet book. For those few minutes my eyes and brain are prisoners of my alimentary canal and otherwise unoccupied, so I might as well give them something to do. Five minutes a day = 35 minutes a week = 1820 minutes a year = 30 hours of reading. Eat a lot of curry and you could be looking at 60 or 90 hours a year. (You could also be in danger of varicose veins so make sure the book isn't a cliffhanger)

My toilet book is easy to read - deliberately so. I want to be able to get through at least a page a sitting (がじゃん！） I am currently reading いじわるペニス by 内藤　みか. I have only just started, but I can tell you it is kind-of-love story centering on a rent-boy and the woman who buys him. Not exactly Harry Potter, but the lovers' dialogue and earthy expressions were precisely the reasons I selected it - there are some expressions even good friends may feel shy about teaching you. A bit of research reveals that you can download the book onto your mobile phone, or at the very least read the first 5 chapters. Here's a sample from the opening chapter:

由紀哉は今夜も、イかなかった。

（ちょっと、またなの!?　カラダ売ってんだから、ちゃんと最後までセックスするのが、当たり前でしょ!?）

ぽろんとヴァギナから外れてしまった、情けないくらいに縮んだペニスが、どうしようもなく悔しかった。

（なんで勃たないの？　私ってそんなに魅力ない？

Easy to read? Tick.
Everyday expressions I can use? Tick. (Well maybe not everyday)
Interesting subject matter? Tick.

Right - I'm off to the bog.

Remembering the Kanji Flashcards

On Polarcloud, the site behind the wonderful rikaichan plugin, you can download printable kanji flashcards for use with James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (Books 1, 2 and 3). The cards come in two zip files and are in PDF format. Cross off "can't afford flashcards" and "don't have time to make flashcards" from your list of excuses for not studying.

When do people learn languages?

I am being a completely lazy bastard today and just posting a link to an old but quality article from Zompist.com. Mark Rosenfelder, in his piece When do people learn languages?, busts several myths and provides a number of thought-provoking examples of situations in which people do and do not learn languages. And yes, there isn't a lick of Japanese here, but the principles are very applicable and I think you'll get a motivational kick out of it. My favourite part:

Why do children learn languages well, when even adults who want to learn them have trouble with them?  Innate abilities aside, children have a number of powerful advantages:

• They can devote almost their full time to it.  Adults consider half an hour's study a day to be onerous.
• Their motivation is intense.  Adults rarely have to spend much of their time in the company of people they need to talk to but can't; children can get very little of what they want without learning language(s).
• Their peers are nastier.  Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind, but it was most memorably expressed by David Berlinski (in Black Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full original intensity).  Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny.

I don't think the fact that language learning takes time, or that motivation is important are  novel to anyone reading this blog but the point about external motivation is very powerful - you learn a language when the alternative is humiliation and embarassment. If you are learning Japanese in a manner in which your pride is never in danger you probably should be.

Check out the full article here.

Nippon VoiceBlog

Nippon VoiceBlog is a simple blog of Japan-related audio files, each accompanied by a script. It is actually a dead blog, or rather, a comatose one - the last entry is dated March 2006 - but the 10 or so entries it does have make a good source for an intermediate learner of Japanese. The narrator's voice is clear and easy to follow, and having the script makes it a simple matter to identify words your ears fail to recognise. Here's an example of the text from the entry GEISHA and MAIKO :

日本には、芸者や舞妓と呼ばれる女性がいます。
最近では、映画「GEISHA SAYURI」などでも取り上げられる程、注目されていますよね。
今回は、芸者と舞妓についてお話いたしましょう。

Like I said - not a huge amount of material, but a decent few hours of learning joy. Other topics include:

• Business card

• Tohu

• Setsubun

This blog is built on the back of the Voiceblog.jp platform which has a wide variety of excellent audio material which I will review in the coming weeks.

And BTW "tohu" is the spelling as per the blog - it is of course tofu in disguise.