Learn languages: Asking for Directions

Language learning

Language learning tips

This section contains a collection of advice, suggestions, tips and techniques for learning languages. Most are based on my own experiences, while some come from other people.

Many of these tips, perhaps with some minor modifications, also apply to learning others skills, such as music.
Why should I learn a language?

There are many reasons to learn a foreign language, from working in another country to discovering your roots, through intellectual curiosity, romance, travel, and secret communication.

More reasons for learning languages
Which language should I learn?

Once you have decided to learn a language, you may not be quite sure which language to choose. To some extent, your choice depends on your reasons for learning a language. For example, if you'd like to communicate with as many people as possible, learning such languages as Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian or Arabic would enable you to do so.

More tips on which language to learn
What materials and tools do I need to study a language?

There's a wide range of materials and tools available to help you with your language studies, including language courses, dictionaries, grammar books, phrasebooks, online lessons, mp3 players and electronic translators.

More on language learning materials and tools
How can I find time to study a language?

Finding time to study a language can be quite a challenge. You may think that you don't really have enough of it, but it's surprising how many spare moments you have during a typical day, and how they can add up to a useful amount of study time.

More on finding time for your studies
What's the best way to study?

After choosing a language, you can start thinking about how you're going to study it. For popular languages like French and Spanish, there's a wealth of materials available. For lesser-studied languages, the choice can be more limited. If courses are available in your area, it might help you to attend them, or you may prefer to study on your own, or to have individual lessons.

More advice on choosing a way to study and some general tips
Learning pronunciation

Learning the pronunciation of a language is a very important part of your studies. It doesn't matter so much if you just want to read and/or write the language, but if you want to speak a language well, as I'm sure you do, pay particular attention to the pronunciation and review it regularly.

More on learning pronunciation and improving listening comprehension
Learning vocabulary

Building up your vocabulary in a foreign language can take many years. Learning words in context from written and spoken material is probably the most effective way to do this. You could also try learning words in a more systematic way - perhaps a certain number of words every day.

More on learning vocabulary | Spaced repetition learning systems (SRS)
Learning grammar

Familiarity with the grammar of a language enables you to understand it, and also to construct your own phrases and sentences. It's not essential to know all the grammatical terminology or to understand why words change, as long as you're able to apply to relevant changes when necessary.

More on learning grammar
Learning alphabets and other writing systems

If the language you're learning is written with a different alphabet or other type of writing system, learning it is well worth the effort. Some alphabets, such as Cyrillic and Greek, can be learnt without too difficulty. Others, such as Devanagari and Thai, are a more challenging.

More on learning a new writing system
Learning Chinese characters

If you're learning one of the languages that use Chinese characters, such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean, you're faced with quite a challenge. However, there are some techniques you can use to help you learn all those funny little pictures and symbols.

More on learning to read and write Chinese Characters
Frequently asked questions about learning languages

On this page you can find answers to some of the questions I get asked most frequently about languages, such as "Are some languages more difficult to learn than others?" and "Which is harder to learn, Chinese or Japanese?".

FAQs page
Foreign phrases

This section contains an ever-growing collection of useful phrases in many different languages, with audio files for many of them. The phrases are arranged by phrase and by language.

Useful phrases in many languages
Careers using languages

What kind of jobs and careers are available to students of languages? This page provides some information about interpreting, translating, teaching, and other language-related jobs, and also links to sites with further information and vacancies.

More on language-related careeers
My own experiences of learning languages

I've been interested in language and languages for as long as I can remember. I am currently fluent in five languages, have a fairly good conversational ability in five others, and a basic knowledge of ten more. I've experimented with a variety of language learning techniques and courses, and continue to do so.

Why Learning Japanese Can Be Frustrating

I’ve always been fascinated by the study of foreign languages. This fascination probably sprang from a childhood love of codes and ciphers. The languages I was most fascinated with were those with beautiful and exotic writing systems. If I had encountered before Japanese, perhaps that would have become the primary object of my dedicated language studies.

I was 11 years old, trying to learn to write in Russian, when my buddy Laban showed me some Japanese characters he’d been learning—the Hiragana (ひらがな). These characters have a simple, graceful beauty to them; from that moment I was hooked.

My buddy and I learned the two sound-based, syllabic writing systems, Hiragana and Katakana (カタカナ), and had good fun doing so. We even incorporated them into the ciphers we’d use to write letters to each other.

The funny thing is, we both learned both writing systems, without actually knowing a lick of Japanese—so we had little to write in it, apart from Japanized English. It didn’t take us long to decide that we really wanted to start learning the language to go with the writing. We both tried starting from library books, but quickly switched to some weekly classes that were being taught on Saturdays at a Japanese Buddhist church. I later took several classes at CSU Sacramento, and beyond that, both of us have been struggling off and on to continue our study of the language over the last twenty years.

Now, obviously, during the twenty years that have passed, there has not been twenty years’ worth of work put in. Nevertheless, I definitely would have hoped to be further along at this point than I am. In particular, it frustrates me that I can’t pick up a book, newspaper or magazine and just start reading along, stopping briefly every so often to look up a word. An explanation for how this is possible is the focus of part two of this article.

I’ve recently entered into another spurt of Japanese study, and I am happily finding that I am making significantly more progress this time than I have in the past. Partly because I’m motivated by the growing realization that I’ve spent so much time on this language, but am still as yet unable to put it to reasonable use: I would like to put enough additional investment into it to avoid all my past effort having been little more than wasted time. And also partly because I’m beginning to understand what sorts of techniques have the best effects for me, and am learning to avoid the sorts of practices that have in the past caused me to burn out, and set aside studying for large spaces of time.

Grammar and Pronunciation

Thankfully, neither Japanese grammar nor its pronunciation are particularly difficult. Japanese pronunciation has sometimes been compared to Spanish (though there are of course some important differences), and the structure of the language is controlled by a set of rules which, though very different from English, are at least consistently followed, so that you are not required to memorize a plethora of exceptions (as you might find necessary if you were learning English as a second language). In fact, if you do not intend to learn anything beyond actually speaking and comprehending spoken Japanese, you might find it to be much easier to learn than some Western languages.

For one thing, it lacks the concept of “gendered nouns”, that many Western languages have (but not English), requiring English learners to memorize the apparently random words that must be prefaced with (e.g.) “la” and “las” instead of “el” and “los”. In fact, Japanese doesn’t even have a word for “the” or “a”.

Japanese also nearly lacks plural forms—that is, Japanese does have a couple different ways to express plurality, but they are generally only used when there is a reason to stress the fact that we’re talking about more than one. The Japanese word “hon” could mean any of “a book”, “the book”, “the books”, “some books”, or “books”.

Some Asian languages, such as Chinese and Thai, distinguish meaning via the use of variously pitched tones. A rising, falling, or stationary high or low pitch can seriously change the meanings of words. Fortunately, Japanese has no such thing—or almost none; pitch is very occasionally crucial for distinguishing one word from another, but it is rare for a textbook to explain these, and virtually unheard-of for a dictionary to include them.

Japanese’s Three Writing Systems

Japanese is written using three distinct writing systems. There are the two syllabaries I’ve already mentioned, and an additional form called “kanji”. The kanji are characters that come directly from Chinese (though there are a few characters that were invented in Japan), and in fact “kanji” means “Chinese characters”. Kanji are used primarily for two things: to write Japanese words that were taken from Chinese, and to represent the meaning behind many Japanese words. The “hiragana” syllabic system is used to fill in the gaps, serving the purpose of allowing Japanese grammar to flow around Chinese ideographs. The “katakana” syllabic system is mainly used to represent foreign words and non-word sounds, and also to provide emphasis.

As an example of how hiragana is used together with the kanji, take the Chinese character for “come”: 来. But when used as a verb, especially as the primary verb in a sentence, it won’t usually be used to express the verb “to come” by itself: it needs to be accompanied by some hiragana characters to indicate the tense of the verb—and even how you should pronounce the character 来. If you want to say, “I will come”, you might write “kimasu” 来ます; if you want to say, “I have come”, you might instead write “kimashita” 来ました. The character 来 provides the initial “ki” sound, and the rest must be written using hiragana characters. (Note: the pronoun “I” is ommitted in the Japanese examples, and isn’t necessary for these complete sentences, which could also have been translated as “she will come”, and “it came”, etc, depending on the surrounding context.)

The two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana (together known as the “kana”), each have 46 basic forms used in modern Japanese, and modified versions of these forms are used to represent another fifty sounds or so. In contrast, there are several thousands of kanji characters. Students in Japan are expected to know some two thousand kanji by the time they’ve finished high school.

A natural question might occur to you: why are kanji even necessary, given how daunting a task it is to learn them, and that there are two complete syllabic writing systems, either of which could be used by themselves to write any Japanese phrase without resorting to kanji? For instance, take the following sentence:

晩御飯を食べてから疲れていたので、映画を見に行かずに寝る事にしました。

ばんごはんをたべてからつかれていたので、えいがをみにいかずにねることにしました。

bangohan o tabete kara tsukarete ita no de, eiga o mi ni ikazu ni neru koto ni shimashita.

After eating dinner, I found I was tired, and so decided to go to bed instead of going to see a movie.

As you can see, the second line, which is written entirely in hiragana and is perfectly comprehensible to a Japanese reader (barring any mistakes I may have made in writing it), is a whopping five characters longer than the first line, which uses eleven kanji, most of which are quite a bit more complex than any hiragana. If I had written these using a pen (or a brush), the first line could possibly have taken nearly twice as long to write! So why bother with them at all?

Well, probably the main justification is that this is simply how the written language happened to evolve. Of course, that’s hardly consolation, and it’s far from the whole story. After World War II, the government made some fairly extensive changes to the written language, simplifying the use of kana, and restricting the number of kanji required to be a literate reader of the language. If they could do these things, they could probably have eliminated the kanji altogether; but they did not. As you’ll see shortly, there are good reasons not to use kana alone, but surely something else would have been more expedient… though in losing the kanji altogether it would inescapably have lost much of its beauty as well.

But the kanji aren’t useless, either. The Japanese language is filled with more than its fair share of homonyms; which can easily lead to confusion. Remember “kimasu” 来ます? But “kimasu” can mean “I will wear” as well as “I will come”. In the vast majority of cases, context will make it quite clear which is meant; but when reading, the judicial use of kanji will eliminate all doubt: the one meaning “will wear” is written 着ます.

An extreme (and famous) example:

李も桃も桃の内。

すもももももももものうち。

sumomo mo momo mo momo no uchi.

Both the plum and the peach are members of the prunus family. (Literally: Both plum and peach are within “peach”.)

The second line, written only with hiragana, is unreadable. As you can see, written Japanese does not use spaces to separate words (though these may be used in romanized Japanese, as in the third line). The word “momo” appears twice, the word “sumomo” once at the beginning, and between these are a couple of small words “mo”, which are called particles, and serve a grammatical purpose (the “both … and …”). Someone speaking this phrase out loud could easily distinguish the words and particles from each other with the use of inflection and light pauses; but as a string of hiragana characters all you see is a sea of も (“mo”).

Kanji comes to save the day! The top line uses kanji very effectively to distinguish one word from another. “SUMOMOmoMOMOmoMOMOnoUCHI”, where each string of capital letters is a single word written in kanji. It’s very easy to pick them apart now!

A Foreign Mode of Thought

Another obstacle to learn Japanese, is the fact that not only isn’t it very similar to English and other Western languages, but it isn’t really very similar to even the way we tend to think about things.

Take for instance the phrase, “I like sports”. In Japanese this might be expressed as “watashi wa supootsu ga suki desu” (the “oo” in “supootsu” is not pronounced like “boot”, but as a long o sound “oh”, which makes “supootsu” a tolerable approximation of the English word “sports”, especially since both u’s are actually silent/whispered). “Mary likes Jon” could be “Meari wa Jon ga suki desu”. In the first few lessons of a typical Japanese textbook, a student will usually learn that “A likes B” is given as “A wa B ga suki desu” in Japanese. Unfortunately, this is a simplification of the truth.

The truth is, a Japanese sentence tends to rely very heavily on its context. “A wa B ga suki desu” doesn’t quite mean that A likes B… in some cases, it can actually mean B likes A. I was recently chatting on IRC with someone, and she said (in English) that she likes “Pocky” (a popular Japanese sweet). My response in Japanese was “Pocky wa nihon no minna-san ga suki desu”. In this case, the meaning is “Everyone in Japan (nihon no minna-san) likes Pocky”; not “Pocky likes everyone in Japan”!

Well, if “A wa B ga suki desu” can mean either one of “A likes B” or “B likes A”, then how can you know when it means one and when the other? The answer is that it doesn’t really mean either one, but something else entirely that doesn’t map all that cleanly onto English modes of thought. How to translate it into something that makes sense to an English speaker depends heavily on what else had been said before it!

“A wa” means something like “as for A”, or “speaking of A”; it marks “A” as “the thing I’m going to say something about now”, and implies that the actual interesting part of the sentence is the rest of it (whatever follows the “wa”). The particle “ga” marks the word or phrase before it as being the grammatical subject of the sentence, and “suki” means something similar to “likeable” except that it doesn’t entirely make clear whether the subject is the sentence is the thing liked (the typical situation), or the thing that does the liking (the case in my Pocky sentence). So, “Watashi wa supootsu ga suki desu” really means something like, “Speaking of myself, sports (are) likeable”. The “watashi wa” bit says, “I’m speaking of myself, but ‘myself’ is not the interesting thing I’m saying: the interesting part of the sentence is that I like sports.”

Without surrounding context, “Minna-san wa Pocky ga suki desu” can mean what most people are taught to think it means: “Everyone likes Pocky”. However, its implication is that the thing we’re talking about isn’t Pocky, it’s everyone. It makes a great answer to a question such as “What kind of thing is loved by everyone?”, because in that case, the interesting part is “what kind of thing”, and not “everyone”, which is only the topic of conversation (the interesting thing is what you have to say about the conversation’s topic). But in most cases that you want to say “everyone loves Pocky”, you’re not talking aobut everyone, you’re talking about Pocky. The interesting part of the sentence is what you have to say about Pocky, so Pocky gets the “wa” after it, and the “ga” goes after “everyone”. “Pocky wa Minna-san ga suki desu.”

This is an extremely difficult concept for many Westerners to grasp about Japanese. Unfortunately, it’s also a very important concept: the Japanese language demands the use of “wa” and “ga”, and knowing when to use which, all the time. The concept is sufficiently complex that there are whole chapters, and even whole books, written on just the subject of how “wa” should (and shouldn’t) be used.

A somewhat similar example would be the Japanese phrase “mita hito” (見た人), which could mean either “the person who saw (it)”, or “the person who was seen/the person whom I (or someone else) saw”. In Japanese, to modify a noun by a phrase you simply drop the phrase right before the noun: “saw-person”. This makes it pretty clear what is being modified, but it doesn’t provide any clues as to whether the modified noun is the subject or the object of the modifying phrase. The astonishing thing, though, is that it generally doesn’t need to: since you never say either “the person who saw it” or “the person I saw” without having already been talking about somebody having seen something, in actual use you would never be without the context that explains which is meant. So there isn’t actually any need to distinguish between them: if the previous sentence was “I spied an old friend when I went to the store today”, then the meaning of “saw-person” in a following sentence, “The ‘saw-person’ was Tommy Jenkins” is obvious. Similarly, if the previous sentence had been “I think somebody saw you when you were chewing out Susan”, then “saw-person” in a following sentence would be in reference to whoever witnessed the scolding.

Of course, when context is insufficient or missing, then one can resolve ambiguity by rephrasing or clarifying. There’s nothing wrong with saying “sono koto o mita hito” (the person who saw that taking place) or “watashi no mita hito” (the person that I saw) when the need arises; it’s just that such phrases are fairly rare, precisely because they’re unnecessary when context provides enough information for us to know which was meant, without explicitly saying. Similarly, if by “Mary wa Jon ga suki desu” we mean that Jon likes Mary rather than the reverse, and the context doesn’t clarify this, we can explicitly say “Mary is liked by Jon”: “Mary wa Jon ni suki desu”.

Note: so far, the best explanation of wa versus ga that I’ve read, is in Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You by Jay Rubin; but I also feel that he makes some fairly extreme statements. In particular, I think his explanation could tend to scare someone off from using “wa”, and that despite his attempts to say otherwise, the reader is left with the general feeling that “wa” should only be used in special circumstances, which is far from the case. In the end, the best way to understand wa is to be exposed to a lot of Japanese sentences where it is used (and practice making your own), to find good textbooks that give useful explanations of how it affects emphasis and meaning, and to avoid grossly oversimplified descriptions such as it being the equivalent to English “the”, or expressing the real gramattical subject in intransitive verbs.

One people, one race?

Japanese people appear at first glance to be one of the most socially and ethnically homogenous groups in the world. It is reasonable to equate Japan’s rapid post-war economic development to the 1990s with social solidarity and conformism. Despite labour shortages since the 1960s, authorities resisted officially sanctioning foreign workers until the 1980s, relying on increased mechanization and an expanded female workforce instead (1). Until recently, Japanese workers have associated themselves primarily with the company they work for – a businessman will introduce himself as ‘Nissan no Takahashi-san’ (I am Nissan’s Mr Takahashi). By extension, we might get the idea that a Japanese person subordinates the self to the objectives of society.

In 2008, however, long-serving Japanese politician Nariaki Nakayama resigned after declaring that Japan is ‘ethnically homogenous’, showing that the old ‘one people, one race’ idea has become politically incorrect. Criticism of Mr Nakayama’s statement focused on its disregard for the indigenous Ryukyukan people of southern Okinawa, and the Ainu people from the north island of Hokkaido colonised by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century. In 1994 the first Ainu politician was elected to the Japanese Diet, suggesting that the Japanese are keen to officially recognise distinct ethnic groups in Japan.

Modern Demographic Development

The most recent census asked people to define themselves only by nationality and not ethnicity, so the true demographic of the country is still unclear Although only around 15,000 foreigners are naturalized each year, immigration has continued officially and unofficially since Japan ended its policy of isolation in the mid 18th century.

Apart from foreign immigration, Japanese people and their descendants have moved freely since the borders were opened. Although the census does not recognise them, there are now an estimated 750,000 Japanese citizens with mixed heritage, as well as 1.5 million permanent foreign residents in a total population of around 126 million. Some ‘harufu’ have gained a high profile in Japan, contesting the nationalist assertion that homogeneity is synonymous with Japanese prowess. In 2004 Yu Darvish, of mixed Japanese and Iranian heritage, pitched an entire game for the professional Nippon Ham baseball team without a batsman reaching first base. More recently, Finnish-born Tsurunen Marutei became a member of parliament.

Since Japan’s main indigenous and immigrant ethnic groups tend not to reside in the densely populated Kanto and Kansai areas of central Honshu where holidaymakers generally go, a tourist would probably conclude that the non-Japanese population is a relatively tiny number of white Caucasians. There is a floating population of Western English language teachers and finance sector workers, particularly in Tokyo, but the authorities have extremely tight restrictions on extending specialist work visas beyond three years so very few become permanent residents.

The largest ethnic groups represented are in fact originally from Korea, China, Brazil and the Philippines. Since the 1970s there has been a steady inflow of Brazilians of Japanese descent, and this group now make up 5-10% of the population in some industrial towns in Japan. These days the younger generations speak only Japanese and not the language of their forebears. In addition to these families, tens of thousands of long-term ‘guest workers’ have been drafted in for factory and menial work under agreements since the 1990s.

The case for ethnic diversification is evident throughout Japanese society. The UN predicts that Japan will reach an economic crisis point by 2050 where the non-working population will outnumber the working population. Initiatives such as the 1994 Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement suggest that Japan is seeking a solution by granting more 3 to 4 year stays for trained workers and caregivers, though it is still very reluctant to grant permanent residency. Conservative politicians still advocate increased mechanization as the solution; swift advances are being made in robotics, particularly in the field of elderly care, but production would need to increase exponentially if the UN estimate of a ten million shortfall in workers by 2050 is remotely accurate.

Beyond ethnicity, there are cultural distinctions between the regions, most of which have existed for a long time but are not immediately obvious to a foreign visitor. For example, Osaka-ben, the idiomatic language used in the Kansai area, espouses the open discussion of money whereas Tokyoites are likely to take great pains to avoid discussion of the raw figures (2). Residents of Kyushu – the most southern of the four large Japanese islands - compare themselves with the Mediterranean, ‘with traditional Japanese reserve taking a backseat to more demonstrative temperaments.’ (3)

Challenges for the Next Generation

Distinct differences are also evident between the generations since the economic bubble burst in the 1990s. Younger generations are facing a dramatically different working culture in which a job for life is no longer guaranteed. Consequently, the identification of the self with the company is weakening. Japanese companies now routinely outsource work and lay off workers who may have been with the company for decades, as dramatised through the character of the father in the 2008 film Tokyo Sonata.

While that movie is of course a work of fiction and does not necessarily represent a typical situation, it does highlight the cultural shift away from an often-quoted Japanese idiom: ‘the nail which stands up must be hammered down.’ The movie espouses individual development over conformity, as the son flourishes as a piano prodigy despite his father’s attempts to have him conform to the existing system of education and employment. The wide generation gap and imposition of values is evident in the fact that the average politician is in his or her sixties, and the current Prime Minister Naoto Kan is 74.

In a highly competitive job market where learning fluent English is seen as one of the keys to success, more and more young Japanese people are studying abroad mainly in the United States. This means that some are developing more stereotypically western individualist outlooks in their formative years. There is also the social phenomenon of furita, young people who take a number of part time jobs instead of a single full-time role, and intersperse these with stints in places like Bali and Australia. Traditionalists are particularly troubled by the number of otaku, a population of young adults estimated to be between one and three million who never leave home. In a significant number of cases, they are not employed and not paying taxes. This adds to the state’s dilemma of how to provide for an increasing elderly population – the largest in the developed world - while the population as a whole is decreasing and some young people are only entering employment part-time, if at all.

The long-established equation between age and standing in a clearly defined hierarchy appears to be holding firm, and the relationship between the senpai (experienced) and kohai (inexperienced) is evident everywhere from college baseball teams to offices and factory hierarchies. Nonetheless, these structures are under scrutiny in economically uncertain times, and may belie a paradigmatic shift in the values and goals of young people questioning what it means to be Japanese.
- See more at: http://www.insidejapantours.com/japanese-culture/people/#sthash.IKOajUSo.dpuf

Learn languages

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Asking for Directions

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