have classified all modern languages into huge "families" that are
related through their grammars and vocabularies. For instance,
English and other familiar European
languages such as French and Spanish are in the Indo-European family
(English
is in the Germanic branch, while French and Spanish are in the
Italic branch). However, despite
the breadth of modern linguistics categories, there are several holdout
languages that simply do not have cognates in any other currently
spoken language. These include Basque, Ainu, and Japanese.
Thus, it is important to approach the learning of Japanese with
this
concept in mind: all the grammar you learned in school does not
quite "map onto" Japanese. You probably learned that there are
various main parts
of speech-- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs-- and that they can be
arranged in certain combinations to impart certain meanings. You learned
about subjects/predicates, gerunds, participles, and
dependent clauses. Japanese has some of these grammatical
structures, but not all. And it has some that do not exist in English
(or German, the other language I know).
So it's not quite accurate to approach the learning of Japanese with
the idea that you will learn how to deal with nouns, verbs, and
adjectives first, then figure out how to construct phrases and clauses,
etc. There just aren't exact analogs to all those grammatical
concepts! So from the beginning, you have to toss out your idea of
what an adjective is, and you have to toss out your preconceived
notion of how phrases and clauses are connected to the subject of the
sentence. This is no simple task-- these grammatical "rules" have been
etched into our brains from the time we first picked up our native
tongue as tiny children.
[BTW, through studying Japanese, I have come to appreciate what a
difficult job my Japanese
teachers have. They have had
to recategorize their own language so that it can be taught to Western
students. Now that I know how grammatically different English and
Japanese are, I see that it would be very hard to teach English to
Japanese people. I wouldn't know how to break the language down into
simple lessons that they could learn logically. The way I would
break it down (ie, the way I learned English grammar as an English
speaker) would be enormously confusing for them.]
One thing you may have heard about "Asian languages" is that
tonality of speech is crucially important. Westerners are routinely
warned that mispronouncing a word could lead to a completely different
(and possibly insulting!) meaning. This is indeed true,
but perhaps not quite as dramatically as you've been warned.
Like most Asian languages (and unlike most Western languages),
Japanese does not use emphasis (stress) to mark accent.
This gives the language its distinctive, rather "flat" sound-- even
long words do not have a stressed syllable. However, Japanese does
use pitch-- high and low-- to distinguish
words. The pitch is applied to each syllable, not within a given
syllable as it is in Chinese. For example, "ima" can mean "now" or
"living room", the difference being
the pitch between the two syllables, not the stress. In a few
cases, you could get in trouble using the wrong pitch (and in any
case you'd sound funny), but usually the context of the conversation
will indicate what you mean. Overall, pitch isn't as big a deal
in Japanese as it is made out to be.
(Be glad you're not learning Mandarin-- in that case, two words
that differ only by pitch are "buy" and "sell". Now that's
an important difference! It could lead to serious stock market confusion).
What other top-level differences are there? In a preview of coming
chapters, here are a few.
- Although Japanese verb placement is often different from that of English,
I believe that far too
much is made of this difference. Shifting the position of the verb really does not
require much rearrangement of your fundamental thought processes. So
don't sweat this part of
Japanese-- trust me, you will have far greater problems than
this in learning the
language
.
- Moving up the scale of "things that are hard for the Western
brain," Japanese uses postpositions instead of prepositions.
That is, the things we call prepositions (like "in," "on," and "behind")
actually come after the nouns they are linked to in Japanese.
We would say "in the station" and the Japanese would say, "station in"
(eki ni). This type of construction will make your brain go
backwards to a far greater degree than the SOV word order, trust me.
- More broadly, there is a difference in the "focus" of verbs between
Japanese and
Western languages. We are very concerned with temporal relations and
have multiple verb forms to convey exactly what happened when. One
of my favorite English verb forms is "will have been going." If you are
a native English speaker, this is perfectly clear. Our minds effortlessly
navigate all the relative temporal relations in that stack of four verbs.But in Japanese, such time-related details are harder to express.
Verbs really aren't set up to convey that depth of meaning. However,
Japanese verbs are set up to convey fine shades of emotion to
a far greater degree than English verbs. We have to include a lot of
adjectives and adverbs to get across details of people's feelings,
while Japanese verbs often contain these subtleties already. One
result of this is that Westerners make strange blunders in
Japanese because they are unaware of which emotion the verb they have
chosen conveys. - Probably the most subtle and challenging difference between our
languages is that Japanese uses very few pronouns, preferring
instead to simply eliminate references to people or other nouns that
are already established. A related property is the tendency to treat
actions indirectly-- it is far more common to say "it was decided that..."
than to say "I decided to..." This at first seems vague-- how can you tell
what anyone is talking about? But as you get into the language, you
will see that Japanese is perfectly clear; it's just more subtle than
English, and you have to work harder mentally to keep track of who
is doing what to whom. (That's not because Japanese is intrinsically
more complicated than English; it's because your mind is not properly
trained to appreciate a language that doesn't use many pronouns). This
issue is even more complex than word order, postpositions, or
emotional overtones, and will probably take years to master.
The result of these (and many other) differences is that, to a
far greater degree than in European languages, errors are
fatal. That is, if you use an incorrect form, you will not simply say
something humorous, you will say something incomprehensible. I noticed
that as my Japanese improved, the native speaker I was communicating
with didn't say, "How nice that you can express more complex ideas
now," or "Gosh, your usage is becoming more and more natural." Oh, no.
He said, "Gee, Kim, I am really starting to be able to
understand you now!"
Learning a foreign language can reconceptualize your view of your
own native language. This is a specific example of the general principle
that true understanding of anything requires viewing it from an outside
perspective. You don't understand America until you have traveled
in other parts of the world. You don't understand science until you
have studied art, religion, and literature (and vice versa). Once you begin studying
Japanese, you will see quirks of English (or whatever your native language
is) that were hidden from you before. That in itself is an end, whether you
end up mastering Japanese or not.
This article was used with permission from:
Japanese for the Western Brain
