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CHAPTER TWO

Challenges and Rewards

Every language has, for the learner from another language background, what might be termed "good news" and "not quite so good news." Japanese is no exception. In this chapter, from an English speaker's perspective, we consider the straight-out good news first, in Section 2.1. Then in 2.2 we introduce you to the challenges, but soften these by giving you tips along the way so as to reduce the level of challenge. That's why we refer to it as "not quite so good news" rather than simply "bad news."

All points raised in this chapter will be discussed in more detail later in the book, so don't worry if you are left wanting more information on some particular point.

2.1 The good news

We shall consider here different types of "good news." These are the rewards of learning Japanese, and the downright "easy bits."

2.1.1 The rewards

Although Japanese does have its challenges, it is almost always seen as rewarding, even by those who do not pursue their studies beyond an introductory level. These rewards are both material and personal.

Japan is one of the world's major nations. Even though its economy has been relatively unhealthy for more than a decade now, it is not going to cease being a world superpower. And yet, despite increasing numbers of native English speakers becoming competent in Japanese, especially proportionately in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, worldwide these are still few relative to those competent in the traditional foreign languages of French and German. That is, Westerners competent in Japanese have a very useful rarity, and possess a skill much in demand. (Having said that, the growth of students of Japanese mentioned earlier may eventually erode that rarity value.)

A recent UK survey revealed that more and more young Britons are keen to study Japanese because they love Japanese anime, and other surveys show that young Americans also think it is a "cool" language. This interest value is another significant factor, in that learning Japanese clearly satisfies a personal interest for many students, and is not merely a planned career decision. In terms of personal development and satisfaction, there is also great reward in the very learning of a language characterized by different concepts and cultural associations. Japan's culture, along with its history, is one of the richest in the world, and command of the language provides an extra dimension of accessibility to it. And in terms of broadening the mind by learning another language, it follows that the more different from English that language is, the more the English speaker's mind will be broadened.

2.1.2 The easy bits

Some things about using Japanese—certainly in its spoken form—are downright easy. For example, you don't have to worry about gender of nouns or conjugating verbs according to person, or noun/pronoun changes depending on whether they are subject or object. And, compared with many languages, Japanese verbs do not contain many irregularities at all in terms of tense change.

English has become such a part of the linguistic consciousness of the Japanese that in many cases you can simply use English words and be understood. Even if a word has not formally entered the Japanese language, many Japanese would be familiar enough with the English vocabulary to understand it from the given context. (The Japanese grasp of English grammar is not quite so advanced, so whole English sentences and long phrases should be avoided.) This would be especially true if you put it into an appropriate Japanese sound structure—basically sequences of syllables comprising consonant plus vowel, as will be discussed in Part Two. But even if you didn't feel confident about "Japanizing" a word, there would be little misunderstanding, for example, if you just said "biscuit" instead of the properly Japanized word bisuketto. As an extra plus, the use of English terminology in Japanese can actually appear very stylish, just as using French in English seems a little chic and conveys a certain je ne sais quoi.

Japanese has fewer sounds to master than English, and there is no need to worry about stress or tones, as in Chinese. There is however a differentiation in pitch (making a sound high or low), which in particular can help distinguish between certain homophones (words with the same pronunciation) or near-homophones. Many students, especially in the past, have not worried about pitch at all, but it will help your accent and communicative efficiency greatly if you pay attention to it. We will return to this in Part Two.

In reading and writing too, at least in the kana scripts, the pronunciation and spelling of words are also much easier than in English, as there is a more consistent correspondence in Japanese between symbol and sound—not completely consistent, and not perhaps as straightforward as some languages such as French or Italian, but more so than in English.

There are many other pleasant surprises you will find along the way, when you discover that the particular aspect of Japanese that you are learning at a given time proves to be much easier than you expected.

2.2 The not quite so good news

Being in a language category of its own, it is not surprising that many of the more challenging aspects of Japanese can be attributed in large part to unfamiliarity—as foreshadowed earlier. In this section we look at the main features that most English speakers would consider challenging, but lessen the challenge by giving you advice along the way.

2.2.1 Japanese as "the Devil's language"

In the sixteenth century a certain Portuguese priest, one of the first-ever Westerners to visit Japan, became frustrated at his inability to master the language rapidly so as to spread God's word through it, and even termed it "the Devil's language."

It does indeed take time to become fully competent in all four skills of the language—listening, speaking, reading and writing, with the last two being very much more time-consuming. In fact, for native English speakers it takes about five times longer to achieve equivalent full competency in Japanese than in French, with its easier script and greater familiarity to English speakers. To start off your study without an awareness of this relativity can result in considerable frustration.

But let's put this into context. The skills of listening and speaking are by no means difficult to master in Japanese, though it is true you are disadvantaged to some extent if you can't reinforce verbal material by reading and writing it. But certainly, the spoken language is not quite so super-humanly inaccessible as our Portuguese friend suggests.

Its accessibility is borne out by (among other things) the increasing numbers of Japan-based Westerners who quite quickly become fluent in Japanese, even to the point of appearing as regulars on television quiz shows or similar conducted in Japanese. The Japanese word for a TV star is tarento, from the English word "talent." While these foreign personalities may be talented performers, they are not all abnormally talented linguists. Nevertheless, they have responded highly successfully to the challenge of spoken Japanese, showing clearly that it is very "doable."

And as for the skills of reading and writing, individuals differ in their approach to learning Japanese. Some prefer to tackle the written language straightaway, which is the norm for most second languages. Others, mindful of the time-consuming nature of the writing system, concentrate first on the spoken language, to provide a sound base for later study of the written version—and of course, "later" can be anywhere between "just a bit later" and "so much later it's close to never." The "spoken first" approach is certainly how we learn our mother tongue, so it is by no means unnatural and ineffective. Unless your circumstances leave you no option, we suggest the obvious: choose whatever approach you feel most comfortable with.

FIGURE 2a: The Devil's language?

2.2.2 The big written challenge

Overwhelmingly the single biggest challenge for most Western students lies in the writing system. As you will see in detail in Part Four, it is one of the most complicated writing systems in the world. To read a newspaper you will need to know not only the two phonetic kana scripts of around 50 symbols each, but also around 2,000 kanji, each typically with two or three readings which may be based either on ancient Chinese or native Japanese, or in most cases both. It takes considerable time and gray matter to remember meanings and readings, and then on top of that, whicn readings are used in which circumstances.

This contrasts strongly with French, for example: native English speakers take a short time to learn correspondence patterns between spoken sound and Roman script, plus a few accent-signs, and they are able to read and write very quickly almost anything they speak or hear in that language.

As cold comfort for Western students, even Asian learners who are already familiar with Chinese characters are only partly advantaged by their prior knowledge. They are generally able to understand simple signs written in Japanese characters, such as for "Exit" or "No Smoking"; they can probably make an educated guess as to the basic gist of some formal Japanese texts heavy in characters, especially if there are lots of nouns (even though character forms nowadays often differ to some extent between Japanese and Chinese). However, for further understanding they would still have to learn the kana scripts, since the characters are used only for stems of words and not endings such as tenses, nor for particles. And they would also obviously have to learn the rules of grammar.

In addition, they would find the pronunciation different, even when it was meant to be a "Chinese" reading. For example, the characters for China, are in Chinese spelled Zhongguo and pronounced rather like jong-guwo, but in Japanese are spelled Chūgoku and pronounced chew-gockoo. (We will explain the letter ū in Part Two.)

Also, in some cases the same characters have evolved rather different meanings in each country, and likewise, some compounds do not necessarily have the same meaning in Chinese and Japanese. A classic example is combining the characters for "hand" and "paper." In Japanese this means "letter" (correspondence), but in Chinese means "toilet paper"! So, in some regards, prior knowledge of Chinese characters—or at least their Chinese pronunciations—might even be considered counter-productive.

FIGURE 2b: Now then, which one should I choose?

So, what can you do to lessen the challenge? First of all, as suggested in the previous section, you can postpone learning the writing system, maybe even indefinitely. This would mean that when it comes to having to write something in Japanese you would be stuck with romaji (or nothing). Most Japanese can manage to read romaji, if slowly, though few are really comfortable with it, so you would not be terribly popular.

A far better alternative is to communicate in the kana scripts (or even just one of these), which can be learned in just a few dozen hours or so as both kana scripts are based on the same sounds in the same sequence, comprise only a few strokes, and have only 46 basic symbols each.

An even better way, for those prepared to make the next step, is to learn a few basic kanji, such as the 80 that are taught in the First Grade at elementary school. These are generally quickly learned (again within a few dozen or so hours), easy to remember (many being simple pictographs), comprise only a few strokes, and are among the most commonly used. This means you will get maximum output of communicative ability relative to the input of time and effort. Unless you are a professional who requires a full command of the written language, few Japanese will think badly of you if you have only a very limited ability to write kanji. They too know the challenges involved! On the contrary, they will respect the fact that you have made an effort to communicate in something approaching proper written Japanese. Of course, when it comes to reading, you will still not be able to read newspapers, or indeed anything but Grade One elementary school texts! However, to get to that newspaper stage is a bit of a quantum leap, and everyone understands that.

If you want to go further, a good way is to concentrate on learning kanji passively rather than actively, that is, simply to recognize them rather than write them. Many students try to learn actively each kanji they encounter, which is a great strain on the memory cells, and they all too often end up after several years being able to recognize something like 1,000 and being able to write about 700 of those. It would be far better, after the same period of time spent studying, for you to be able to recognize all 2,000, even if you could only write a few hundred. The key thing is to understand what is put before you, and Japanese written material typically involves a liberal use of kanji, so you need to be able to know their meanings or at least be able to look them up quickly in a dictionary. You can use a smaller number of kanji, writing words in kana when you don't know the kanji for them.

And, when it comes to using a kanji dictionary, it will be much quicker if you can just make sure you remember at least one reading for each, since with modern dictionaries this will usually enable you to look up that kanji more quickly than trying to work out stroke count or radical component—a radical being the key element in a kanji, the traditional way of listing and searching for them. (Of course, this doesn't work for characters you encounter for the first time, unless you recognize a phonetic component.)

One plus about the kanji script is that, once you understand the core meanings, you can actually make fairly accurate guesses when you encounter new kanji compound words. This is not always the case with newly encountered words in English, unless you are familiar with Latin and Greek. Some advanced students even feel that speed-reading can be easier in Japanese than in English. For example, the meaning of the English word "glacier" is not immediately apparent to those encountering it for the first time, whereas the Japanese term hyoga involves the two kanji for "ice" and "river"—much easier to understand, provided you know the core kanji meanings.

2.2.3 The strangely worded challenge

The second major challenge is the lack of familiarity with much of the vocabulary, meaning that it is in that sense "strange" to the typical English speaker. If the English student of French or Spanish hears or sees the word liberté or libertad for the first time they would almost certainly understand this straightaway as "liberty," or similarly the German frei as "free." By contrast, the Japanese for both "liberty" and "free" is jiyū. That is, there is no clue for the English speaker.

Jiyū is actually a Chinese-derived word, one of many that have become an integral part of Japanese since the introduction of Chinese script many centuries ago. But pure Japanese words are no more helpful. For example, English cat-lovers would soon overcome language barriers in identifying a French chat, Spanish gato, or German Katze. They might need more time, however, to become familiar with a Japanese neko.

FIGURE 2c: Answer me a riddle

"I'm not a Spanish gato	"What am I?
Or an English cat.	I'm a Japanese NEKO,
I'm not a German Katze,	And I'm very proud of that!
And not a French chat."	—And I'm famous too!"*

* I am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru) is one of Japan's best-known novels, written in 1905 by Natsume Soseki. (Wagahai is an old word for "I"; wa is a subject-marker; de aru means "am.")

It is true that you don't have much control over the vocabulary the other party uses, though many Japanese people, recognizing the obvious fact that you are foreign, will often make a special effort to use loan words that they assume you will probably be familiar with. And certainly when it comes to speaking Japanese yourself, because Japanese has in recent times absorbed so many foreign words, especially English, you can use this very much to your advantage by using "Japanized English" should you forget or not know the "real" Japanese. For example, the "real" Japanese word for "book" is hon, but nowadays bukku can also be used. Likewise miruku for "milk" (as opposed to gyūnyū), kā for "car" (as opposed to kuruma or jidōsha), konpyūta for "computer," and so on. English words for material and/or technical objects are particularly common, though they are sometimes abbreviated. Thus "differential gear" is difu-giya. You do need to appreciate, however, that equivalents might not be exactly the same with some terms, with for example miruku and gyūnyū having slightly different usages (this will be discussed in Part Two), but at least your basic meaning will be understood.

And as mentioned in the section on "easy bits," as a worst-case scenario, just try using simple English. There's no need to shout, which is the typical English speaker's method of communicating with foreigners, but saying a word slowly and clearly will be helpful. Japanese people all learn English at school and often have a good passive knowledge of English words, though they may never have heard them actually articulated (at least by a native speaker).

2.2.4 The unspoken challenge

Another significant challenge lies in the grammar, which, like its vocabulary, is generally not familiar to native English speakers. As mentioned earlier this is seen in the word order, in the use of particles to indicate case (grammatical role), and in overlaps between adjectives and verbs (with adjectives being marked for tense as if they were verbs proper).

The grammar is generally less explicit and thus more vague and more potentially confusing than most Western languages. That is, more is left unsaid. For example, there is often no distinction made between singular and plural. Thus neko can mean "cat" or "cats." Verbs within a given tense do not conjugate according to person, as, for example, in English "I see, he sees," or even more so the French endings -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent. Combined with the frequent omission of pronouns which indicate the subject of the verb, this can be particularly vague. And speaking of tenses, there is no dedicated future tense in Japanese, as the tense used is the same as the habitual present. Thus, eiga ("movie") o ("object particle") mimasu ("watch/see") can mean "I watch movies (as a regular thing)" or "I will watch a movie" or "somebody other than myself regularly watches movies or will watch a movie or multiple movies"!

Basically, though the language can certainly be specific and precise when necessary, in general Japanese is often implicit whereas Westerners are used to explicit language. That is, it is not what is spoken but often what is left unspoken that can be a challenge. Therefore the context becomes particularly important for inferring precise meaning, and this in itself can be challenging (as discussed in 1.1.4, on socio-cultural context).

But this "vague" grammar can actually be a plus depending on how you look at it. Unlike French and many other languages, when using Japanese you do not have to worry about the gender of nouns, the conjugation of verbs according to subject, or the formation of plurals. And, let's face it, sometimes it pays to be vague! How many times have you stuck your neck out to be specific about something only to regret it!

2.2.5 The challenge with a difference

There are numerous other particular points that will strike the English speaker as challenging simply because they are different and unfamiliar. For example, Japanese uses a wide range of different number-suffixes when counting, depending on the category of the item being counted. Thus san-bon means three long cylindrical objects, while san-mai means three thin flat objects, and so on. But is this any different in principle from the collective nouns in English—a "pride" of lions as opposed to a "pod" of dolphins?

Similarly, in English we say "I'm going out to post a letter", when in fact there are almost always not two but three actions involved: going, posting the letter, and returning. Perhaps we are not that bothered about the returning bit! The Japanese, by contrast, say "I'm posting a letter and coming back," and don't seem concerned about how they get to the postbox!

As a third example, replies to negative questions are also frequently different from English. In reply to a question "Aren't you going?" English speakers (if they were not going) would normally reply "No, I'm not." A Japanese, by contrast, would usually reply "Yes, I'm not" and this is even more confusing if the answer is just "Yes." The English-speaking respondent focuses on the action, which in this case is negative, whereas the Japanese respondent focuses on the accuracy or otherwise of the question, in effect using "yes" to indicate "You are correct." Which is the more valid as a reply? Of course, both are equally valid.

FIGURE 2d: How should I answer?

In the old days Western visitors to Japan often referred to it as a "topsyturvy" land because so much of its language and culture seemed to be the opposite of what they were used to. But it works both ways; the Westerners and their ways and words seemed pretty weird to the Japanese in turn. In our present day we recognize that it's simply different ways of approaching the same thing.

There are many more examples such as this, where Japanese and English do not correspond exactly. The key thing is to keep an open mind, and to see differences as interesting challenges rather than difficult problems. The very fact that you are reading this book voluntarily (as opposed to being forced) shows that you are interested in learning Japanese, and so there is a very high probability that you are the sort of person who will respond positively to the challenge of difference.

You will probably also be able to work out your own "solutions" or "short cuts" when it comes to tricky aspects of the language. For example, you will probably have worked out for yourself that one way of avoiding a confusing response to a negative question you might be asked (such as "Aren't you going?") is to avoid saying ee/hai "yes" or ie "no" and simply give the substance (i.e. "I'm not going" or "I am going").

FIGURE 2e: Let's be pragmatic

As Japan's international profile increases, we are all becoming more familiar with Japanese culture and even with a number of Japanese words. You probably already know at least twenty Japanese words from the hundred or so that have entered English, such as samurai, geisha and karate. This helps reduce the aura of exoticism and "alienness" that underlies so many of the perceived challenges.

And the bottom line when it comes to challenges? The Japanese have shown by their technology and in many other ways that they are a very smart people, but like any group they too have their share of those who are not quite so smart. Yet they all manage, even the least bright and least motivated among them, to learn the language up to at least a functional level. (In fact, it is a basic law of linguistics that any established language must by definition be able to be adequately mastered by those who use it as a first language.) And, perhaps surprisingly, despite having one of the world's most complex scripts the Japanese also have the world's highest literacy rate, at over 98%! Of course they have more exposure to the language, but nevertheless, this reality-check goes to show that the challenge of Japanese is not insurmountable.

Let us now move on to Part Two, in which we start to look at Japanese in terms of the formation of sounds and words.