BETWEEN FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;

BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND JAPANOLOGIST;

BETWEEN FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter 5a -  LEARNING THE LANGUAGE 

1. Learning Difficulties. Japanese and Chinese Compared

2.  The Conscious versus the Sub-Conscious

3.  Breakthroughs

4.  The Written Language

5.  Speaking Japanese
That year in Japan was memorable —  even more than the time in Moscow. 

One reason was the business of trying to self-teach myself Japanese.  It was to drag me into Japan, inextricably. 

It was also to drag me deeply into thinking about the mechanics of language learning. 

For those who might just possibly be interested, let me elaborate: 

As others have noted, beginning with Francis Xavier in the 16th century, Japanese is not an easy language (“a language invented by the Devil” was his conclusion). In many ways it is even more difficult than Chinese 

Chinese word order, grammar and sentence structure are much closer to English than Japanese is. True, there is the problem of the four tones in standard Mandarin Chinese. But as I mentioned earlier, once the ear becomes attuned they cease to be much of a problem. 

Tones can even be a plus. They provide a clear rhyme to the language - something that in any language, Russian, French or German for example, makes for easier listening and understanding. 

Intonation in Japanese is very subtle, too subtle at times for this human ear at least. That, combined with the way the Japanese agglutinate their sounds, makes it very hard to catch the spoken language, especially when the speaker begins to blurt out streams of disorganized thoughts. 

These are some reasons why so few foreigners, other than those born and raised in Japan, speak the language with complete fluency.  Others include the difficult grammar, the back-to-front word order, and the need to master the various grades of politeness language (though less important than before).. 

The question of grammar and word order is much more important than many realise. 

When you speak or listen to a language you do so via a computer in your sub-conscious.  If it is your own language,  the computer is created naturally by you, as a child.  

If it is a foreign language and you want to be able speak and understand it with some ease, you have to set out deliberately to create the computer.   

The problem is how. 

If I try to learn a language like French, not only are many of the words similar to English, but the sentence structure is basically the same as English. 

So when I read or listen to the language I can, in effect, process it through the  ‘computer’ that I use for English, making changes where needed. 

From there it is not hard to create the computer I will need to read, speak and process French sounds at speed. 

But when the sentence structure is completely different you lose this crutch. Right from the beginning you have to start building a completely new and different computer to handle the language. 

That takes time.

With Japanese, compounding these difficulties, on the listening side especially,  is the homophone problem. 

Just as much of the more sophisticated English language vocabulary comes from French (and before that, Latin and Greek), much of the Japanese vocabulary comes from Chinese. And with the words come the ideographs – the kanji – that the Chinese use for those words. 

Learning the kanji obviously takes time, though in my case I could rely on the pre-reformed ideographs I had learned for Chinese. Differences in writing and using the two sets of ideographs are not great. 

 But that does not help greatly with the listening. The Japanese have taken the original Chinese pronunciation for each word, and in most cases have reduced it to barest of bones. 

Only a very few -anshin meaning safe, for example - are similar to the Chinese pronunciation today. 

Take the Japanese sound 'ko'. It is the pronunciation given to dozens of words in common Japanese use (there are another dozen or so more ko’s with more arcane uses). 

The original Chinese pronunciations for those several dozen ko words include: gong, gang, kang, kung, hong, huang, guang kuang, gao, kao, hou, hao, jiao, qiao,and jiang. 

But in Japanese they all become ko. 

True, Chinese also has its homophones — words with the same pronunciation but different meaning. But they are fewer than in Japanese. And in any case, they can usually be distinguished from each other by one or other of the four tones. 

So gong with a high tone means one thing. Gong with a low tone it has a different meaning. And so on 

But in Japanese both they and a host of other words taken from Chinese will end up as ko, with nothing like the Chinese tones to distinguish them from each other. 

To make things worse, if the o sound in ko is shortened, we find one set of meanings. If it is lengthened, we have another quite different set of meanings. 

And since ko with the long o and ko with the short o sound almost alike, once again, it is only through close listening, and sometimes blind intuition, that one knows which ko they are talking about (though as with Chinese tones, once the ear becomes attuned the problems decline). 

True, given the dozens upon dozens of meanings that a sound like ko can have, whether shortened or not, (and for that matter the same is true for a bunch of other sounds - ka, ki, ku, sei, shi, sai - , to give just a few examples), the Japanese, like the Chinese, rely heavily on compound words — two sounds brought together to give a meaning. 

But even with compound words there are problems. 

In Chinese, high tone gong can have several meanings. So it will be combined with, say, ye to create what is called compound, in this case gong-ye meaning ‘industry.’ 

So when you hear gong-ye in Chinese you know it can only have one meaning - industry 

Japanese has borrowed many of these compound words. In Japanese gong-ye becomes kõ-gyo, also meaning industry. 

Problem solved? Not entirely. 

Because even when the Japanese create compounds there is still an army of homophones. 

Take the Chinese origin word for ‘success’ which is pronounced sei-kõ in Japanese. A Japanese dictionary will give you a dozen or so other meanings for sei-kõ (one is ‘sexual intercourse’). 

In Chinese, the sei-kõ meaning success is cheng-gong . The sei-kõ for sexual intercourse would be sheng-jiao, and so on. The difference in sound alone, not to mention the use of tones, makes the meaning in Chinese quite clear. 

But in Japanese they all end up as a fairly neutral tone sei-kõ. 

Once again, one is reduced to context and subtle intonation differences to guess which sei-kõ the speaker is talking about. Failing that, the speaker is sometimes reduced to writing out the kanji in the air. 

 2. The Conscious Versus the Sub-Conscious 

As mentioned earlier, originally I (and my ANU mentors) has assumed my knowledge of Chinese would make it fairly easy for me to read research materials in Japanese. 

That illusion did not last long. I soon realised that to read the language I needed to learn the spoken language. 

Why?  Because if you set out simply to look consciously at each of the words in a sentence and try to string them together into a meaning,  even if you know the meaning of each of the words you are looking at, you will find the process very slow.  

Extracting a meaning from the sentence is painful. 

But if you know the spoken language, then when you look at the words in a sentence you can turn them into mental sound.  The meaning of the sentence emerges as quickly and as naturally as if someone was saying the same thing to you. 

So the first priority in learning a language, a difficult language especially, should be to create the sub-conscious computer that will allow you to process sounds and turn them into meaning. 

But that too is not easy.  The sounds you will be hearing will be often be spoken at normal speed. Normal speed is usually much faster than the conscious computer can handle. 

 You will have to create a very fast and sensitive computer. 

That computer can only function properly in the sub-conscious area of the brain.  

The sub-conscious brain is an amazing machine. Just think of how it operates when you are listening to your own language.  In effect It is able to take in a mass of sound, often jumbled,  and immediately give it meaning. 

Understanding how to input and use that computer is the key to all language learning.  It is far more important that any amount of grammar, textbooks or anything else.

True, unless we are gifted with very sensitive brains at first we have to input our conscious brain.  Then by repeated speaking and listening it ends up in the sub-conscious brain.  

Nor is it just language.  Think of the way we learn to touch-type. 

At first we have to type consciously.  We have to look at the keyboard and make sure each of our fingers goes into each slot correctly.  

But with practice we discover we no longer have to look at the keyboard.  Each finger seems to know automatically and rapidly where it should go. 

How many of us stop to think how we can have such speed and accuracy without even having to look at the keyboard. We take it for granted. 

But if we think about it. it is a remarkable phenomenon -  a tribute to the power of that sub-conscious brain. 

Playing a piano by memory is  even more remarkable. So is a range of other abilities we take for granted - riding a bicycle, dancing, and so on. 

Unfortunately most language teachers, and their students, do not realise this. They seem to think that learning a language is a highly intellectual operation and seek to force input slowly and ponderously into the conscious brain. 

But that conscious 'computer' has very poor retentive ability, as anyone who has tried to remember vocab lists will know. It is also slow in operation. 

It may eventually provide some kind of fluency.  But it will be the fluency of the two-finger typist-  slow, painfully-acquired and hard to break out of. 

That is why it is so important right from the start to try to create the sub-conscious ability in the language.  

True, you will also need what I call conscious input — the textbooks that will teach you the grammar, vocabulary etc. But that simply provides the framework for the knowledge that you are going to have to put into the sub-conscious.

And the only way to input the sub-conscious computer is by constant listening practice, with speaking practice to follow. 

But once you have created that sub-conscious computer, you have something that even the most sophisticated IBM machine could not match. 

In my own case, as someone who has had to learn three difficult languages to fluency level — Chinese, Russian and Japanese — it is strange experience. 

It is all rather like remembering a song or poem.  The fact that is a very long song or poem, and one subject to infinite variations,  does not change things . 

Songs, of course, penetrate the sub-conscious easily.  They is why we can remember them for so long and so easily. 

What's more, each of them has its own particular place in the sub-conscious.  If I start to sing one song I am unlikely to confuse it with another song. 

People who learn languages consciously assume that when I am speaking one language there must be constant confusion between the other languages. 

In fact, confusion is rare. If I have to switch from Japanese to Chinese, for example — the process is not difficult. 

It is as if I just open a door, go through it, and close it behind me.. 

Occasionally the existence of very similar words in Chinese and Japanese causes mild confusion. 

There is also the problem for me of switching back from Chinese to Japanese. 

The fact of learning Chinese when I was younger (22) has embedded it more deeply in my brain than Japanese, even though I have been speaking Japanese for 30 years. 

For a few seconds at least the mind can go into semi-seizure as I try to sort out what language I should be speaking. But once put back on the right track, all goes as before. 

The other surprise for me is the ease with which words and expressions I learned as long as 40 years ago, together with correct pronunciations, jump out of my sub-conscious computer naturally, as if I had been using them just yesterday. 

But if language is a song, I guess those abilities are not too surprising. How many of us would forget ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, ‘ even if we had not sung it for decades? 

But while mastering a language is like mastering a song (ever noticed how often Japanese singers with no knowledge of English manage to sing English songs with very good intonation?) the actual learning itself is no song. 

Creating that sub-conscious computer for handling the Japanese language, with its sounds spoken at speed, with similar pronunciations and without clear intonations, has for me at least been far more difficult than it was for other languages. 

There are no shortcuts, particularly in my case when one has reached adulthood and the brain cells have begun to fossilize. 

So right from the start I knew that I had to do everything I could to make a breakthrough on the listening side. I would have to begin creating that sub-conscious computer. 

Constant listening to tape-recordings, and TV/radio broadcasts, was the solution. Meeting and talking to a lot of Japanese people also helped. 

The process is cumulative. 

Get started on a language, and from then on everything you do in your daily life, from buying fish and listening to the news to pub harangues and sorting out visa problems, becomes a learning experience. It is all fodder input to that computer. 

Fail to do that and you spend the rest of your Japan career confined to your own little box of dark incomprehension, jealous of those who have broken through. 

True, listening to radio and TV programs in Japanese was not easy at first, and sometimes even now. 

You feel as if you have been hit by a wall of sound, with almost no clue as to what the topic is or where it is going. Sounds run into each other to create a blur of accumulated noise. 

Years of constant listening practice are needed to breach the wall, and even that might not be enough. But it is better than no practice. 

And today we are helped greatly by the Japanese subtitles they use on many TV broadcasts. 

3. Breakthroughs 

Realising the need for listening practice was one thing. Just as important for me at the time was finding effective ways to do it. 

Listening to TV is a very shotgun approach, though the use of words crucial to understanding the plot can sometimes penetrate the sub-conscious memory directly.   

The ideal is to have some recording of something relevant and interesting which you can listen over and over again till the meaning is clear. When the brain is reaching out to understand something its retentive power is much greater.

Language tapes were few and expensive in those days, though the Jordan set of sentence pattern tapes helped a lot at the beginning. 

(Memorising whole sentences is another very effective way to push material into the memory box, even if it seems childish to some. Play acting is even more effective. Others say reading out aloud helps.)

(Whatever method, the aim is to break down the instinctive barriers we all have to remembering something as big and as alien as a foreign language.)

(One of the most ineffective, and expensive, ways is the popular idea of free discussion with native speakers. Even if students overcome a natural reluctance to listen and speak, what they hear often passes fleetingly through the mind. Little is retained.) 

(Even a close relationship with the opposite (ie Japanese) sex can leave one making largely repetitive or unprepared conversation with the risk that wrong words and expressions will enter the sub-conscious.)

(Concentrated listening, and memorising, is crucial. I call it deep listening, and through books and articles have managed to get that concept accepted somewhat in Japan.) 

(It should then be followed up by conversation, ideally on an organised basis.)

For listening practice I used to rely on taping the weather forecasts at first. With repeated listening gradually I could make sense from the ‘wall of sound.’ It was rather like decyphering a secret code,  with the same kinds of challenges, and my term of it put into book form  “The Code-Decyphering Technique” (Ango Kaidoku Hoshiki) also made some impact in Japan. 

Next I moved to news broadcasts, relying on the newspapers of the day to help sort out incomprehensions. In particular I liked an early morning radio program called Watashi-tachi no Kotoba in which mainly elderly Japanese gave their views on social problems. 

The reading was slow and clear, by top-line NHK announcers.  The topic was of interest. And the texts included many educated words and expressions that I did not know but which I could use.

The ever-attentive Yasuko helped me a lot in the 'de-cyphering' process. I will always be grateful 

4. The Written Language 

Spoken Japanese is difficult enough. Reading the written Japanese also has its problems. 

In addition to the Chinese origin ideographs, or kanji, Japanese has two phonetic scripts – katakana and hiragana. 

Katakana is used mainly for imported words, mainly from English. Hiragana is for Japanese origin words or parts of speech. 

Kana can be basically memorised in a day or so. 

Nor is recognising and reading ideographs in written text  quite the problem people think it is, particularly if the publishers have been good enough to put the kana pronunciations alongside the kanji (it saves the painful process of having to look up kanji dictionaries). 

If you have already learned the spoken language then all you have to do is associate the pronunciations with the kanji you see before you.  

Nor do you have to learn to write the kanji, though knowing the various parts that go to make up the ideograph - the 'syllables' so to speak - can help.

When you see a kanji it is rather like seeing a picture. If you see a Picasso picture on a wall, you can immediately say that is a Picasso.  You do not need to be able to paint the picture to recognise that it is a Picasso. 

Reading kanji is rather similar, even if there are many hundreds of 'Picasso's' that you have to be familiar with. 

Of course, the Japanese will have to learn to 'paint' it, if they want to be able to write. But for most foreigners being able to read is enough. 

(Once again, the language schools mess up by making students spend too much time learning to write kanji.) 

Many well-intentioned Westerners – the former US ambassador to Japan and Oriental scholar, Edwin Reischauer, for example – have urged the Japanese to abandon kanji and rely on romanization.

But that leaves the problem of the homophones, since they would all have similar spelling in romanization. 

Once mastered, ideographs work well as the basis for a written language. They allow easy and speed reading - one reason why the Japanese have had the good sense to retain them. 

In effect, the years that Japanese children spend learning the language are probably more than compensated for by superior reading ability. 

There seem to be few dyslexic Japanese children. Few leave school unable to read a newspaper. 

Indeed, it is just possible that if in the future speed reading, or accurate reading, come to be seen as crucial to acquiring the vast amounts of knowledge needed to run our societies, our Western phonetic scripts might turn to some form of ideograph. 

A Problem

If there is a problem in reading Japanese, it is in the texts where kanji are few and words in the phonetic kana script are run together without any breaks. 

The result looks something like this:  

ItisalmostasifIwastowritethissentencelikethisandthenaskyoutoreadit. 

So even more than in other languages, listening ability becomes important. 

In other languages one can look at each word consciously and give it a separate meaning.  

With kana en masse, only a very good knowledge of the spoken language can help you. So when you start to read the initial 'letters' you need to know almost automatically what word is likely to come next.

So in the above example, the first word 'it' makes it likely that the next word will be 'is,' and so on. 

That language is sound, not script, is something many language teachers around the world still need to understand. Many still seem to think that language is the written words on a page. 

5. Speaking Japanese 

Listening is one thing. But speaking too is important, if one wants to consolidate the language into the sub-conscious memory. 

But the speaking needs to come after and as a backup to the intensive listening — something that those devotees of  'communicative English' fail to realise. They seem to think that if you just put people into live situations where they have to communicate the language will penetrate the memory and the speaking ability. 

In fact, there should be intensive listening practice before trying to speak. 

Ideally the speaking should be with a teacher who is familiar with the material you have been using for listening. Or at least you should be able to to put yourself in a situation where you can use the words you have been listening to.  

And while listening can be done by oneself (all you need is a radio, TV set or even better a good tape recorder) speaking requires other human beings. Ideally it should be a circle of friends or acquaintances with whom one can discuss things naturally. 

(With Japanese that is yet another  very particular problem that few seem to realise.) 

(Japanese people do not try to communicate directly. So much of what they say seems to slide off the memory box, even if you understand everything they are saying.) 

(With Chinese it is very different., Provided they are speaking slowly enough, every word they say seems to penetrate the box like little bullets, and stay there.) 

Making friends with Japanese was not easy in those early days. The psychological and other gaps between Western and Japanese society were wide; among the women at least, foreigners still carried some of the stigma of the Occupation days. 

Fortunately, a British Embassy contact introduced me to a professor of English at some university. He was said to be an expert on Shakespeare but could hardly speak the language – a typical victim of the script rather than sound approach to language learning. 

But he introduced me to his deshi and they tried to look after me. That gave me my first break-though into Japanese society. 

I was not so fortunate with the Australian Embassy. It had me firmly black-listed as a dangerous anti-Vietnam protestor. 

Fortunately my one contact at the Embassy - a junior third secretary, Richard Broinowski, and his wife Alison - took pity on me and invited me to the occasional party. 

They were beginning to have their doubts about the Vietnam folly. They too gave me some useful introductions. 

But my main break-through on the speaking side of things was a small nomiya (eating place) at the bottom of the Toritsu-dai hill where I was renting my room.  

As I passed it on my way home from a day's work at the Ajiken library I could smell the sweet odor of grilled yakitori chicken seeping out from the sliding doors and hear the buzz of conversation inside.

One day I decided to take a look inside.  As I opened the sliding doors someone called out for the gaijin-san to come inside. Someone else moved up for me to sit down.

I was facing  a counter lined by the half dozen or so regulars - a plumber, a school-teacher and so on - with a mama-san on the other side. 

My neighbor turned out to be a nomiya regular - a very ordinary salary-man and as I discovered later a good friend of the mama-san.   He helped me order, and then went out of his way to talk to me, slowly so I could understand. 

For the first time in my Tokyo career I had been able to have a conversation, albeit very limited, with an ordinary Japanese.   

I kept coming back.  They kept on looking after me. Gradually I came to realise that this little group had begun to see me, an ignorant gaijin, as one of their regular members.

Early in the spring they invited me to join them and the mama-san for a hanami (flower viewing) on the cherry tree lined banks of the nearby Tama river. 

Soon after they were to organise a farewell party for me when I was due to leave Japan. 

All this despite the fact I was still struggling to speak their language properly. 

It was a lesson in Japan's group relations. When you are outside the group the distance can be total. 

But when for some reason you are inside the sense of group belonging can be equally total. Insider/outsider, or soto/uchi as they call it in Japan.  It is one of the clues to understanding Japan. 

But that aside, the experience, plus other happy memories of that year in Japan, would do much to bring me back a year or so later. 

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