When an engineer learns Japanese (Part 2)
Some interesting observations and musings while learning Japanese
In the first part of this blog, I started to tell my story of learning Japanese. The story continues…
Our ‘sound’ adaptations to new languages
In the previous blog post, I mentioned how Japanese have fewer sounds compared to English or Malayalam. Which allows us to be a little more free in using sounds. The Japanese friends I interviewed said they cannot distinguish between the sounds of “श/ശ” and “ष/ഷ” as the different sounds don’t exist in their language. So you are free to say ‘ഷിനഗവ/ षिनागवा’ or ‘ശിനഗവ/शिनागवा’ for “Shinagawa”.
It is just like how most of us can’t seem to say some sounds in the English phonetics. For example, when we read ‘West’ as ‘vest’ ; or roll our tongue too much for the ‘r’ in reason or earthquake in order to associate these sounds to their closest relative sound in our language. Even with the vast array of 36 consonants and 15 vowels, Malayalam still cant express all of the 44 phonemes or phonetic sounds of English (And so is vice-versa, too). It seems that the more intricate the sounds of your mother tongue is, the more easy the sounds of another language may seem to you.
Language as a tool to understand society
Learning a language has a lot to do with understanding its culture as well. There is a whole level of polite Japanese that is a system of roundabout away to avoid saying a ‘no’ directly, which can be rather confusing especially for westerners whose language expressions are more straightforward.
Aced and native level learners say that they are still ‘learning’ the language because the Japanese language has many nuances, like its way of polite misdirection, which may be very hard for most of us to follow. I once received a letter from the bank in response for my credit card application. I translated using Google translate, but I could not make out if my application was approved or not. Because the letter was beating around the bush so much, it was almost impossible to understand what it was trying to say. It was finally my Japanese labmate who translated that they had rejected my application. I would have never understood that with the word-by-word translation that Google translate gave me! There are way more nuances to a language than what we can verbally understand.
Now, this has to be understood from the reverse lens, too. Even after one has mastered the language, one needs to polish it to these subtleties to be polite and to not sound rude.
Another way of understanding a culture through means of language is by the language that we use. The words I seem to use most are:
- Sumimasen(Excuse me/ I am sorry) — being a very clumsy person, I trip on people’s feet , drop things loudly and inconvenience people around — and I seem a misfit in this orderly world!
- Arigatou(Thank you) — because I receive a good deal of help from people in daily life; or I may even be responding to the hospitable greetings or smiles of the staff at a store.
See, the words we use itself speaks a lot about the society we live in.
How many’th language?
Another interesting thing I observed while learning Japanese is that I started forgetting Hindi. When I try to speak in Japanese and run out of words, Hindi words come to the tip of my tongue. The vice-versa happens when I try to speak in Hindi. It seems that I will have to learn one language at the cost of another. But the Japanese territory does not cross with either Malayalam and English, probably because they have deeper roots in my long term memory.
Having said the issues of being (bi+multifractional)-lingual, there are also some advantages of having exposure to several languages (or language families).
Studies in comparative linguistics have led to the identification of several language families like the Indo-European languages (Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi,Russian, German, French, Marathi, Italian, Persian etc) and Sino-Tibetan languages (varieties of Chinese, Burmese, Tibetic languages etc). This is based on the concept that some languages have been derived from a common ancestor and thus they have some similarities in the morphology, vocabulary, etc.
While learning a new language, if its grammatical structure does not match with language A, you can try associating it with language B or language C. So the more linguistic families you have exposure to, the easier it becomes to find some association. Even though the languages I knew before belong to either Dravidian or Indo-European languages, and the Japonic languages are a different family itself, my friends and I have found some interesting (probably irrelevant) similarities.
There is a question that Pauly asks his English master in the Malayalam movie ‘Pranchiyettan and the saint’. How will you translate “ V. S. Achuthanandan Keralathinte ethramathe mukhyamanthri anu?”(Malayalam) to English? We can see the English master is at a loss. There is no direct way of asking how many’th (9th?5th?2nd?) in English. But this is possible in Malayalam.
Similarly in Japanese, we can ask “しぶや はいくつめ の えき です か” (Japanese) or “Shibuya ethramathe station anu” (Malayalam) and in odd- English it would be “How many-th station is Shibuya?”
Thus knowing both English and Malayalam (and some Hindi) helps to draw familiar comparisons as their styles are different. But overall, I believe Japanese probably has more in similar to Malayalam and Hindi than it has to English.
To elaborate, English (active voice) follows the S-V-O(Subject-Verb-Object) format, whereas a larger majority of languages like Japanese, Malayalam and Hindi follow the S-O-V format.
The order of words in a sentence is not much strict in Japanese, Hindi or Malayalam in contrast to English. Swapping of positions of Object and Subject without changing the verb (or the sentence) into a passive voice is allowed in Japanese (However ‘An apple ate me’ would totally change the meaning in English). What the swapping does is just shift the emphasis to either subject or object, without making it passive voice. Similarly, we can go on adding other details like where we had coffee from, with whom etc, before the verb in any order. Saying, “At the coffee house, with Anne, I had a coffee” would be wrong in English, but this word order is normal and flexible in Japanese, Malayalam and Hindi.
To conclude, while putting daily effort on this language along with a group of friends who all speak different tongues, I have been curious with some reflections.
I have wondered how interesting it would have been if Malayalam was taught in the way Japanese was being taught to us? What would a foreigner find the most difficult? Is it the lopam(merging) of sounds, sandhi, samasam ? Because, in Japanese that never happens — all consonants (except ‘n’) will be followed by a vowel like “mi-kku-su-sa-n-do-i-chi” (mix sandwich). Non-native english speakers always complain how the same letter in english is read in many different ways (autumn, apple, angel etc). What would be the most difficult thing for foreigners if Malayalam was taught to them in language schools like we were taught Japanese?
Those explorations might take us to yet another long and boring linguistic essay!
The End.
