Abstract Expressionism In Conversation

So here we have our first brief introduction to learning spoken Japanese the way it tends to be spoken by the Great Unwashed. What's cool about this is the random and arbitrary nature of the entries, just as in real life — slapdash and badly conceived, like the majority of projects initiated by humans, and assigned to baffle and confuse the unwary or unprepared. Umm, just kidding.

For anyone never having heard spoken Japanese except for Teacher's and maybe some cartoons you might want to listen to the various intonations I give some of them in order for you not actually "kill" your next door neighbor instead of just "tell" the pleasant fellow of your discovery of this awesome video which you should listen to over and over again until you know all the phrases backwards as well as sideways and can flirt with the opposite sex with as a weapon of mass love-action as well as a love-surfactant.

Whatever your "thang" is, this little tiny lesson of Umms and Uhhs should take your progress with learning Japanese into the troposphere at warp factor ∞!

Kanji Slamming

It's finally beginning to pay off! I think. For the past month or so I've been "hanging around" with kanji a lot . . . that means, trying to study it, getting distracted, trying some new, odd method usually with iPad apps -- I think I now have about eight different ones on my iPad Mini -- but it's the addition of a little stylus pen-thingy that seems to have broken the blood-kanji barrier.

Plus, add to that the sheer amount of tines I've been looking at these kanji, now over almost 30 years . . . I've learned them, forgotten them, learned them and forgotten them so many times it's just not countable/uncountable . . . and now that I've been concentrating on them again they have somehow magically begun to stick.

I bought this rather overpriced app called "Kanji LS" and now that I have the very pathetic "stylus" which when writing kanji is like trying to play the guitar with Antarctic-recommended mitts on it seems to have clumsily come together enough so that I can actually write a kanji and then see how close I came to being right! These five example being the ones I'm proudest of, since all I got as hints for these kanji were English meanings. I was merciless on this exercise, counting as "Wrong" any kanji whose stroke order I wrote incorrectly so that i will be forced to meet up with them later.

Also, remember that all these kanji are among the first 80 or so that six-year-olds learn in school in Japan so you can put into proper perspective what a pathetic "feat" it truly was . . . but I'm proud of it! Hell, I even ran out to show Brigitte one of the ones (the one for "sound") I got right. She was properly impressed.

I may just start a kanji competition with my students. Maybe for money!

BUT I mainly just wanted you to take hurt and understand that if I can do it, you can too!

These are just five of the ones I got right. To my credit, out of the 80, on my first ever complete run-through, I got around a 60% score, meaning that I was able to WRITE the kanji with only the meaning of it given in English, which usually means that if I can write the kanji, i have remembered its on-yomi and kun-yomi readings as well, and could probably read it correctly in an unfamiliar compound.

So . . . kanpai to me (my student Mathieu and i polished off a couple of small bottles of saké last week to celebrate . . . um . . . the Emperor's gardener's 93rd birthday.

Anyway. Read 'em and weep! (Do weep, because a couple of my attempts look like a 4-year-old's).

I almost nailed "Ki!" but neglected the little tail that goes on the "roof" segment. My "bamboos" were unforgivably slanted but I gave myself a pass anyway. The only hints I got for each one before trying to write them were the English words you see at the top of each panel.

New Carpet, New Room!

If you're just tuning in, check out the new look for the teaching space. New carpet, new feel . . . even the inhabitants look happier.

See you down here soon!

--　カマキリ

Carpet no longer looks like dead forest floor!

Our pals, Admiral Yamamoto and party . . . as happy as you'll ever see them. They watch us with undisguised scorn. After all, we mangle the Mother Tongue!

Te-imasu Form

Okay, I bit the bullet and designed another "Lego" type chart for the "the-imasu" form of Japanese verbs -- I cannot emphasize more strongly how important the mastery of this form is -- it literally is the machine that controls the entire language. Without knowing the the-imasu (or the-iru) form -- i.e.. the progressive tenses -- you will be doomed to speak pidgin Japanese forever.

Here then, is my te-imasu chart.

An Introduction to Kanji

I wrote this rather long intro to kanji (the Chinese character system adopted by the Japanese) for a very genki young student who wants to do things correctly right from the start. In my mind, the writing system and spoken language should preferably be learned side by side. I understand many people don't have time for this but it's still what I recommend.

I myself gave up trying to learn kanji when I lived in Japan and I now think that was a big mistake. Then again at the time I had no convenient iPad, Internet or anything else except for good old books and a pen and paper.

Brief Guide to Kanji by Kamakiri

Because of the way they have been adopted into Japanese, a single kanji may be used to write one or more different words, and so the same character may be pronounced in different ways. From the point of view of the reader, kanji are said to have one or more different "readings". 

Some kanji have very few ways to read them (and pronounce them) and some kanji, especially the very common ones, have many, many readings, and uses, and pronunciations.

We have looked, for example, at the kanji "日". This is one of the simplest kanji you will see, but it is also one with the most meanings and way of reading and pronunciation. For example, it is used in the name for Japan, the country: 日本, which is pronounced "Nihon" or sometimes "Nippon" (the second way is usually by older Japanese people, but you will sometimes hear it).

Both the kanji for "Japan" are two of the most commonly used kanji in Japanese, so they have LOTS of different readings and pronunciations, and even completely different meanings. So for example, the kanji "日" can mean "day," " sun, " or be a counter for days of the week, with the pronunciations of "nichi" and "hi."

This kanji, luckily for us, is not part of an adjective, or verb, or other part of speech -- unfortunately, many kanji are.

When that happens, like in the case of "行" which by itself, as a noun standing alone, it is a noun meaning "going" or "journey," and is pronounced "kō" (you'll remember that if it has a bar on top it is an extended vowel).

However, if it is attached to other kanji, in which case it is called a KANJI COMPOUND (that just means two or more kanji attached together to form different words) that's when you will see the "different readings" of each kanji come out. In the case of the compound word "銀行," which is pronounced "gin-kō" and means "bank", luckily the pronunciation of "kō" is the same, but bear in mind that this is not always the case. In this word for "bank," the first kanji means "silver," so together the word can be translated to English literally as "Silver-go," which I suppose makes some sense. You "go" there to get "silver." Most kanji have these rather odd meanings. Many times the two kanji practically mean exactly the same thing; why this is so is not clear, but there must have been a reason in ancient China.

When a kanji is combined with other kanji to make a COMPOUND, like the example just given, it usually uses its "Chinese" reading, or pronunciation, which is called "On-yomi." "On-yomi" literally means in English "Sound-reading," which tells you that that particular kanji is being used for its sound as well as meaning. Very, very often, if you compare the "on-yomi" of a Japanese kanji to the Chinese character (the Chinese call their writing "han-zi," which is not that far apart from "kan-ji!") it can sound the same, or in some cases, be absolutely identical.

When a kanji is used, say, for a verb, then HIRAGANA will be added to it. In the case of "行く", it becomes the verb "iku," which is now pronounced "iku", but with the kanji now making the "ik" sound, and everything after that is the verb, which will be written in hiragana. So, in the case of iku, we say that it is a "u-dropping" verb, which simply means that instead of the "u," HIRAGANA will be used to form the various tenses, so now the "行" is just the STEM of the verb "to go."

In general, in the case of verbs, you just have to figure out what the stem is going to be -- and the stem will 99% of the time be a kanji. After that stem, you will use hiragana to conjugate the verb, but the stem kanji's pronunciation will never change. So in the case of the verb "Iku," the kanji "行" will ALWAYS be pronounced "Ik" although the hiragana coming after it will change the whole word's pronunciation.

Sometimes a kanji will be the base for an adjective as well. In Japanese, adjective like "cold," "hot" and other common ones can actually be used as a verb at the same time, which is completely different to English. In English, we would have to say "It was hot," where we use the "It was" to tell that "hot" is in the past tense. In Japanese, many times an adjective (they are called "i-adjectives, because they end in the hiragana 'い'") can just change its hiragana to make a past tense. For example, 暑い, which as you can see ends in an "い," will change to "暑かった" (atsu-katta,) which means "It was hot." The kanji "暑" is pronounced "atsu" and everything that is hiragana that comes after it will change the pronunciation of the word. In many ways, you can call this kind of word an "Adjectival verb," since it is half adjective and half verb. We don't have anything like that in English!

So to sum it up, kanji are used mainly for three things: to be part of a word when combined with other kanji -- this is usually just two kanji, but can be more -- and is called a KANJI COMPOUND, or just a "compound." Then, it can be the base for a verb, in which case it will take on its Japanese pronuciation/reading, called "KUN-YOMI," which pretty much means "Japanese reading." So, for many kanji, you have to learn the On-yomi, which in a dictionary is usually written in katakana, and Kun-yomi, which in a dictionary is usually written as hiragana (that's how you know it's the Japanese form, because katakana is usually used to spell foreign words).

So, the kanji "行" will have a dictionary entry something like this:

行

Chinese reading (On-yomi, notice katakana):

KŌ　コウ 　GYŌ　ギョウ 　AN　 アン

Japanese reading (Kun-yomi, notice hiragana):

i.ku　い.く　 yu.ku　ゆ.く -yu.ki　ーゆ.き -yuki　ーゆき -i.ki　ーい.き  -iki　ーいき

okona.u　おこな.う oko.nau   おこ.なう

Please note that in the examples above, EVERYTHING BEFORE THE DOT WILL BE THE KANJI; EVERYTHING AFTER THE DOT WILL BE HIRAGANA.

So you see that "Iku" can also be read "Yuku," even though it is spelled "Iku" for BOTH WORDS. In this case, it sometimes depends on politeness levels how it is read. But that's for later.

So you see, even ONE kanji can be a very complicated set of little bits of information. Thankfully, kanji like this are pretty rare. Usually it is only the MOST COMMON kanji that are this complex, and you will be learning all of them pretty early on. Most of the rest of the 1,945 kanji usually have only one reading and are either used in a compound, or in a verb.

Simplifying Verbs: Too Childish?

I was teaching a fantastic student today and we started on the dreaded subject of verbs. Dreaded, because there's no way around them. Sooner or later -- and sooner is better -- we're gonna have to learn how verbs work in Japanese. Thankfully, it is not the chore it might be with some other languages, like English, French or German. It's actually remarkably regular and quite easy to get a grasp on ALL verbs and their conjugations once you have learned a small core.

But the idea came to me to present them as Lego blocks, so the mind could compartmentalize them into little modules that you can slot in and out of a given base to change the base's meaning. Japanese is ideal for this, because the verbs are so regular.

Thus, I present to you my first chart, no doubt the first of many to come, where you can build Japanese verbs like you build little Lego constructions.

The verb we're using today is "taberu," meaning "to eat."

Why Japanese is So Difficult

Want to know why everyone says Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn?

Well, for a start, you can blame the Chinese. It's the Chinese that make Japanese difficult. See, a long time ago, some Japanese samurai were sitting around drinking sake when one of them said "How do you spell 'Chrysanthemum?'"

Well, none of the other samurai had a clue, because they had no written language (the spelling bee had not yet come to Japan).

So instead of laboriously having to invent a written language from scratch, they just grabbed a Chinese hostage from a recent raid and told him to write "Chrysanthemum" in the sand outside the hut. They were so pleased with the result that they told him to write the entire Chinese alphabet down so they could copy it.

The Chinese guy was understandably unhappy with this, so instead of writing down an alphabet, he just took the spelling for "Chrysanthemum" and changed it around a little bit around 50,000 times, thus creating the Japanese written language as we know it today while covering the entire land surface of Iwate Prefecture with little pictogram squiggles.

It took the Japanese about 900 years to remember all these little pictograms, which they called "Kanji," but now we foreigners are expected to learn them all -- well, at least 2,000 of them -- in order to be able to read a typical manga book.

THAT is what Japanese is so difficult to learn. The spoken language is a cinch; the written language is a mess.

As you saw in a previous post, the Japanese DO have their own script, but for the most part, they like to rely on these pictograms to convey most stuff that needs to be written.

The problem is that unlike the Chinese, the Japanese have sometimes in excess of ten different ways to read a kanji, and some kanji can mean several completely different things at once, depending on what comes before or after them.

Take for example, the "hon" in "Nihon," which is the Japanese word for Japan. It looks like this: 本. It means, depending on the context, book; counter for long cylindrical things; main; origin; present; real, or true.

But wait, there's more: not content with having several different pronunciations, readings and meanings for each kanji, they decided to make them all look pretty similar to each other.

Take, for example, the kanji that look like this: 王

Here they are, in no particular order: 千牛壬玉主生宝狂枉住注柱注往. And they have not yet begun to fight; that's just the tip of the iceberg. I didn't go any further in my search for kanji that look like 王, but if I had, I would probably come up with at least 30 more that are confusingly similar-looking. And remember, each one can have several different readings, pronunciations, and meanings. So let's say that each has two different pronunciations and two different meanings. That's now five bits of information you need to know about one kanji. Multiply that by forty similar-looking kanji and you get 200 separate bits of information you need to know. And like I said, you need a minimum of 2,000 to get on with in daily life. In reality, when you count people's names as well, you probably need more like 6,000 kanji if you really want to master written Japanese.

Even the Chinese think Japanese is difficult.

So how do you spell "Chrysanthemum?"

Try "菊"

How Much Japanese is Enough?

rom the mix of students who have come to me wanting to learn Japanese, I've noticed, not surprisingly, that a fair amount -- perhaps 80% or so -- want to learn Japanese "to understand animé."

Well, one might say that that's like saying for a foreigner, "I want to learn English because I want to understand what they are saying on 'The Young and the Restless.'"

Huh? might be your first reaction. You want to learn a fairly difficult language for the sole purpose of being better equipped to watch cartoons?

But I don't put the students down for this. Not everyone wants to learn a language because they're determined to go spend years in that country. I myself did everything backwards: even though I knew at least a year ahead of time that I was going to Japan for an undetermined length of time -- saying to myself that it was going to be more than 3 months but probably less than a year -- my purpose for going to Japan was not to learn Japanese or understand the Japanese culture, which are understandably noble motivations, but rather that I was told that by opening my mouth I could earn $30/hr. I found this hard to believe at first, but didn't really question the concept too much. To hell with it, I said, let's go and see what happens!

So you might imagine that I immediately looked for some local Japanese courses (I was in Northern California, and there is no shortage of Japanese people who live there) so that I'd be able to "get by" in Japanese when I got there.

But what did I actually do? I said to myself, Hell, they've all been forced to study five years of English in school -- most of them will at least be able to carry on simple conversations in English. I think at this point I was confusing Japan with the Philippines, because I was in for a very rude shock.

But back to studying Japanese: I had a year to prepare, so what did I do? Well, I borowed some cassette tapes from a friend on Beginning Japanese and listened to them a few times.

What?! you say, staggering backwards in disbelief, You thought you could learn a language by listening to some cassette tapes?

Well, the short answer to that is "Yep."

The long answer to that is that I wasn't unduly worried. I have been lucky enough to have lived in foreign lands for long periods of time; in fact, when I went to Japan, I had spent more than a third of my life so far living in countries whose main language was not English (India, Senegal, Congo).

So even though I was taking a calculated risk, I decided just to hold my nose and jump in at the deep end and let exigencies demand their course. I figured, what was the worst that could happen? I would be forced to learn Japanese in a hurry. Was I afraid at facing such an awesome task? Not at all.

As it turned out, I was completely and ridiculously unprepared for living in a country where 99% of the population could not even carry on the simplest of conversations in English, where even "Where is the station?" would elicit major panic reactions in some of the good citizens, who would literally scurry away from me as if I was some large, biting insect.

So I slowly, painfully learned Japanese, and it was both slow and sometimes painful. At some point I will tell you how that happened, and how I ended up not staying for one year, as I'd originally thought, but five.

But to answer the question, how much Japanese do you need to know? To be able to "understand animé" it's not such a huge task. You won't actually have to interact with any Japanese people, so it will largely be a passive learning experience, and it will be based on an awful lot of listening recognition. That means watching the same thing over and over and having enough of a vocabulary to understand what is being said.

The sad thing is, though, that the Japanese spoken in animé films is not some form of simplified form of Japanese that is meant for small children, with a much-reduced vocabulary and thus much less work for you; on the contrary, I would argue that it is actually more difficult Japanese, in that they will be frequently be using slang, colloquiallisms and most of all, be talking really, really fast.

You will never be able to understand animé by studying from tapes or a book. You must have a teacher to tell you what you need to know and what you don't need to know. You need someone who can tell you, with all seriousness, that you can safely eliminate having to learn a quarter of what is actually involved in learning mainstream Japanese, namely, polite Japanese, which is almost never used in animé. But you wouldn't know that if you just went to some nameless conversation school or tried to study on your own.

And what about you, the other 20%, who actually intend to spend a significant amount of time in Japan, or are forced by circumstance to have to learn Japanese (one of my students is the father of a half Québecois son whose mother has taken him back to Japan permanently; the son, who is four, can no longer remember any French, so the father must learn Japanese in order to speak to his own son!)?

You must learn enough basic Japanese to conduct simple conversations, but what is far more important than grammar and verbs and vocabulary is knowing how the Japanese people think; this to me is the single most important aspect of learning Japanese with an aim to spend time in Japan. Understanding what is expected from you in your rôle as a foreigner is crucial and will give you an enormous leg up on a student who merely attends classes at the local YMCA.

And that is what I am here to teach you. I live by the maxim "Learn only enough to accomplish the tasks you wish to accomplish and don't waste a minute more in learning anything else." This is why an individually tailored approach to learning Japanese is absolutely necessary and this is what you will get from me: not a unisex evening outfit but a measured, fitted and bespoke suit that will be designed for you and you only.

Hiragana: A Primer

Here's an excellent video from the "BEGIN Japanology" NHK series people, on hiragana, that most elegant Japanese way of writing. It's a good place to start your studies!

The Argument: To Learn Via Written Japanese, Or Through the Roman Alphabet?

t's always a dilemma for me when teaching Japanese to decide just how much the student needs to learn in order to achieve his/her goals. I have stated several times that Japanese is one of the easiest languages to learn -- and I stand by that statement -- but in reality it's a little bit of a white lie.

The spoken language is fairly easy; I can point to many reasons for why this is so -- but what makes Japanese continue to appear in top-5 lists of "Languages Most Difficult to Learn" is the written system, which is a complete and total disaster.

Proof of this comes in the very fact that the Japanese government itself, through the centuries, has tried to make the written language easier with various proposals -- one of which was seriously considered: writing everything in the Roman alphabet! But these "improvements" have never taken hold and the best they seem to have been able to do is to reduce the number of kanji (Chinese characters) that are required for students to know in order to graduate high school.

But it's still a mess. The Japanese long ago appropriated Chinese characters for their written language, but also have two other forms of writing, called kana, that are uniquely Japanese.

The trouble begins when one starts mixing the three systems. It's where everything becomes insanely difficult.

The kanji themselves often have several ways of reading and sometimes up to ten different pronunciatons, so you can imagine that when you take the required 1,945 kanji but add all these readings and pronunciations, you end up with something like 10,000 separate bits of information that must be memorised -- well, this poses an insurmountable problem to anyone learning to read and write Japanese and is also a problem for the Japanese themselves!

I myself consciously gave up studying the writing system about two years in to my 5-year stay in Japan. I simply felt that the effort would be better directed elsewhere, in vocabulary and grammatical skills, for example. I had no reason whatsoever to be able to read a Japanese newspaper.

I'm very glad I did, but I have now started actively studying kanji again. When I was in Japan, there were no iPads, there was no Internet. Hence, I could only learn, cumbersomely, from books.

Now, I have about eight separate apps on my iPad alone dedicated just for kanji.

Also note that by the time I had given up, I had learned to recognize, if not write, up to 200 kanji and all the kanas.

Whether you are going to want to study Japanese in Japanese is totally up to you. It can be studied using the roman alphabet exclusively, but I highly discourage this approach. It will lead to many headaches later on. It is worth your while to at least learn the kana systems, and preferably, at least the 100 or so most commonly used kanji.

But it's your call.

What is the Kamakiri Method and Why Should I Be Learning Japanese From You?

 W  hy indeed.

The advantage I have in Montreal is that I speak English and French and am able to teach the culture of the Japanese. A native Japanese teacher will teach their language in a rather robotic fashion, as they will most likely try to teach you as they themselves have been taught English, with heavy emphasis on textbooks and prefabricated dialogues, along with much rote memorisation of vocabulary which may or may not be useful to you in your daily life in Japan.

In general, you will be unable to discuss Japanese culture frankly with them, as they will not consider this necessary to learning Japanese. This is a crucial error; it would be like learning to cook without being told how the various chemical and thermal processes of cooking come together to produce tastes and texture.

Thus, in my teaching of Japanese, I spend a large amount of time discussing "why" certain things about the language are how they are, with a heavy emphasis on looking into the mind of the Japanese as they themselves interact with each other, in addition to how they interact with foreigners.

This will give you insights into the "behind the scenes" of the Japanese language which will spare you the agonizing process of trial and error -- mostly error -- which most beginning learners of Japanese will undergo as they begin to interact with actual Japanese people.

The journey through the process of speaking Japanese is heavily sprinkled with minefields which most textbooks will not warn you about. I will teach you about where to look for these minefields and how to avoid them, in the process gently guiding you away from the textbook-style speech most foreigners will take away from traditional language curricula.

To be brutally frank, the only way to know the Japanese and the way they think is to live, eat, sleep, and interact with them for many years on their home turf. This level of knowledge cannot be learned from the Internet or an intensive course or immersion classes.

However, most of us either do not have the time nor the money to spend several years in Japan in order to learn Japanese; that is what I am here for: to prepare you with a basic framework upon which you can rely when you do get to Japan; so you can hold essential conversations with an average Japanese person and be able to understand what is being said back to you.

The Japanese are a fascinating people, but they simply do not think like we do in almost every fashion. What I will teach you will come from the book that no one has written: the "Unwritten Rule Handbook." You can view this as kind of a "manual" on the Japanese that is generally not shared with foreigners; codes of behaviour that go unspoken about, body language and behaviour that can tell you what is really being said instead of what you think is being said. These societal rules and behaviours are not taught in textbooks yet are crucial to the speaker of Japanese who knows the rules of the game instead of blundering about missing cues and hidden meanings that are especially common to the Japanese culture.

Finally, learning Japanese should be fun; it should never be a chore. As a student, you must put in many hours of study on your own; as a teacher I have no magic pills which will enable you to memorize 600 verbs and their conjugations. However, I can point out which ones you will need more and which ones you can safely skip, thus saving you large amounts of time spent trying to learn everything, when only 15% of everything is necessary in order to communicate.

And by continual digressions on cultural aspects and other fun facts about the Japanese, you will accumulate a wealth of knowledge that you will never get from a website or a textbook.

Add to this a tailored approach to your particular needs instead of a one-size-fits-all teaching style, and you should be ready for your first real encounter with the Japanese in as little as three months.

So then, welcome to the Kamakiri-style of Japanese learning. Hold on to your notebook and get ready for a great ride.