An Engineer's Guide to Japanese

[tongodeon]

I've been having a hard time keeping up in Japanese class and I think I know why.

I'm an engineer (more or less). When I'm trying to solve a problem I try to make a solution that will work in all cases, not just the common case. "What if this software gets used on a really high-latency connection? What if it's being used by someone who's trying to

Comments

[rwx]

IMHO, english has many of these same corner cases as modern japanese, we just don't describe them as formally and call them manners and not grammar.

[tongodeon]

The only time-of-day stuff I saw in my quick smattering of conversational Japanese is not far from the greetings 'good morning', 'good afternoon', 'good evening'.

We're learning from Basic Functional Japanese. This isn't the "conversational Japanese" course, this is the first unit of the course that prepares you for the JLPT, so maybe we learned different things.

I'm specifically referring to page 14, "Expressions: leave taking", which identifies three distinct levels of formality that we covered last week. That's a separate issue from what we covered *this* week, which is about how pronouns like "brother" or "sister" change depending on whether you're talking about your own family or someone else's family.

Heck, even English used to have different formality for pronouns used when addressing someone (thee/thou), and while there aren't direct analogies for most Japanese honorifics, it's not that far removed from how we add formal titles for some people (particularly "doctor", but even "professor", or "sir" on certain "class"

[zestyping]

I'm very curious about your reaction to studying Japanese, because it's so different from my experience. When I took classes, Japanese seemed like one of the most refreshingly regular languages around: consistent phonemes, no tones, no declension, no subject-verb conjugation, no plurals, no gender (OMG what a pointless waste of quadrillions of human neurons), only 3 irregular verbs in the entire language.

Have you studied, or do you speak, any other languages besides Japanese and English?

[tongodeon]

French and Spanish.

[erikred]

がんばれ！

Or, as the JPLT prep material will almost certainly insist:

がんばってください、ソースさん。

When it comes to Western names in Japanese, the hardest part is figuring out how a native Japanese speaker would transcribe it. FREX, Douglas Robb's Japanese Wikipedia page lists him as ダグラス・ロブ.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ダグラス・ロブ

[seraphene]

I've been told that it's perfectly acceptable to put the first name first, & that if you do so, you use the dot to separate first & last name. If you put last name first, then it's just a space.

Therefore, I'm either
リトル　サリー
or
サリー・リトル

[erikred]

Sure. My Alien Registration Card, for example, read ニールセン エリック, but name cards at conventions or panels often had エリック・ニールセン. Mind you, all of my students (and my fellow teachers) called me エリック先生. Well, apart from the ようちえんせい, of course. They thought my name was 英語の先生.

Apropos of nothing in particular, my French teacher in Okinawa was named George Littoral. At the Okinawan DMV, they simply called him George.

[sseaman]

I spent four years in college learning Japanese the conversational way and now I'm learning Korean in more of a sentence structure methodology and I can tell you that you are going about it the right way. Learning sentence structure and rules first makes it much easier to 'stumble' through the language when you don't know a certain word that you are trying to say.

I can also state that Korean is almost as bad as Japanese in terms of class and respect modifiers but understanding how to form the sentences makes it much easier. The person listening can at least get the idea of what I might be trying to say. With the conversational approach I found I could say what I was taught very easily but forming my own sentences was more difficult because I wasn't sure how to properly form them unless I could reference some conversation I had already had.

Good luck!

Totally unrelated...

[jsbowden]

Nice icon. I have a dashboard just like that

Re: Totally unrelated...

[sseaman]

Thanks! It's a pic I took when sitting in my old bmw 330CIC.

Re: Totally unrelated...

[jsbowden]

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/8xRu-Ryu12-CHzIClxBfXQ?feat=directlink

Funny that.

[steeltoe]

I think the problem is that you aren't a child, and aren't excused or laughingly corrected. Your mistakes aren't cute, and you don't get to ask the same questions. What makes you a good engineer is not being a kid, and what makes you a bad kid is that you look like an adult. People (erroneously, I suppose) expect more.

That said, do you get a pass in Japan being a gaijin?

[tongodeon]

You totally get a pass in Japan for being a gaijin because your mistakes are cute. Try this one, sometime.

When you're at a restaurant and you're done with your meal you ought to say "Sumimasen, okanjo onegaishimasu." Instead, if you say "Sumimasen, kancho onegaishimasu." you're really asking "Excuse me, could you please stab me in the ass with your fingers?"

The reaction is usually either laughter or head-clutching "no no no no no not like that!!"

[mister_borogove]

Your mistake here seems to have been visiting a place that has a specific word for "stab in the ass with fingers".

(Mostly joking.)

[itsacountry]

The reason you get a pass is because of the shock, initially, then respect for the effort. At least in my experience.