“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources”

– Eldon

Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK!

白卜庭議長: 要派Jedi{絕地}去救Jabba{賈霸}個仔
baak buk ting yi jeung: yiu paai Jedi {jyut dei} heui gau Jabba {ga ba} go jai
[We] need to send Jedi Knights to rescue Jabba’s son

魅使·雲度: 嗯 其實我真係 好唔想同呢個壞蛋打交道
mei si wan dou: ng kei sat ngo jan hai hou m seung tung ni go waai daan da gaau dou
Hmmm…I’d really rather not deal with that ruffian.

• Audio

Note: I’ve never seen Star Wars: Clone Wars in English, so…I don’t know what the original lines were. These are my re-translation back into English from Cantonese.

Note from Dear Leader Khatzumoto: The following post is by Momoko, and not me. Momoko likes to use language that we don’t approve of here at AJATT. It’s like she’s doing that teenage rebellion thing, but like 15 years too late…way to be on time, champ. Um…I actually tried bowdlerizing her text, but then…yeah, anyway…

This is the fourth (extremely late) installment in a new (ideally) weekly series by Momoko, 「お巫山戯（ふざけ）、日本語で」, or “F***ing around in Japanese”.

お待たせ（またせ）！So sorry to keep you waiting for this week’s お巫山戯. The Khatz and I attended two big wedding parties last week, and, being the grungy T-shirts-lounge-pants-and-sneaker-wearing geeks that we are, it took a LOT of effort and focus and positive pep talks (and bribes from our friends) to get us off our lazy a**es and into formal attire. Anything formal…is like Kryptonite to us…but we did it…and it was actually incredibly fun, and we’re extremely lucky to have such awesome, patient friends. But, like I said, it took a bit of time and energy so that is why this is so late this week.

I’ve decided to take a short break from my recent obsession with potty training (I’m guessing you’d probably like to give your gag reflex a rest) and turn to something much more…pretty…and sparkling and cozy like pink hearts and glitter and fluffy bunnies!! So this week we’re going to take out our frilly Lolita umbrellas and frolic around in the magical Hello-Kitty-esque land of…

✭⋱⋆ღ♥ஐカワイイ!!!ஐ♥ღ⋆⋰ ✭

Just what exactly is 可愛い（かわいい）? Let me introduce you to some experts on the subject…

Kittens!

This little kitten （子猫／こねこ） is 可愛い…

So is this extremely sleepy （眠い／ねむい） one:

And this kitten is SUPER kawaii (超可愛い／ちょうかわいい):

Awww, ain’t that precious. 可愛くない（かわいくない）！？ There’s only one thing more 可愛い than kittens…

School Girls!

Q: What do you get when you cross 可愛い with 女子高生（じょしこうせい） — those world-renowned Japanese high school girls in ultra-short-skirted (they really are, even in the winter…I’m totally in awe…no idea how they do it) uniforms?
A: 萌え（もえ）！！

And right now nothing is as 可愛い or 女子高生 or 萌え as the manga/anime series らき☆すた (“Lucky ☆ Star” — Yes, that is an actual star symbol in the middle. Get used to it! We’re not in Kansas anymore…)

Now, I’m warning you. The intro song, もってけ！セーラーふく (Work that sailor uniform!), is like 可愛い ON STEROIDS. Brace yourself, okay? Here’s the full/extended version, complete with Japanese lyrics (thank you tanigutanigu!):

(You can find copy-and-pasteable lyrics for the whole song here.)

I know, I know, I was a bit shell-shocked when I heard that song for the first time, too.

If you want a closer look at what hit you back there, here are the opening lyrics in all their stupefying glory. For the (rough) translation, I relied on the extremely helpful line-by-line explanation provided by a knowledgeable fan here (助かりました、パトリシア＝マーティンさん！）, the English subtitles from the video clip we’ll get to in just a minute (thanks gleipnir2!), and Khatz’s suggestions (ありがとう、ダーリン！　(^з^)-☆):

It’s like peering into the jaws of madness, no?

Guess what? Most Japanese people feel completely lost, too. Here is just a sampling of the online comments I came across when I was sweating blood trying to understand and translate the lyrics:

深く（ふかく）考えちゃ（かんがえちゃ）いけない歌詞（かし）だ
These are lyrics you just can’t think too hard about.

深く考えないで　まいっか（＝まあいいか）
Don’t think too hard about it. F*** it.

ぅん!!考えちゃだめだこの歌（うた）は!!聞く（きく）に限る（かぎる）！！
Yeah!! You better not think about this song!! Just listen to it!!

And of course, the predictable

萌えーーーーー

from a smitten geek.

I even stumbled upon this hilarious mock-conspiracy-theory “exposé” that reveals how the mysterious lyrics encode information about the coming annihilation of humanity （人類滅亡／じん・るい・めつ・ぼう） in World War III （第三次世界大戦／だい・さん・じ・せ・かい・たい・せん）! (It’s even illustrated like a manga with awesome ASCII art. If you need one reason to learn Japanese, this is it…)

Why is it so hard for even Japanese people to understand the lyrics? Because under the breezy surface of this cute little song lies a Pandora’s box chock-full of school girl slang, clever word play and sexual innuendo. Linguistically speaking, this is some dope shi**.

So let us take the advice of our Japanese betters. Just roll with it. (Or invent your own conspiracy theory.) Do NOT try to make it make sense. Just listen. Sing along. To preserve your sanity.

Now let’s skip past that really fast part to the chorus…

Wow. It doesn’t get much more 可愛い than “キャ？　ワ！　イイv” (“v” = the “v”-shaped peace/victory sign you make with your fingers…I think).

And, finally, here for your viewing entertainment and CULTURAL EDIFICATION is the first episode. In the main scene (starting at about 2 minutes into the clip), three of the four main characters — こなた （「こなちゃん」, the tomboyish one with blue hair), つかさ (the purple-haired one with a bow in her hair; her twin sister, かがみ, has pig tails), and みゆき (the overly polite, pink-haired one with glasses) — fret over the best ways to eat various pastries: a chocolate-filled cornet （チョココロネ／チョココルネ）; a cream puff （シュークリーム）; a piece of strawberry shortcake （イチゴショート）; a popsicle （アイス）; and a (soft-serve) ice cream cone （ソフトクリーム）. Enjoy:

(Is it just me, or is there something…a bit “Freudian”…about this scene? But, hey, it could just be me… I mean, what IS the best way to suck out the creamy contents of various phallic-shaped desserts? These are important philosophical questions!!)

The central question here, as posed by こなた, is which side you should eat the chocolate cornet from:

こなた：　ね、つかさ、チョココロネってどこから食べる（たべる）？

つかさ postulates that you start from the “head”:

つかさ：　頭（あたま）からかな。

こなた：　そうっか。

Okay… So the next logical question would be, which end is the head: the fat one or the thin one?

こなた：　ところでさ、頭ってどっち、太い（ふとい）方（ほう）と細い（ほそい）方（ほう）？

つかさ opts for the thin end:

つかさ：　私（わたし）はこっちの細い方が頭だと思う（おもう）んだけど。

This suprises こなた, who has always thought the fat end was the “head”:

こなた：　あっそうか。あたしは太った（ふとった）方（ほう）が頭だと思った（おもった）よ。

When こなた asks つかさ why she takes the former position,

こなた： でも何（なん）で細い方が頭？

つかさ argues that the chocolate cornet looks like a seashell:

つかさ：　だって貝（かい）みたいじゃない？

And when つかさ turns the question back on こなた,

つかさ： こなちゃんは何で太った方？

こなた offers the counter-argument that the cornet looks like a caterpillar (literally, “potato bug”),

こなた：　だってさ、芋虫（いもむし）みたいじゃん。

grossing out つかさ:

つかさ：　えっ！芋虫！？

Upon which こなた agrees that the seashell model is much more appetizing:

こなた：　まあ、でもそう考える（かんがえる）と貝の方（ほう）がイメージいいね。

This model turns out to be more elegant in theory than in practice, however. When Konata bites the thin end, the chocolate filling squeezes out of the fat end, and she has to keep turning it around to lick the extra chocolate before it falls out.

At which point, the perfectionist Miyuki has to intervene…

みゆき：　あ、あの・・・
こなた：　ん？

She offers a third, compelling (if perhaps complicated) solution to the problem:

みゆき：　細い方が千切って（ちぎって）、余った（あまった）チョコを付けて(つけて）食べるという食べ方（たべかた）も・・・

You can also break off the thin end and dip it in the extra chocolate (from the fat end)…

つかさ：　なるほどね！

Eureka! Seems to make sense.

But after a detour into how to eat curry rice （カレーライス）, what condiments to use on what dishes, and different ways of eating egg and meat dishes, Konata realizes

こなた：　あっ。ところで、太い方と細い方、どっちがチョココロネの頭？

she still isn’t sure which end of the cornet is the “head”…

So, comrades, let me turn this dilemma over to you: what do YOU think the best way to eat a chocolate cornet is? And which end is the “head”?

Next up, the only thing more 可愛い than school girls is:

School Boys!

(to be continued next week…)

The other day, a handsome young AJATTeer (and South Park fan) named MGV sent me this handsome email:

On your site, which is awesome, you mention that you should spend 18-24 hours a day doing something/anything in Japanese. I’m in high school, grade 10. I have school Monday-Friday. I worked it out on a piece of paper, and the most time I can spend listening to Japanese is about 10 hours, and I was a little generous.

Anyways, I was hoping you might have some suggestions on how to listen to more Japanese each day. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’m wondering how often you had college classes. In other words, how did you find the time to “get used” to Japanese.

It’s not just with listening, at most I can review about 5-15 kanji a day. At that rate it will take ages get through the kanji phase.

Life is very busy, and school is just terrible for Japanese, since everything is in English (the E word!) and it’s loud and hard to have your headphones on in, and also, the worst, school issues hours of homework!

Sorry to ramble, you may have heard it all before. It just seems like learning to understand this language is gonna take a lot longer than it has to.

If you have any suggestions, please please please write them to me or post them in some immersion article or something.

Khatzumoto’s one-line answer:

Just focus on the time you do control, rather than on what you don’t.

The government and your legal guardians practically force you to be in school, but no one’s forcing you to watch English TV in your free time, and no one else but you controls the contents of your iPod, and no one’s got a gun to your head telling you to read English websites.

Control what you can control. No one reasonably expects any more of you. Do all you can when you can. And you’ll be surprised by how much you do progress and do get done.

Limits are not always a disadvantage. What seems like friction can actually be traction — just as professional runners use spiked shoes that actually get stuck into the ground (which would seem to suck) to give them more power to push off. In fact, people with all the time in the world can be very unproductive, unless they start to give themselves some self-made traction.

All your friction can be traction. All your friction can be a gift — a brand new pair of shoes . Limits are your friend.

Think of Japanese less as something to “get through” and more as something to “be”. Japanese is just who you are. As long as you’re doing even the smallest thing in Japanese, there’s nowhere you need to be other than where you are. The thing with AJATT is that you’re not directly forcing growth, you’re just ensuring good “nutrition”, knowing that growth will naturally take care of itself.

One inch counts. One kanji counts. One minute counts. Try holding your breath for one or two minutes (ok, don’t), and you’ll quickly see that it is a very long time.

P.S. When I was kanjiing hard core, I found my daily upper limit was 25 new characters per day (plus about 100 reviews), no matter how much time I had.

P.P.S. SRSing your school subject material could help you save time. The key is to make sure the format of your SRS cards is as good as possible a  reflection of your exam style.

P.P.P.S. Anyone with any suggestions — especially people who’ve faced and solved a similar problem — please feel free to share your advice.

Like I’ve said before…the set of tools/methods described on this site…I don’t know why it all works; looking at and thinking about how people learn their native language, it just all seemed obvious to me. In other words, I knew what I needed to do to achieve fluency…but not much more.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio – keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (“Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19. Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon. But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane. In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle – you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet – feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized – movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

Creating a language immersion environment is almost inevitably going to require the use of headphones. In this post, I’d like to share with you the headphones that have pleasured my ears with Japanese and Chinese sounds, and invite you to share your own recommendations, advice and experiences.

To start, I was faithfully served by a pair of Sony MDR-G42 behind-the-head headphones for almost the entire duration of the hardcore phase of my Japanese.

After that, for a year and change I used a pair of Sony MDR-NC22 noise-cancelling earphones, the first earphones that had ever fit my ears — I often forgot I was wearing them! They’re pricier, and I only justified buying them because it was for “educational” reasons. They were great back when I was using trains a lot — you know how loud that can get.

Currently I use speakers quite a bit at home (since my living arrangements allow it), supplemented by some Pioneer SE-MJ5 headphones.

On the road, I use a pair of Phillips SHE-9500 earphones. Good sound, nice small size…The cable’s kinda short though, so I often need to use the extension they came with. One thing that’s really amazing about these headphones is that you can actually sleep in them comfortably, despite the fact that they’re not marketed for that as such. Plus they don’t look as ridiculous as the actual “sleep headphones” that are on the market right now. When I’m sleeping, I want to know that I look good.
[Update 2008/12/4: It turns out these were making my ears itch...earphones and I just don't seem to get on -- so I went back to basics, to neckband-style headphones: Philips SHS8200]

Headphones are a peculiar product. For one thing, above about $15-20, there seems to be virtually no correlation between quality and price; my less-than-$40 Pioneers (SE-MJ5) destroyed all the $100-$300+ pairs around it at the store I went to — so you can’t just spend a lot and be guaranteed a good unit. Nor is there always a strong correlation between make and quality. While all my headphone choices so far have skewed to industry leaders, all the industry leaders produce both gold and duds [I don't mean go get a no-name brand: those will almost certainly suck. I mean that you still need to find a good pair within a good brand. It seems like brand definitely matters in headphones, but by itself it only offers the possibility of quality, not a guarantee]. Moreover, headphones need to be equal parts good-sounding and comfortable; neither condition takes precedence over the other. Speaking of sound, if you listen to hip-hop, make sure your headphones have a good frequency range, especially at the low end (they should at least be able to go down to 8Hz [or, as close to single digits as possible] if not lower).

So, the best advice I can give you is not a single product recommendation; it is this: TRY ‘em. And if the shop won’t let you try them, make sure they accept returns in the event of suckage. Try the headphones. Bring your player and play the things you listen to. Real, live experimentation is the only way to really guarantee getting something that’s worth it. Given the amount of time you’re going to be listening to audio to produce an immersion environment, the trip to the store or wherever will be worth it.

All the headphones I’ve mentioned do start to hurt eventually, but only after several hours of use. So, yeah, rich sound (to me, at least…I’m not an audio buff) and comfortable wearing. Anyway, what matters most is you and the shape of your head/ears; I think I must have weird ears, since most headphones simply don’t fit me. Or maybe headphones are a metaphor for life and how we need to take control if we want to be happy.

Whatever.

The floor is open to your comments and suggestions .

I saw this page from How To Learn Any Language a while ago (it might be that someone put it in comments) but neglected to link to it despite how cool it is: a headshot jackpot mother lode of Japanese audio materials with transcripts. They range from children’s books to some more, what’s the word, anyway, there’s a lot of range. What’s exciting to me about this is that it has links to all those European fairy tales you and I grew up with (yay!). I’ve been listening to Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes this morning. Anyway, give it try. AFAIK, it’s all free! Freeee!