Recently over on the le das Twitter, the great @papajohn and I have been having a ball using Chinglish with each other.

Below are some samples of our exchanges. John’s messages contained classified information, so I shan’t reproduce them here. Oh, I didn’t tell you? Yeah, we’re totally spies, dude. What, you didn’t think it was a little weird how invested we were in this whole language deal?

Aaah, screw it. I’ll reproduce the parts of papajohn’s communication that have no operational significance. Observe that John and I have generally used one language’s syntax with the other’s vocabulary, but we have stretches of full-on Chinese. We also switch across Mandarin and Cantonese, but that’s another story.

John’s Mandarin isn’t actually “transitional” — AFAIK, he’s a Mandarin princeling — but mine more or less is. Furthermore, we’re both native speakers of English _{[...oh wait, I forgot -- apparently, according to some people, I'm not ]} so…we have English thoughts _{[That doesn't sound dodgy...no siree]}, but we also have Chinese thoughts, having been raised Chinese since the age of twentysomething . A lot of, at least, my motivation, is to communicate directly to the heart and not just the head, so this sometimes becomes a factor in choosing which language gets to be the substrate or lexifier at any given time.

Too many smilies.

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@papajohn
I think I’m too 文字 focused. Worked great for 普通話, but I think treating 粵語 like some kind of 部落方言 would work better.

@ajatt (that’s me)
No ur absolutely 啱呀 雖然有文字 但係亦都有一個好大嘅部落方言/不立文字嘅element
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@ajatt
Glad you enjoyed the link. It’s hard to tell how 有用 a link is to other people! I’m prone to 想ing that everyone but me 已經 知道ed about it
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@papajohn
Amazon.cn hey? I’m a Dangdang man myself. Does this mean you’re riding the 簡體 train?

@ajatt
哈哈 梗唔係啦！只不過係因爲台灣嗰邊 除咗動畫之外 都冇歐美電影嘅國語配音版DVD可以買。 咁所以冇辧法囉～。仲有Amazon.cn好平添。大陸萬歲！呵呵

@papajohn
哦，明白了。大陸的配音是不是跟臺灣的有所不同？我一直覺得臺灣的配音很柔軟、可愛似的。大陸配音北方人多：）
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John and I started doing this to save space on Twitter, because Chinese characters can communicate more information in less space. In 140 kanji, you don’t even have to be pithy; yous can writes yourself a whole mini-essay!

I wonder whether such a mixed approach to output (and maybe even input?) might not be a great way to ease into 使うing your target 言語anguage(?)

In the past, it would appear that a lot of 教育ducation systems around the 世界orld have favoured a cold-turkey approach to second-language/basilectal/dialectal learners of a target language. Barring cases of forcible acculturation, the intent behind this was good — the system designers didn’t want to further encourage or create dialects/pidgins/creoles, so they went straight for the goal.

However, I did recently read about some mixed-usage graded readers for children who are native speakers of the Ebonics dialect of English. If I recall correctly, the readers are initially mostly in Ebonics, and gradually introduce more and more acrolectal [is that even the right word?]/Standard English usage until they are written completely in Standard English. Apparently, they were really successful in getting kids reading acrolectal English with ease and fluency. _{[As it turns out, according to some linguists, Ebonics is not mere slang; it's actually an entirely self-contained logical-syntactical system, with a relationship to Standard English akin to that of Schwizerdütsch to Hochdeutsch].}

And that just seems to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, mixing is, of course, “impure”, heterogeneous, asymmetrical. And that kind of thing doesn’t appeal to the little zealot inside all of us, that binary part of us that wants everything just so. But at the same time, there’s just something very natural and organic and logical and workable-seeming about the whole idea.

Human beings, more often than not, need to be eased into things, I think. Put another way, there’s far less likely to be a rebound — much like an organ transplant rejection — if the transition is gradual rather than sudden. Accomodating this apparently natural tendency can seem like a sort of half-buttocked mishmash compromise (and it can end that way if the transition window stops moving), but ironically enough it can also lead to rain on wedding days, free rides when you’ve already paid, and true, permanent behavior change in a way that coercion often does not. Coercion produces resistance. Well-executed gradual change can bypass this resistance completely.

Frog in hot water. Frog in water that gradually gets hotter.

This gradualism thing, we are seeing, is true of children, and I think it may be even more true of adults. Not because adults are less malleable or resilient than kids or any other ageist crap like that, but because adults have the power to resist and escape. I’ve seen this with training my two cats, who are of different ages: it’s not actually “easier” to train kittens — they have short attention spans and less background knowledge — but kittens aren’t as strong as adult cats, so you can…you know…literally put them right where you want them. With adult cats, on the other hand, you kind of have to coax and negotiate and reason, otherwise you will get the scratch, motherlover.

Babies can’t turn off their immersion environment. Babies can’t build their own gaijin bubbles.

So, kids, 次回ext time you’re at a loss for 詞words…try mixing 言語anguages. Of course, you want to get to the stage where you use or can use just the one. But for now, treat it as a phase you’re going through.

To tell you the truth, I’ve already done this mixing before, but in analog form — when I was in college, I would take coursework notes in a hybrid kanji-katakana-Latin [in order of priority/abundance] shorthand, making and using words very loosely in a highly personalized, idiosyncratic sort of way; I’d often make up original kanji compounds on the spot.

When you think about it, until your vocabulary matures and fills out, you’re already a de facto “transitional user” of your target language. The only question is: do you now recognize and exploit this fact, or do you suppress it out of fear of the risk involved? As it is, with conventional methods, many people give up learning their target language and thus remain “transitional” for life anyhow. But acknowledging this “middle passage” through language-mixing may have the paradoxical effect of carrying more people through to full fluency than a strict language separation.

Anyway, food for thought. Anyone with information to share, go ahead and 發言launch words! Oh yeah — sorry for being autological; I know that annoys some people. Or maybe it’s my inner purist that’s annoyed. Yeah, it’s probably just me. Oh well…

Recently, I met this one girl. She’s really cute. And she knows Japanese. Fluently. Native-level fluently. After only studying it four years. She talks circles around people who studied it for four years in college.

Why is this girl so good at Japanese?

Because she spent 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a years studying Japanese. She has spent 40,000 hours listening to Japanese. Her name is Didi.

The people who went to college spent 5 class hours a week, plus perhaps 1-2 hours out of class per hour in class, for 52 weeks a year. That comes to 2000-4000 hours a year, being generous. This is an order of magnitude less than Didi.

Didi is just shy of four and a half years old.

Don’t ever talk to me about how kids are magical until you spend 40,000 hours listening to your target language.

Don’t ever talk to me about how you’ve spent 4 years studying Japanese when really you’ve only spent 3-6 months, counting by hours.

Don’t ever blame on something as nebulous and BS-ological as talent, what can much more easily be explained mathematics.

Put in your hours. And you will be rewarded. It’s that simple. It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in.

For the record, I have logged about 20,000 hours of listening since June 2004. And my vocab is easily far larger than Didi’s (sorry, Didi! you’re still my friend!). So chalk another one up for adult learners.

Adults can do it. You can do it. Japanese — any language. But you need to step up to the plate; you need to show up; you need to not have the temerity to think that 1000 classroom hours and some homework is an acceptable level of effort. Because it isn’t. Come back with 5 figures, and then we can talk, literally .

Steve Kaufmann does a much better job explaining it than I have. If, as he says (and I think he is absolutely right) most vocabulary is learned incidentally rather than deliberately, then it is crucial that we give the vocabulary lots of chances — lots of “incidents”, lots of hours of input — to hit us, and thereby be learned.

This is not fluff. This is not theory. This is cold, hard, listen to effen Japanese in 5-figure+ quantities if you want to get good at it. That’s all you have to do. But you do have to do it. As Jim Rohn suggests, success is easy; the things that you need to do to succeed are easy. But the reason so many fail is because: “The things that are easy to do are also easy not to do”.

Language is easy. There may or may not be difficult problems in life, but language is not one of them; get it out of your head that it is.

Now get listening!

This is another comment that grew so long as to deserve its own article. First, the original question:

See, everyone is so discouraging when you learn a new language and say you’ll always ’sound like a foreigner’ and this is a bit depressing. I realize that certain speech patterns are set and all that but what would be your advice and aquiring an authentic accent (Japanese or any other language)?

And my response:

ACT. Pretend you ARE from that country. Pretend you’re that Jared kid from The Pretender, and that your life depends on you convincing people that you were born and raised in whatever country has native speakers of your language. Pick specific people (often, actors) to imitate and copy their mannerisms, look at the way their mouths are shaped, their hand gestures, the facial muscles they use. Be like a comedian doing impressions.

You stop being foreign when you stop believing you are foreign, at least in terms of the language. Hold yourself to the same standard as a native speaker — if someone had to talk to you on the phone, they shouldn’t be able to tell. Never fall for the excuse of “oh, it’s not my native language”. You needn’t be harsh on yourself, just always be looking for ways to improve.

I had a Japanese friend who self-taught English, and when I first met her I thought she was Japanese-American: it was that flawless. She told me she’d watched a lot of TV and movies, and had changed the way she acted and used her facial muscles and shaped her mouth when making sounds.

So, input and imitation. Input, because you have to hear a lot of examples not just of certain words, but certain COMBINATIONS or strings of words. Words change a bit when people shout, intonation changes based on emotion.

Also, pauses. Use the same pauses and bridges as native speakers. So, no “um” because “um” is English, find the equivalents of “um” and “uhhhuhhh” in the languages you are learning.

What else…YES! I call it “doping“. In semiconductor production, doping is the process of deliberately introducing impurities into an extremely pure material in order to obtain better/desired performance properties. In learning a language, doping is the process of almost “dumbing-down” or de-streamlining your spoken language by introducing inefficient elements that have function but no meaning, and serve to make it more natural and native-like. You see, foreigners, tend to learn from texts and textbooks. And text is much, much more efficient (“pure”) than speaking. In text you get straight to the point:
A) “This is an example”. [4 words, 0 long pauses]

But in speech, you amble zig zigzag-zag toward your point:
B) “Well, um, this is, like, an example or whatever…kind of, I dunno”. [13 words, 1 long pause]

Native speakers are wasteful and inefficient. This is why the Borg in Star Trek despise human communication. In my experience, native speakers use perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of words they “need”, and all that extra baggage has no lexical meaning. “Um” does not mean anything. “Like” does not really mean anything. It’s all just filler.

Make your speech more native-like by making it more wasteful — I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. If you speak too plainly, without any flavor, you come out sounding robotic or just foreign (often both). Also, the wasteful pauses can help buy you time when you need to remember a specific word — you do this in your native language, too — you don’t remember a specific word or phrase, so you keep stringing words or phrases that are close to it in meaning and until you hit the jackpot. Examples:

A) “Is it like a wiki or a blog, or, like a CMS or something?”.
B) “I’ve never, like really had Japanese food, Or, I guess, been to a Japanese restaurant or whatever, at least on my own. I mean, I can, like, read the menu, but, um, you know, what’s actually inside it — the stuff, you know, the food, the tendon or whatever…Is what I want to know?”.

Not very good examples, but I think you get the point.

Finally, you want to swallow the words that native speakers swallow. For example, in Japanese, there is a word:　雰囲気. Technically, it should be pronounced “fun-i-ki”, but native speakers swallow it and say “fuinki”; I say it the garbled, native way.

Oh, one more thing: pick an accent. The easiest to pick is the standard accent since it tends to have the most materials produced in it. Either way, pick a focus: pretend the people who speak that dialect are your parents and classmates — functionally, they are.

Finally (for real), try recording yourself now and then. It can reveal where you need work. For more, try out these articles:

• Language is Acting
• How To Pronounce Japanese

As many of you know, it’s one’s duty as a geek to love Neon Genesis Evangelion. Recently, I was rewatching the show, and then reading about in on Wikipedia. Anyway, there’s a link there to the text of a 2004-ish TV interview with the creator/director, ANNO Hideaki (庵野秀明[あん-の-ひで-あき]). It’s a good example of very natural, semi-formal spoken Japanese.

In my time in Japan, I’ve found that when you first meet someone, it’s normal to start out very formal and distant, but as you get to know them better (even within the course of a single conversation), there’s this natural relaxation of the stiffness; of course, unless you’re the same age and rank, the tone remains polite — you’re not likely to be dissing each other’s mommas — but you’re certainly not talking to them as if they were Emperor Palpatine, either. In a sense, that’s exactly how it is in much of the rest of the world, too. Anyway, it’s that typical semi-formal tone that you’ll find in the interview.

“Oh, maybe you can speak conversational Japanese, but the news, that’s impossibe, man. The news is so hard. You’ll never understand the news. Even Japanese people don’t understand the news, man”.

I’m allergic to BS, so that type of thing is really hard for me to hear. And even harder to type out. Time for more myth-busting. You can watch and understand the news in Japanese. I’ve been doing it since 2005, and my intelligence is famously questionable.

Don’t believe the hype. There’s nothing especially complex about the news. How could a type of program that uses a fixed set of phrases, and (due to the nature of news) repeats itself for weeks at a time…be difficult? How can a form of television invented to inform a non-expert audience be difficult? If anything, news is very much a lowest common denominator of television.

As with most so-called “difficult” things, there is no magic to watching the news. You just have to get used to it. And the way you do that is by watching a lot of it. I mean a LOT. A. LOT. There was a time when I watched and listened to the news exclusively on a close to 24-hour basis (yes, when sleeping as well). I would even watch a news broadcast, record the audio from it, and replay it for days at a time. Watching, watching, watching. Listening. Listening. Listening.

The news source I used for that was the Fuji News Network (FNN). Then and now, they offer a 30-minute news digest that updates once a day. The news streams in clips of about 90 seconds. Each clip has an accompanying text section on the FNN site, often this text is an exact transcript of the words spoken by the newscaster. Even when it isn’t, it’s very close.

I would loop the FNN webcast all day. It only updates once a day, so that means a lot of repetition for you. But not in a boring way — each time the news repeats, you will catch something you may have missed the last time. Pretty soon, you’ll start to pick up the set phrases (“逮捕されたのは・・・”、”警察は事故の原因を調べています”) and the keywords (“北朝鮮”, “拉致問題”) and such.

Eventually, you’ll understand the entire broadcast. It will take a while (weeks and months), but you’ll learn a lot and you’ll feel yourself learning a lot along the way. In the end, news will cease to be a challenge for you. After that, you can either continue being a news junkie, or become a jaded news refusenik like me .

Either way, the vocabulary you learned from watching news will remain with you through your SRS. And since TV news and newspapers are related, I imagine your TV news proficiency will help you read the papers as well.

Finally, you’ll learn about more formal words and styles of Japanese speech, for example, that people when speaking formally, use filler words like “まあ” rather than “さあ”, and “ですね” rather than just “ね”, and tend to end their sentences in “・・・と、いう風に思います”. All these things that born native speakers take for granted, you the self-made native speaker can learn just like they did — through intense observation, followed by imitation.

FNN was the main news source I used; while I was using it, Yomiuri News Podcasts came into being. They offer news in both audio and video formats; which may save you having to record audio from the Fuji News Network site (although, I would still recommend doing that; it’s more fun to listen to something you’ve watched, as well as being easier to understand when you’re still learning a lot). Also, being podcasts, updates can be “hands-free” in a sense.

Here at AJATT, we (me? I?) are (am?) all about input. Input, input, input. And that works well for written Japanese. But what about regular spoken Japanese? Well, hang out with Japanese people. But what if there are no people from Japan in your area? Simulate them.

One of my favorite ways to simulate having Japanese friends is (was?…wait, is…is today my day to be indecisive?) podcasts. And one of the best podcasts out there is 「道産子女子高生のしゃべり場！まりもえお！」（ど・さん・こ・じょ・し・こう・せい・の・喋り・ば・まりもえお, which somewhat loosely translates to: Marimoe! Three Hokkaido High School Girls’ Hang-Out Joint!).

By the way, this isn’t another instance of me trying to force gentlemen to talk like ladies . Marimoe aren’t your stereotypical high school girls who’ve forgone the services of their brains; they aren’t airheads and they don’t really talk in a ditzy or explicitly feminine way; most of their speech is neither womanly nor manly but gender neutral, so do feel free to imitate and listen to them without fear.

Perhaps the coolest thing about Marimoe podcasts is that they have the quality of being both very natural (as if you just happened to be listening to three native speakers having a normal conversation), and very professional in that they actually do/did the podcasts on a regular basis; they pick something of a topic in advance and there are no dumb pauses — none of the narcissism and repetition of poorly done podcasts: “うん・･･･････････････・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・ええと・・・”…I mean, after a while, that just gets too much.

Whether or not you are the level in your Japanese where you understand them, there’s still value in having them playing in the background. And the cool thing about spoken word over music is that it’s not as distracting — sometimes you want to concentrate on something else while still to remaining “in Japan”; Rip Slyme are too groovy to let you focus anything else; but with something like Marimoe, you can.

Anyway, definitely give it a try.

• Marimoe
• Yomiuri Shimbun News Podcasts and Video Podcasts
• Podcast NAVI, Japanese Podcast Directory
• What is a Podcast?