Was in the bookstore today and couldn’t resist picking up a starter pack for Pimsleur Japanese. Had been thinking about getting one since I’ve been going to the Mitsuwa Market lately to get Japanese low-carb noodles and have had a need to ask basic questions of salespeople who aren’t always totally fluent in English.
As soon as I got back to my pickup, I eagerly popped the first lesson into my CD player and heard the following conversation (NOTE: all spellings are phoenetic, and there are other ways to say the same things):
MAN: Sumima-sen, Aygo ga wakarimas ka?
WOMAN: Iyeh, wakarimas-sen. Nihonggo ga wakarimas ka?
MAN: Hai, skoshi wakarimas.
WOMAN: Anata wa Amerikajin dess ka?
MAN: Hai, watashi wa Amerikajin dess.
The CD then started to teach me what I needed to understand this conversation, starting with sumima-sen. I knew immediately what this would mean: “Excuse me.” That’s the first thing you get taught in every Pimsleur langauge course, for a very good reason: You’ll need it a lot!–both to start conversations with people and to apologize for the mistakes that you (as a beginner) will make at first.
You keep learning for the next twenty or so minutes, and then they play the conversation that you heard at the beginning over again. Suddenly, you realize that you understand everything being said in the conversation. Translated, it’s:
MAN: Excuse me, do you understand English?
WOMAN: No, I don’t understand it. Do you understand Japanese?
MAN: Yes, I understand a little.
WOMAN: Are you an American?
MAN: Yes, I am an American.
Of course, I’d know what it says even without the lesson. Every Pimsleur set starts with the same conversation adapated to whatever language you’re learning. So far, I’ve been through this same conversation in (modern) Hebrew, (modern) Greek, (Syrian) Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe one or two others. Whenever I start a new Pimsleur course, I have a nostalgic “I’m home” and “Here we go again” feeling because of the initial conversation.
It’s a handy little conversation to know. The things that get said are things that you’ll need to know how to say and understand in the new language.
The genius of Pimsleur language courses is that they tell you want you most need to know first and start you directly on how to speak conversationally, without memorizing lots of grammar and paradigms first. How many other language programs do you know that will have you understanding complete, if short, conversations like this one in less than thirty minutes?
I’m looking forward to trying my hand at Pimsleur Japanese. Every language has its own genius, and Japanese will be interesting. Unlike some Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese), it does not have an extensive tonal system. The main tone we have in English is raising our voice at the end of a sentence to form a question, but in Chinese virtually every word has a normal, high, rising, falling, or dipsy-doodle tone that functions basically like an extra consonant in the word and completely changes its meaning. It’s part of what gives Chinese English-speakers their musical accent, but it’s so hard for English-speakers to master that when I first started studying Mandarin I had trouble distinguishing individual words out of the stream of sound and tone. Fortunately, Japanese is like English in that it rarely uses tones. That will make it easier.
Another thing that will make it easier is that Japanese (like Chinese) is not a heavily inflected language. That means that the words don’t change their forms as often as in some languages (like Latin, which has a bugbear system of inflection for nouns, or Arabic, which has a bugbear system of inflection for verbs). Japanese is a low-inflection language so, for example, it doesn’t normally distinguish singular nouns from plural nouns. For example, the word jidosha can mean either “car” or “cars.” Thus there are no plural endings to memorize.
Also–as in Latin–there are no articles (a, an, the) to memorize, so jidosha can mean “car,” “a car,” “the car,” “cars,” “some cars,” “the cars.”
The bugbear for Japanese will be its word order. Japanese is what linguists call a “head-last” language, where as English is a “head-first” language. This concept is a little hard to explain (it has to do with where you put the most grammatically important part of a phrase), but the upshot is that the word order in Japanese often will be backwards of what English word order will be. Other times, it will seem pretty scrambled from an English perspective.
But that’s part of the fun! I’m trying, over the course of time, to try learning one of every major kind of language. Studying Mandarin, for example, helped give me some exposure to a tonal language. Studying Japanese will help give me some exposure to a head-last language. Ultimately, I want to get around to aggultinating languages like Swahili or some of the American Indian languages, which have monster huge verbs that can encode all of the information of a whole sentence in just the verb. (Klingon is another agglutinating language.)
Isn’t it cool how God designed the human faculty for language?
Fortunately, in Pimsleur, you don’t need to know or learn all the grammar I just described. You get the grammar you need by osmosis from conversation–the same way you did when you learned English as a baby (or whatever you learned as a baby)–without having to study a grammar book.
In the end, it’s pretty simple. In fact, I bet that you can use just the information from the Japanese and English conversations above to figure out what the title of the post means. Here’s a clue in case you need more help (the stuff in parentheses represent what the untranslatable particles ga, ka, and wa mean):
MAN: Excuse me, English (<--subject) understand (question)?
WOMAN: No, understand not. Japanese (<--subject) understand (question)?
MAN: Yes, a little understand.
WOMAN: You (predicate–>) American are (question)?
MAN: Yes, I (predicate–>) American am.
Armed with this knowledge, can you translate the title of this post?
IRONIC NOTE: After I left the bookstore, I discovered that the main kind of Japanese low-carb noodles are now available at the ordinary Vons grocery store across the street from me. Sheesh! Well, it won’t dampen my interest in Japanese. Languages are cool, and there’s still all those other Japanese low-carb products to get at Mitsuwa.
I’m currently using Pimsleur to learn Cantonese. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in learning a new language. After the first lesson (30 min.) I actually put my new language skills to good use. Last Friday, I attended a Cantonese Mass in NYC’s Chinatown. After Mass, an old woman approached me and started speaking in Cantonese, I responded by saying, “I don’t understand Cantonese” in Cantonese. Yes, I know my response wasn’t helpful, but it did encourage me to further my language-learning.
Wah! I want koine Greek!
Yeah, I’d like Pimsleur to start doing ancient languages, too. Unfortunately, they tell me that doing one of their 30-CD sets involves a $100,000 investment on their part, and they don’t have plans to expand their language selection (which is already broad) for a while.
Working at Pimsleur Greek has helped me improve my Greek accent, though. Though the language has changed, the sound system of the language retains elements from first century Greek, and hearing native speakers make certain sounds (particularly the “chi” sound, which isn’t a /ch/ sound at all but a light fricative, like the “h” in the name “Hugh”) has helped. You can hear the improvement whenever I say “kecharitomene” on the air on Catholic Answeres Live.
*One* Pimsleur set is good for biblical languages, though: Hebrew. Because Hebrew is a revived language, it didn’t develop much during the centuries when it was dormant. As a result, doing Pimsleur Hebrew will give you a good running start on biblical Hebrew.
Jimmy, one question about Aramaic, and dead languages in general, for which no sound recording had ever been done…how do scholars know how the words *sound* like?
Ray –
Your story reminds me of the first time I put my Cantonese to practice. I had just learned how to ask ‘How much?’ (Gei chin ah?)
Naturally, the vendor replied in Cantonese. I sheepishly explained that I don’t really understand Cantonese and I didn’t understand her answer.
Well, don’t ask in Cantonese if you can’t understand the answer! Was the polite reply I got 🙂 🙂
Modern Greek is still pronounced like Koine, complete with itaciztion, which is not present in Classical? I wonder why the changes would have slowed down, even with vocabulary changes.
Does it help at all with vocabulary and grammar?
I pronounce by ear, and my profs in sem said such things as Chi correctly, though they typicaly used classical pronunciation, without the iticization.
Francis, Aramaic is not a dead language. It is still spoken by the few remaining ancient Christians in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. You can find the liturgy in Aramaic, on-line. Look at it, and the English translation, and the contention that Revelation is structured by the liturgy is even clearer.
Didn’t say that modern Greek is pronounced exactly like koine, just that it has common phonetic elements, the pronunciation of “chi” being one of them. Modern Greek is characterized by itacism, though the standard pronunciation scheme for koine is characterized by etacism.
Also, it’s more than the vocabulary that has changed. The grammar has, too. For example, the dative case has basically dropped out of modern Greek. Thus I can’t recommend Pimsleur Greek as a good window into New Testament Greek. It would help a little bit, but not much.
Incidentally, Aramaic is not used by the majority of Lebanese/Syrian Christians, who have switched to Arabic in the last century or so. It’s still used in their liturgy, though, and the language itself is spoken in individual Christian villages in Syria and Lebanon, but it is most extensively spoken by the Christian community in Iraq.
Francis,
For dead languages, or even really old languages, we don’t know exactly how they were pronounced. We can figure out some things about their pronunciation based on their alphabet (if they have one), by comparison to other, similar languages, by how they transliterated words into other alphabets, and by things people wrote about them (i.e., they sometimes commented on proper pronunication), but it isn’t possible to construct with precision what they sounded like.
For some languages (like ancient Greek and Latin) a person well-educated in these could probably make himself understood if he found himself in the ancient world, but he wouldn’t sound like a native.
For other languages, like middle Egyptian, what even the greatest living scholar of this language would say would be completely unintelligible to ancient Egyptians (who didn’t write down their vowels, meaning that scholars today have to guess them and default to using “e” whenever there is doubt), though they could undertand each other pefectly if they switched to communicating in writing.
Hebrew is somewhere between these two extremes, but closer to Egyptian than to Latin or Greek.
A good example of the kind of clue that helps modern language scholars figure out ancient pronunciations is found in Judges 12:5-6.
This shows us a difference between the Ephramite accent and Gileadite accent: Ephramites didn’t pronounce the sound /sh/ (either at all or at least when it was on the front of a word) and so they would pronounce the word “shibboleth” as /sibboleth/. (And then get their heads cut off by the Gileadites.)
If I am not mistaken, the Samaritans (descendants of the Ephraimites) to this day have the same feature to their accent, though I’d have to check to make sure.
Francis DS,
Hilarious post! 🙂 BTW, do you know that in Mandarin, “Gei chin” sounds like “Give me your money!”. hehehe! The correct way of saying it in Cantonese is “Gey DUO Cheen ah?”
~Andrew
Jimmy:
I have wanted to learn a little Japanese for a few years. Well-meaning people gave me beginner’s books and tapes, but I had a lot of trouble getting started with them.
Your testimonial about the Primsleur method impressed me. I happened to find a tape set at a discount bookstore. You are right. This system is wonderful. It was just what I needed to begin.
Thank you so much! Oh – I mean, domo arigato gozaimasu!
can u please translate the song make it ral into japanese version? plz…..
it was really great to here that story! nihon de ninnen hataraetteta kara,,yapari nihonggo wa sonnani kantan janaii dayoune! watashii wa piripinjin dakedo iroiro nihon no koto suki datta desuyo!
I wanted to learn nihonggo…dozo tetsudatte kudasai..can you please translate the word “fighter”? im looking forward for that…domo arigato gozaimas!
English To Spanish Sentence Translator
Universal Translator will be your at home teacher, s
Love this article. I just did some random Japanese searches as I am trying to brush up myself and I came across this little gem. Pimsleur is great. I actually purchased a really cheap (well under $50) CD set that has several languages on it. It’s amazing how much information they packed into it. The translations are pretty accurate too – go figure!
It’s called “Languages of the World” and Encore is the publisher. It’s definitely not complete but good as a primer or “everyday conversation” crash course of sorts. What I like about it is that it does all the repetition of Pimsleur but it also has lots of other memorization aides, such as pictures to illustrate the conversation.
Really good stuff. Just a small catch. The widely-accepted romanization is “eigo”, not “aygo” – in the long run it helps because you see more consistency in how the familiar vowel sounds are used, especially if you speak romance languages where such sounds are common. For example, I find that Spanish speakers have an easier time with Japanese sounds than some English speakers. Not always the case but it helps. Same goes with Chinese: some very strange sounds that we are not used to as native Spanish or English speakers can really throw you off and change the meaning of a word completely.
Thanks for this great little piece. Please visit my blog as communication is one of the main topics I discuss. I’m actually helping a client build up her own blog, which happens to be focused on language as well (specifically Spanish) so check it out sometime.
See you around!
Hi my name is seane (shinkei), female, 26 years old, from the Philippines. I had a friend from Japan who will come back in August in our country. I lost my Japanese book and when I talked to him on chat, I rarely understand him. I am having trouble translating his words in english. Do u know any free website that can help me translate his japanese dialogs? Because it is time consuming if I will look every word he says into the dictionary and it so hard to construct sentences especially when I am in a hurry. I would really appreciate your kindess. Thank you. Anyone here plz help me. plz email me at laluceche2dai@gmail.com
Iwant to joint to be come speak and write japan word
its better if u translate any thing into japanese
konichiwa….!!!
help me to understand japanese….
my sister is so good in speaking nihonggo…
domo arigatu guzaimaz!!!!!!!!!!! sayonara!!!!