Learning by Mixing target language words into native language texts?

I'm pretty sure this is not a great idea:

Waikato University PhD student Michael Walmsley is working on a project which will help language learners build their foreign vocabulary by reading texts online where some of the words have been replaced with words in their target language.

Read more... My big problem with this is that it'll keep learners away from actual exposure to the target language; instead of reading a pidgin text, why not just go to the native language? If the learner refuses to read native language texts, I think that learner's got a bigger problem than can be solved by throwing in some target language words to a native-language text.

Walmsley relates this to his own experience with Japanese:

I can always find time to read the newspaper to keep up with current affairs, but I can't do that in Japanese. It's just too time consuming. This way, busy people can squeeze in language study by combining it with their general reading.

I read that as saying that his priority is reading the news rather than learning his target language. I'd recommend he find short newspaper articles (such as those found here in Yahoo's headline news in Japanese) and read fewer articles while taking the time to understand them. If he's serious about learning Japanese, I'd imagine that he can get by without the crutch he's trying to create.

Link: New tool ahead for language learning [Waikato Times]

Get Japanese furigana for any website or text

If you're looking to add furigana to an entire Japanese website, just drop the URL into Hiragana.jp. It'll add furigana to the entire page for you, and then you can click through the website normally and have furigana on every page.

If you've got a block of text that isn't on a website for which you want the furigana, then simply copy and paste it into Furiganizer. It'll do the same thing that Hiragana.jp does for websites for whatever block of text you dump in.

Get the text of Japanese podcasts with Podcastle.jp

The Japanese government seems to be doing a few things that are pretty useful for language learners. I noted a few while back that they've made the official Japanese-English dictionary of legal terms. That unfortunately is probably only of use to lawyers and the like, but last week I discovered another gem, again courtesy of Japanese tax dollars^*, that is of more general use for Japanese learners: Podcastle.

I've been trying to find some Japanese podcasts for which the text is also available, without much success. LingQ's list of resources surprisingly has nothing suitable, and googling was turning up little. For whatever reason, there seem to be few Japanese podcasts that also provide transcripts.

But then I stumbled upon Podcastle.

Read more... Here's how Podcastle.jp describes itself:

Podcastle is a service that lets you search the audio of podcasts in Japanese. Voice recognition technology converts the audio into text. Users can then freely edit any recognition errors.

So, basically, they use a less-than-perfect voice recognition technology (because, after all, I don't think one exists yet that gets close to 100% accuracy) and then users edit the computer-generated transcripts to fix errors.

As I've noted before, one of the Japanese-language podcasts I've been listening to regularly is Yoichi Ito's Business Trends. And, sure enough, it's on Podcastle.jp. I went through a few of the transcripts, and overall their accuracy is pretty good. Indeed, many of them have hundreds of corrections. That tells me that the crowdsourcing is working well, but also that the voice recognition technology must leave quite a bit to be desired.

However, even with the crowdsourcing, the transcripts are not completely accurate. I was listening to one podcast and I noticed that a term appears to have been outright skipped. The term in question was スローダウン suro-daun, which means "slowdown" in the sense of the economy slowing down and is taken directly from the English term. The term was said quickly and somewhat quietly, and I could see why the voice recognition technology might have missed it, but I had no trouble understanding it so I'm sure native-Japanese speakers are able to hear it just as easily—but it remained completely omitted from the text. (I became a crowdsourcee by making the addition myself.)

Another cool feature of Podcast.jp is the ability to follow along with the podcast. You can play the podcast and Podcast.jp will indicate what text you are currently listening to. It's not completely accurate, but it's usually within a few words of where the audio is.

Until something more accurate pops up, this is a pretty good way for Japanese learners to get audio combined with text. The biggest problem is, of course, that the text doesn't always match up with the audio, so it's helpful if you know enough Japanese to figure out when the text might be screwed up. But by and large, it's accurate and good enough to help you get many of those terms you didn't quite catch in the audio.

Despite it's limitations, I'd love to know about any similar things that are available in other languages, so if you've got the info, please drop a line in the comments below.

P.S. If you're wondering how I figured out that this is a government-run project, take a look at their "Credits" page (in Japanese):

Podcastle is released as the research results of the Podcastle Project of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, an independent administrative agency.

So if this was made with taxpayer dollars, I wonder if there's a way to get the research results—and the code—for free. If there is, someone with skills in working the Japanese bureaucracy please do so, and make this available for all languages ASAP.

Get foreign-language text read to you online for free

This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.

When I signed up for CorrectMyText, I must have said I was studying Russian, because here's the message I got from them today:

Вы получили сообщение от Катрина со следующим содержанием:

I studied a year of Russian back in high school, but the only word I could remember was the first one, вы, which means "you". A couple of free online dictionaries quickly got me this translation:

You have received a message from Katrina with the following contents:

Knowing what it meant was a good start, but I also wanted to hear what it sounded like; although I can read the letters, I have no idea how close my imagined pronunciation is with the actual pronunciation (ultimate result: not so close). Without a Russian speaker anywhere nearby, and without feeling like spending the time to find one online willing to humor me via Skype, I googled about for a text-to-speech solution online, and quickly found one.

Read more... What I found was Smartlink's text-to-speech website.

The Russian sounded fine to me, but I really have no idea, so to see how good these voices were I checked out the English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I have to say they are pretty darn good. In addition to those langauges, French, German, Italian, and Korean are also available. They even come with computer-animated speakers, one of whom (one of which?) is pictured above. They are a wee bit creepy, especially when they're moving, but that doesn't take away from the pretty impressive text-to-speech.

Another very cool feature is that they change the color of the text next to the animated image as the text is being read—kind of like language-learning karaoke.

All in all, a pretty cool tool for when you need a sentence or two pronounced for you on the fly.

How to use the built-in Japanese dictionaries and thesaurus in Mac OS X

While I'm on the topic of hidden little gems inside Mac OS X for language learning, did you know that Mac OS X comes with a built-in Japanese-English dictionary, Japanese-Japanese dictionary, and Japanese thesaurus? Yeah, I had no idea either, but it's handy to have around.

Where you can find them, after the jump.

Read more... If you weren't already clued in by the icon above, it's not particularly shocking where you'll find them—in Mac OS X's Dictionary app. But the Japanese dictionaries are not enabled by default, so you've gotta do that first. Here's how:

1. Open Dictionary.app.
2. Select Preferences from the Dictionary menu.
3. In the "Drag sources into the order you prefer" list, make sure Japanese, Japanese-English, and Japanese Synonyms are checked.
4. Close the preference pane.

Once you've done that, looking up a word is a piece of cake:

1. In the reference library row, click on the library in which you'd like to search (e.g., Japanese-English, Japanese, or Japanese Synonyms) or, if you'd like to search all of the libraries at the same time, click on "All".
2. Enter what you're looking for in the search field.

And your results appear below.

As far as how good the Japanese-English dictionary is compared to free online Japanese-English dictionaries, it's most comparable to Excite, Yahoo! Japan, and Infoseek; solid definitions, but example sentences and other features found in better online dictionaries comparatively lack. Still, as I always have my laptop with me, the dictionary comes in handy from time to time when I can't get online, so it's nice to know it's around.

How to look up Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters by radical in Mac OS X

If you're running Mac OS X, you've already got a built-in way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters by their component pieces, i.e., their "radicals": it's known as the Character Palette. (It, by the way, also works for the Chinese characters that used to be used in Korean as well, if you're into that.)

How to use the Character Palette to look up characters by their radicals, after the jump.

Read more... The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the Character Palette enabled.

1. From the Apple menu, open System Preferences.
2. In the Personal section (the first row of preference panes), click on International.
3. Select the Input Menu tab.
4. Make sure Character Palette is checked.
5. At the bottom of the window, make sure "Show input menu in menu bar" is checked.

Incidentally, this is also where you can select the languages in which you want to be able to type; just check off the appropriate boxes below the horizontal dividing line in the list above.

Once you've set that up, you'll have a menu that you can get to from your menu bar that looks something like this:

And here's how you can then look up a Chinese or Japanese character by its radical:

1. From the input menu, select "Show Character Palette".
2. From the View pull-down menu at the top of the Character Palette, select Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Japanese, as appropriate.
3. Immediately below the pulldown menu, select the "by Radical" tab.
4. Immediately below that, select the appropriate radical in the left-hand pane.
5. Select the character you're looking for from the right-hand pane.
6. To see information on the character, such as the reading, click on the triangle icon next to "Character Info" until the triangle is pointing down and the character information is displayed.
7. To see how the character looks in a variety of fonts, click on the triangle icon next to "Font Variation" until the triangle is pointing down and the font variants are displayed.

Or, if you already happen to have the character on your computer and don't need to go the radical search route, just copy and paste the character into the search field at the bottom of the Character Palette, and all the rest'll pop right up for you.

And that's it. It's a simple, always-handy way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters on your Mac.

P.S. If there's an analog to this on Windows, let me know and I'll add it.

Get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free

When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.

Sound like something you'd be interested in? A comparison of the websites on which you can do just that, after the jump.

Read more... The first two sites below—Lang-8 and CorrectMyText—are focused primarily on textual corrections. The rest—Livemocha, Busuu, and LingQ—include textual corrections as one among many features.

One note before diving in... the comparisons below are only looking at what these websites do in terms of text corrections. All of these sites can of course do other things, but I'm leaving those features aside for now (although feel free to highlight your favorite features in the comments below).

Lang-8

• Overview. Lang-8, based in Tokyo, is a two-person project by Yangyang Xi, CEO, and Kazuki Matsumoto, CTO, that focuses letting language learners get their texts corrected.


• Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever text you feel like posting. Although many people do post journal-like entries, I typically post all sorts of things in there. In addition to texts to get corrected, this mainly consists of language-related questions. Just as people are happy to correct your text, they're also happy to answer questions about whatever confusing point of the language you've come across.


• Making corrections. Lang-8 first breaks the text down into sentences, separating them based on punctuation (this results in the occasional weird break-up when you have something like "12.1" in the sentence; Lang-8 interprets the decimal point in that number as the end of a sentence and breaks it up accordingly). Then correctors can edit sentence by sentence. The system flags uncorrected sentences so subsequent correctors can focus their efforts where most needed.
  
  Correctors edit each sentence in a little window. The one annoying thing about the editing process is that, if you want to add formatting to the text, you've gotta deal with tags tossed into the text in that little window, such as [BLUE][/BLUE] or [BOLD][/BOLD]. It can get pretty jumbled up.


• Speed of corrections. Although none of these sites are slow in getting corrections back to you, the corrections come extremely rapidly on Lang-8; I rarely wait an hour, but I think the most I've ever waited is something like a day. In fact, one day I put up a whole bunch of posts on Lang-8 and, by the time I was done adding all the posts, most of them had already been corrected.


• Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through formatting: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I make most use of Japanese, unsurprisingly, but I've also made use of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French thus far. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.


• Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done. I'd like them to make it even easier to view edits, but it's decent as is.


• Bottom line. I find Lang-8 to be the best of the bunch, and I recommend it highly.

CorrectMyText.com

• Overview. CorrectMyText, based in Russia, is the project of Dmitry Lopatin. It's a new entry to the free online text-correction market; as far as I can tell, it was launched all of seven days ago. As such, it's still got a lot of squeaky wheels that need some grease, but the functionality you need to get text corrected is already there.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into CorrectMyText.com.


• Making corrections. CorrectMyText first breaks the text down into paragraphs, separating them based on line breaks. The corrector can then edit each paragraph's text direcly.


• Speed of corrections. Given how new CorrectMyText is, and thus the limited number of users it has compared to the other sites in this list, the corrections don't come quite as quickly. Nevertheless, if my limited experience is representative, you'll still get them within a day or two.


• Correction presentation. The corrector cannot apply any formatting. CorrectMyText.com will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in red and struck through. The after version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes.


• Languages. Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.


• Interface. This is still a bit rough. It's sometimes hard to figure out what you need to press to move on, and I found myself pressing the wrong thing more than once. It remains very basic, as you'd expect from a newly launched website.


• Bottom line. As a new entrant to the market, it still needs some work before it'll be a viable contender against Lang-8, but it's definitely a site to keep an eye on.

Livemocha

• Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through text corrections (see my complete review of Livemocha here).


• Content. The textual submissions on Livemocha are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects". However, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about, and indeed that's what I've often done. In fact, Livemocha may soon be considering implementing freestyle writing. That'll be more than a nod to reality than an actual change, but I'd be happy to see the addition.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.


• Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu.


• Interface. As far as text correcting goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.


• Bottom line. Not a bad back-up to Lang-8 for text corrections, but as Lang-8 specializes in this feature and it's just another feature at Livemocha—and Livemocha's still not made for freestyle writing—I'm going to stick with the specialist Lang-8 and hope that Livemocha gives this feature some TLC.

Busuu

• Overview. Busuu is a direct competitor of Livemocha, using a similar picture-based learning method, but it also connects you with lots of native speakers, including, again, through text corrections.


• Content. Just like Livemocha, the textual submissions are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe a real person in your life", but, again, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text, mirroring Livemocha. It does have one convenient feature that Livemocha lacks: a button to automatically copy and paste the unedited text into the comment field.


• Speed of corrections. Although I don't have any numbers to back up my supposition, it seems to me that Busuu has less users than Livemocha, and accordingly will take a little longer. That said, corrections still come back within a day or so.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8 and Livemocha, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. English, French, German, and Spanish. One of the largest differences with Livemocha is that Busuu covers fewer languages.


• Interface. Busuu's interface is probably the nicest of the bunch, and it's just fine for getting texts corrected.


• Bottom line. Given how similar it is to Livemocha, the bottom line for both is essentially the same; not a bad back-up to Lang-8, but until Busuu puts some more focus into textual corrections, I'll be sticking with Lang-8.

LingQ

• Overview. LingQ's focus is on audio and textual content (especially audio with the accompanying textual content), and, among other things, it has a feature that allows you to get your text submissions corrected. LingQ's text correction feature, however, is not free (it's not terribly expensive though, basically coming down to $0.033 per word, although the pricing is a bit more complex than that). I've broken the free-stuff-only rule and included it here because it has some very interesting features that the completely free ones do not yet match.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into LingQ.


• Making corrections. You highlight the text you want to correct, and click a button. Up pops a window with the text you selected, and you can then edit it. Thus far, that pretty much makes it like all the rest. But then you then get the option to select what kind of error it is—spelling, word order, verb form, etc.—and that data will be used when presenting corrections.


• Speed of corrections. Corrections are generally done by a learner's selected tutor, and you might have to wait a little bit before your tutor has a chance to correct your text. That said, tutors seem to reply relatively quickly. I'm a tutor on the site, and I typically try to do my corrections as soon as I'm notified they're there. My slowest response time thus far has been a single day.


• Correction presentation. Just like CorrectMyText, LingQ will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow, the after version in green. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes. Alternatively, the same corrections are listed out below the side-by-side versions in a table that also lists correction-specific notes and the type of each correction.
  
  And then here's where LingQ lays down some awesome. Using the type of errors that the corrector marked down, you get an analysis of your mistakes.
  
  
  Just. Fricking. Awesome. Getting this level of analysis is far better than just seeing your mistakes, because it can help you focus your efforts on where to improve. Although Steve at LingQ is not a big fan of focusing on grammar, this lets you do just that. If you see that you're struggling in a particular place, you can do a read-through of the section in your grammar on that topic, or take other steps to figure out why you keep messing up. Great feature.


• Languages. Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.


• Interface. LingQ recently made some system-wide improvements to the site, which included some interface improvements. The site before was fine, and the improvements made it better. Overall, a very usable interface.


• Bottom line. They've built in some very clever features into LingQ's textual correction system, but I just can't justify the cost for text corrections when Lang-8 and all the above are available completely free of charge.

So do you know of any other places where we can get our foreign-language writing corrected? If so, drop a line in the comments!

The best free online Japanese-English dictionaries

As promised, I've been working on lists of my favorite free online dictionaries, and I'd like to launch the series with Japanese-English dictionaries, as I've been making much use of these since I arrived in Japan.

The dictionaries, after the jump.

Read more... With no further ado, in the order that I use them when looking words up:

1. ALC: ALC (pronounced アルク aruku in Japanese) is my first stop among Japanese-English dictionaries. They've got great word coverage, which means they're often my last stop as well, and they've got tons of example sentences. They seem to scan the web for translated sentences and then add those to their example sentence corpus (Google their example sentences in quotes and you can often find the source). The big thing they lack is an easy way to get to the pronunciation of words (i.e., they don't include the kana for kanji words), so for that I typically turn to Goo.


2. Goo: Goo also has very good coverage, but not quite as good as ALC, and they certainly don't have as many example sentences. What they do have, however, is how to pronounce words that contain kanji. Another thing I like about Goo is their incorporation of a Japanese-Japanese dictionary, which can be surprisingly helpful—if you can get through wholly Japanese definitions.


3. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC: ALC and Goo are both aimed at native-Japanese speakers (although non-native speakers can easily make use of them as well), but the WWDIC is hands down the best Japanese-English dictionary aimed at non-native speakers. (For you polyglots out there, it's got dictionaries to a bunch of other languages as well, such as Spanish, French, Russian, etc.)
   
   It's got audio samples (courtesy of JapanesePod101), the kana is always available, and it gives you easy access to example sentences. It also has a bunch of speciality dictionaries—a rare find in free format (although not totally unheard of).
   
   It's open source, so you'll find that other dictionaries out there make use of it, my favorite of those (which I learned of from Tofugu) is Denshi Jisho (which literally means "electronic dictionary"—like those ones you can carry around). It's got exactly the same content, but the interface is nicer and it's got a nice iPhone version as well.


4. Glova: Glova is basically a massive database of translated phrases and sentences. Do a query, and you get two columns, one having the hits of your search and the other the translations—and there can be pages and pages of these hits if your search term is relatively common. It lacks the typical numbered definitions and such that you'll find in most of these dictionaries, but it's great for finding multi-word phrases when ALC leaves you empty handed.


5. WordReference.com: You'll find WordReference in many of my lists of favorite dictionaries, and Japanese is no exception. Although I don't find their coverage is quite as good as those listed above, they do offer plenty of phrases for many words and the forums can be a great place to find hard-to-find phrases.


6. Tangorin: Tangorin is a relatively recent discovery for me. Although they don't generally have quite as many example sentences as the dictionaries above, they do seem to occasionally have some terms that I can't find elsewhere. Their real power is in all their various speciality dictionaries, but that's a topic for another post.


7. Excite, Yahoo! Japan, and Infoseek: These guys are all portals that appear to have thrown in a dictionary because the others did—and it shows. Although they have solid definitions, example sentences and other features that those above have are generally lacking. As you might guess, I very rarely need to use these dictionaries and they typically just collect dust in my bookmarks, especially since they are about as good as the Japanese-English dictionary that comes with my Mac.

So what do you think? Any killer features from the above dictionaries that I forgot to mention? Any other dictionaries that you think should be in the list? If so, drop a line in the comments!

This post was updated on October 5, 2009, to include Glova, Tangorin, and a reference to the Japanese-English dictionary that comes with Mac OS X.

Japanese/Chinese emoticons are totally inscrutable

You are probably wondering right now what the heck a picture of an obscure Star Wars character named Ponda Baba, who got his arm cut off by Obi-Wan in the beginning of Episode IV,is doing accompanying this post.

Well, as far as I can tell, there's a Japanese emoticon in which I can see nothing but our dearly disarmed Mr. Baba:

(´ω｀)

Japanese people apparently see happiness in this emoticon (1st column, 7th from the top), but I don't know what's happy about losing an arm.

And wait until you see what chaos emoticons bring us after the jump.

Read more... Japanese emoticons (and Chinese emoticons as well, although the examples here are all from Japanese) are a great deal more complicated than what we've got in the West. Perhaps they're just used to complex characters in the form of kanji (I'd be curious to find out whether Korean emoticons are as inscrutable), or maybe they're somehow connected to anime-like facial expressions, but they certainly do have a lot more complexity to them. For instance, we all know the winking emoticon:

; )

Our two-character wink is totally zen compared to one of the simpler Japanese versions:

(^_~)

At least I can easily tell what that one is. Take a look at this page to see some emoticons for which you'll have no idea what they mean, or take this example from a website profile of a friend of mine:

ヽ(*´∀`)ﾉﾟ.:｡+ﾟฺ♡♡

OK, let's try to analyze that one. The upside-down A is, I presume, the smiling mouth. Those two little dots next to it on either side must be eyes. I'm not sure what that thing next to the eye on the left would be, but the parentheses are the sides of the head. The slashes—ears, or arms? After that, I'm totally lost. I presume the hearts are just tossed in there for the cuteness effect, but I have no idea what the plus sign and everything around that are supposed to be. And this is hardly the worst of them.

Emoticons remain a neglected facet of language learning, and indeed I'm guilty as charged as I've long ignored them myself. The thing is that I run into these enough that I feel like I should at least know the basic ones, although I can probably get by without knowing this:

・:*:・:(*'v`d):・:*:・

Can you help me improve my language-learning routine?

I thought I'd share with you what's shaping up to be my language-learning routine. I'd love it if you could take home a few good pointers from my routine, but I'd love it even more if you could give me a few good pointers to improve my routine.

My days are, predictably, dominated by Japanese and English. I try to maximize my use of Japanese because of my need to use it at work, but there are two places where I use English as a matter of course. The first is with my kids; I only use English with them, and my wife and I speak English to each other whenever we're in earshot of them, in order to maximize their exposure to English. This is of course a direct trade-off between my Japanese and their English, but one I'll take to prevent them from speaking Engrish. The other place I use English regularly is of course at work when I need to do any of the various things a lawyer might need to do in English.

My language-learning day gets kicked off with my morning alarm; I awake to the sound of Japanese podcasts giving me today's news. Breakfast with the fam is largely in English, although my wife always speaks to the kids in Japanese and the nanny speaks to all of us only in Chinese, so that'll be floating around as well. My mother typically joins us for breakfast via video chat, so once in a while she and I will use some Italian when we don't want anyone else to understand.

Read more... Whenever I'm walking around (such as to, from, and in train stations) or standing around (such as on trains when I can't get a seat), I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts and to review vocabulary with iAnki. My first iAnki/podcast stint every day is from the time I leave my apartment until I sit down on the train to work.

Once seated on the train, the podcasts continue, but I typically break out my computer and try to get stuff done that often doesn't involve a foreign language—doing actual work, responding to emails, working on the book, or preparing these blog posts. When I arrive at the station at which I get off, I return to iAnki/podcasts until I get to my office.

Once in my office, I switch from listening to podcasts on my iPhone to listening to them on my laptop quietly in the background, and I keep them playing in my office the entire time I'm there. I also run a screensaver that shows selected vocab on my laptop screen while I work from the firm-supplied computer. You do end up glancing at it from time to time, and it's especially useful for getting extra exposure to things you've been struggling wtih.

Although I end up doing much of my work in English, I get exposed to plenty of Japanese over the course of the day. Once people figure out that my Japanese is passable, they typically stop using English with me whether via email or in person (and I of course encourage this by using Japanese as much as possible). I also regularly have to deal with Japanese-language documents, websites, etc.

All of these serve as founts for vocab to feed into iAnki and from there into my brain. As I come across words and phrases that I'm unfamiliar with over the course of a day, I quickly note them down in an Excel spreadsheet. Before I leave the office each day, I send the Excel sheet I made over the course of the day—which typically has somewhere between 15 to 30 items in it—to my personal email. When I get home each night, I look up all the words, get example sentences, and add them to iAnki.

Whenever I write Japanese, I get it corrected, review the mistakes, and make any new items for iAnki that might be necessary (by first adding them to that Excel spreadsheet). My secretary helps to correct any Japanese I put together for work, but I've been submitting everything else to Lang-8 for corrections—totally gratis. On Lang-8, native speakers of the language you are learning will correct your writing (and you're expected to reciprocate). Response times are impressive, and I've rarely waited more than a hour for corrections, and certainly never more than a day.

As for other languages I encounter at work, I treat them the same way I treat Japanese. As I'm part of the China Practice Group at my firm, I regularly get exposure to Chinese. I've also had to review documents in other languages, such as Spanish and French, and there have been phone calls to Latin America, so any words I've had to look up have ended up mixed in with my mostly Japanese iAnki reps.

Whenever I get the chance, I'll revert to podcats/iAnki, e.g., on a walk to the bank, which is maybe 5 or 10 minutes away from my office. And whenever I get a little bit of time in which I can't effectively do anything else—such as if I'm on hold on a phone—I'll quickly pull out my iPhone and do a few reviews on iAnki. Even if I only have 30 seconds, I can probably get through at least 10 reviews in that short a time period.

On the way home, it's back to iAnki/podcasts. I typically can't find a seat until maybe halfway through my ride home, so this is typically the period each day in which I spend the most time reviewing vocabulary. Once I do find a seat, I break out my laptop and do the same kinds of things I do on the morning ride, while continuing to listen to the podcasts. And, once again, the walk from the train to home is more iAnki/podcasts.

Once home, I add the new items from the Excel spreadsheet mentioned above to iAnki and see what I've managed to do over the course of the day. Typically, I'll get through somewhere between 300 and 500 reviews in a given day. I'll then make any changes necessary to the items in iAnki (such as adding example sentences to things I'm struggling with), as well as updating the vocab words in my screensaver.

It's also at night when I do thing like read news in other languages, although I don't spend as much time doing that as I'd like to.

And that's pretty much my routine as it currently stands.

I am looking to make a few changes, however. One thing I've been puzzling how to do efficiently is bring in languages other than Japanese in a more systematic manner. I think I'm going to do this by assigning a time percentage to each language and then listening to podcasts in each language accordingly. Ideally, I'll be able to find podcasts with transcripts and then review those as well, and then put the vocab into iAnki.

And, of course, I'm sure you might have some tips for me as to how I can improve this routine, so please drop them in the comments below!

JeKai: A interesting little online Japanese dictionary of some obscure terms

In searching the internets for an explanation of the word ～かねる -kaneru in Japanese, I found the explanation I was looking for on a website called jeKai (pronounced jay-kai). Curious as to what I had just stumbled upon, I dug around a bit.

The site appears to have been actively largely in the early 2000s, but is still kept up by the person who was behind it, Tim Gally. Here's how jeKai describes what it's there for:

In May 2000, a group of volunteers throughout the world began creating an open, free, online Japanese-English dictionary. The form and content of the dictionary are decided by the participants in the project. Among its features are the following:

• Definitions that explain the meaning of words as completely as possible
• As many examples as possible of each word in real contexts
• Photographs and other illustrations, especially for entries about uniquely Japanese things
• No restrictions on the type or range of vocabulary
• No restrictions on the length of entries

My guess is this little Web 1.0 project fell into disuse as Web 2.0 wiki-based sites made this kind of effort a lot easier, but the fact that it's still coming up in Google hits demonstrates its ongoing relevance.

It seems to have a lot of things that aren't adequately explained elsewhere, one of course being ～かねる -kaneru, but another you might find of interest is their list of Japanese baseball terms. There's a whole bunch of other stuff up there as well, so I'd recommend you Japanese learners to have a looksee.

The official (free, online) Japanese-English dictionary of legal terms

Pretty much every day at work I make use of Japanese Law Translation, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is, but it's got a few neat tricks up its sleeve.

The website is maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Justice, with contributions from various lawyers (including those at my firm), legal academics, and others (more about its genesis is available here). It is in effect the official translation of legal terms in Japanese.

It has a basic bilingual dictionary, where you can look up words in English or Japanese. (And there are rumblings of later expanding it to include Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese as well.) It then gives you a list of the definitions that contain the word plus links to the laws it's found in.


However, not all terms that have been translated can be found in the dictionary, so another very useful tool is the ability to search translations of the law for the word you're looking for. That will get you both the English and the Japanese text and you can figure out how the word was translated.

As the website is a work in progress (and will need regular updating as laws change), not all laws and regulations are included yet, and as mentioned above not all terms have been added to the dictionary, but it is a very useful tool if you ever have a need for legalese in Japanese.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test vocabulary list with Chinese translations

If you are studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (I'm not, really, but I find the lists of vocab for the test that can be found floating about the internet are useful because they approximate frequency lists) and you happen to speak Chinese, check out this vocab list. There's no English, but you can learn your Japanese from Chinese (or learn both at the same time). It's all in traditional characters, but I'm sure you tricky netizens can find a method or two that could convert it to simplified for you.

It's got separate lists for all four levels of the test (1, 2, 3, and 4, with 1 being the hardest), or you can view the vocab all together. The list was made in 2005, so it may be a little out of date, and it was made in Taiwan, so you'll probably get that variety of Chinese.

One thing I like about this list (and that I'd like to see in other such lists) is that it notes on which syllable the stress falls in the Japanese word. My wife often says I use stress in Japanese words where there isn't any. This chart seems to back up her criticisms, given how many words are marked as having "0" (i.e., no) stress and thus should just be read flatly.

How do you say "pattern" in Japanese?

This is the first in a new series on this blog called "how do you say", in which I take a word in English that has multiple translations in a given target language and try to figure out which ones are used for what. As I'm doing this to answer my own questions (or maybe yours—leave them in the comments!), drop a line in the comments if you think I've gotten someone wrong and I'll revise as necessary.

When you look up the Japanese for the English noun "pattern" on ALC, you get (deep breath, now) 傾向 keikou, 模様 moyou, 型 kata, 原型 genkei, 型紙 katagami, 柄 gara, 形態 keitai, 構図 kouzu, 模範 mohan, and パターン pata-n (as if they didn't have enough ways to say it with Chinese characters, they had to bring in a loanword from English as well). Let's see if we can figure out what to use when.

Read more... Thanks to that loanword, I've got good news for you for you lazy native-English speakers. The basic rule appears to be that, when in doubt, use パターン pata-n in good old katakana, taken straight from English. パターン pata-n has 18 pages of examples where the English equivalent is "pattern" on ALC. Of all the other ways to say "pattern" in Japanese listed above, the only ones with more than one page of such examples are 型 kata (with two) and 模様 moyou (with three). What's more, looking through the numerous examples of パターン pata-n on ALC, there appear to be relatively few cases where some construction of パターン pata-n can't replace the other words below.

Turning to the the one with the second-largest number of such examples on ALC, 模様 moyou means "pattern" in the sense of a print or weave design (e.g., 市松模様 ichimatsu moyou, "checkered pattern").

Also in the two-dimensional realm, 柄 gara is used to mean patterns on cloth and certain similar things (wallpaper, etc.). The difference between this and 模様 moyou seems to be that, for 柄 gara, the pattern is generally part of the material rather than just printed on it (e.g., アーガイル柄靴下 a-gairu kutushita, "argyle socks"). However, this appears to be a rule of thumb rather than a hard-and-fast rule (e.g., ヒョウ柄 hyou gara, "leopard print pattern").

型 kata seems to be the Japanese translation of "pattern" with the broadest use. For those language learners among us (can I see some hands?), this is the term to use for a linguistic pattern (e.g., 動詞型 doushigata, "verb patterns"). And there appears to be a wide variety of other uses. I'll refer you to ALC and if you can clarify this for me any better, drop a line in the comments below.

The related 型紙 katagami means a pattern made on paper, such as a cut-paper stencil or a sewing pattern.

模範 mohan means "pattern" in the sense of an example that is to be emulated. The word has a good connotation, e.g.: ～を模範とする ~ wo mohan to suru, "to pattern oneself after"; and 親は、子の模範 oya ha, ko no mohan, "Parents are patterns for their children".

傾向 keikou means "pattern" in the sense of "trend" or "tendency". So if you're talking about patterns of behavior over time (e.g., 消費傾向 shouhi keikou, "spending pattern"), you can use this one.

形態 keitai seems to be used for patterns of human activity that can be characterized at a given point in time or based on data collected, in contrast to 傾向 keikou, which considers ongoing activity and the future. Examples include: 人口形態 jinkou keitai, "population pattern"; 労働形態 roudou keitai, "working patterns"; 暴力形態 bouryoku keitai, "pattern of violence"; etc.

Although 原型 genkei comes up under pattern (e.g., 原型製作 genkei seisaku, "pattern manufacture"), it means the original upon which subsequent things are patterned after, so "prototype", "original", "model", etc., tend to be better translations (e.g., 原型製作 genkei seisaku can also be translated as "prototype production").

構図 kouzu appears to mean "pattern" in the sense of structured relationships (e.g., 政・官の癒着の構図 sei ˙ kan no yuchaku no kouzu, "pattern of collusion between politicians and bureaucrats"). It does not appear to be a very common way to translate "pattern".

So... anything wrong here? Anything to add? Drop a line in the comments below (especially you native Japanese speakers out there!).

Drinking-party English

Today there was a going away party for some departing summer associates at my firm. One of the Japanese attorneys sitting nearby commented that it's difficult to understand drinking-party English (飲み会英語 nomikai eigo). And I can see what he means.

One particular utterance that came directly from my own mouth demonstrates the point neatly. Some of my more-or-less inebriated non-Japanese colleagues were chugging ramen. Slurping vigorously would be a more accurate description, but we settled on "chugging" to describe the action. When a bowl of ramen was passed my way, I declined, saying, "I ain't chuggin' no noodles!"

The linguistic dissection, after the jump.

Read more... Oh how "wrong" is that sentence, let me count the ways. First there's the sort-of-not-quite-right use of the word "chugging", described above. Then I swallowed the "g" at the end of "chugging", so that's one step farther from linguistic purity. Then there's the contraction "am not" to "ain't", which grammatical sticklers the world over frown upon (and which doesn't seemed to be covered in many English classes in Japan). And I bring it all together with the dreaded double negative, an even bigger grammatical faux pas in English.

Rather than being ungrammatical, what we really have here is an example of something that's only grammatically correct in a given kind of language (more on that here); in this case, very informal language. That, together with the somewhat creative word usage (more on that here) make it pretty tough to parse out the meaning for many English learners, even though native speakers would have no trouble (and even though some of those English learners can breeze through contracts and legalese in English that some native speakers might have trouble with).

The attorney in particular that made the comment is actually bolstering his English by watching U.S. television shows, among other things, and with enough of that I expect he'll sooner or later be able to tackle drinking-party English with ease. Now if we can just figure out how to get all English learners in Japan to get the same kind of exposure, we'll be making real headway.

I've moved to Japan

In case you've been wondering where I've been for the past three months, I've moved to Japan! If you've never done it before, moving to pretty much the other side of the world can be something of a complicated process, so I ran out of blogging time with all the things on the to-do list. I'm still neck-deep in a to-do list of unpacking and whatnot, but one way or another it'll be finished pretty soon, so hopefully I can get back to plenty of language-learning goodness.

I arrived here on May 31 and I'm working at Nagashima Ohno and Tsunematsu, one of Japan's "Big 4" law firms. While I was hired of course to work primarily in English, everything around me is in Japanese and I get lots of exposure to it, which is creating a great language-learning environment (which, unsurprisingly, is heavy in legalese). I'm also living with my in-laws, so the percentage of time that I'm only using Japanese is pretty high, although I'm not quite at complete immersion because of the legal work I need to do in English and the English I speak with my kids.

I've set myself a little goal for the next year: I want to get my Japanese to sound indistinguishable from a native speaker almost all the time. We'll see how that goes.

I've also got a whole bunch of half-baked posts from the past few months, including a lot more on my Getting to Grammar series, that I hope to push out the door over the next several weeks. So keep your eyes open! Although I'm not quite out of the woods yet in terms of things that are keeping me from blogging, the posts'll be here soon!

Language-learning linkwrap 4/4/2009

European Parliament split over language teaching: Next time any of my fellow yanks get themselves in a tizzy regarding the use of Spanish in the U.S., just remember: it could be worse; translation costs could take up 1% of our budget. Tangential money quote: "'[P]romoting the learning of […] an international "lingua franca",' such as English, should be a 'political priority'." As if there were another international lingua franca.

Young Americans going abroad to teach: When in economic peril, teach English abroad.

Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials: Say what? Babies can learn in their sleep! I wonder when and if that wears off...

On to Z! Quirky regional dictionary nears finish: For buffs of obscure Americanisms, this book's for you.

More languages, not fewer: Professor Erin Hippolyte "regularly see[s] statistics that link world language proficiency to salaries that are 8-20 percent higher." What exactly is a "world language" anyway? I wonder if it's a West Virginia regionalism for "foreign language". Someone should check a quirky regional dictionary. I am probably proficient in one or two "world languages", so where do I apply for the raise? When are Professor Hippolyte's office hours?

The Waver's Dilemma: A lot more information on how runners communicate in English than I gave you in my post on the runners' nod. For the record, I'm personally against waiving on the grounds that it makes you break form.

Son's first word is ねんね ("sleep") in Japanese

With my obvious interest in language learning, it's great fun to have kids and watch how they learn languages. If you've been reading this blog, you know that my four-year-old daughter has long been a part of my language-learning observations, and now my son had joined the speaking world as well.

We've got what is essentially a trilingual environment set up for the kids. I and my mom, who lives with us, speak only English to the kids. My wife speaks only Japanese with them and we make them speak Japanese with each other (which has so far consisted of our daughter speaking Japanese to our son). We use only Chinese-speaking babysitters or nannies and have them around enough that our daughter speaks Chinese as well as English and Japanese.

Our son's first official word is nenne ねんね in Japanese, which means "sleep". It's the an infantile form of neru 寝る ("to sleep"). We give if the official designation because he's clearly saying the word and linking it up to a meaning that he can use to communicate with.

More observations of a one-year-old learning to speak, after the jump.

Read more...He's said lots of things that happen to be words. Mama, baba 爸爸 ("father" in Chinese), dada, etc., but he didn't seem to use these consistently enough to indicate things as to really count as his first word. He'd at times call me "Mama", or just yell it out randomly, for instance. However, he clearly uses nenne to convey a single meaning.

However, his interpretation of nenne meaning is a little different. When he says nenne, he lays down flat on his belly on something soft, whether a pillow, a bed, or a person. If you say nenne to him while in the living room, he'll grab a pillow from the couch, lay it on the floor, lay down on top of it and say "Nenne!" He'll use it when he lays down to go to sleep, etc.

There was one earlier contender for his first word, and that was ge 个 in Chinese. He'd point at things and say, "Ge!" We speculated that he got that from the ge in zhège 这个 ("this") nàge 那个 ("that"), which he heard from the babysitters. However, since the ge was only really part of the word, we couldn't really count that as his first word.

He's also got a few other close contenders. When an airplane flies overhead, he says, "Woooo!" in imitation of the noise it makes. When a car drives by, he says "Vroom!", again in imitation of the noise it makes, which happened to be among my daughters first words as well.

One interesting thing is that he got basic intonation down before he ever said a word. He could long ask a question by pointing and saying some syllable with a rising intonation to make a tone. He would give a warning when something was amiss, like a door being open that we usually kept shut, with a sharp, high tone. He's use a fall tone to indicate comfort or the like.

Gestures came in before words as well. That's a well-known phenomena; children whose parents use sign language end up learning to communicate with that long before their peers learn to speak. Pointing, nodding his head, shaking his head, clapping after doing something good, tilting his head to the side to indicate inquisitiveness, etc., are all among the gestures he learned early on.

Language-learning linkwrap 3/15/09

Old age begins at 27: Nevertheless, "abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increase until at least the age of 60." That, of course, would include languages.

The Economist translated into Chinese by Chinese readers (in Chinese) (via Waxy): If you like The Economist and are learning Chinese, here's a chance to read all of the articles translated into Chinese. What's great about this is that you can always refer back to the original English if you're confused. Now I'm sure there's a copyright issue or two to be found in here...

Where Education and Assimilation Collide: The New York Times discusses the debate over how to teach all of the non-English speakers coming into the States.

日本語を勉強する (in English): Aspiring Polyglot has a nice bunch of Japanese language-learning links.

Flight attendant's interpretative translation

I'm now once again back in the States again. My last flight, from Tokyo to New York, was a flight bound for Sao Paolo via New York, so all announcements were in Japanese, English, Portuguese, and Chinese.

While we were still in Tokyo, there was a bit of a delay after we boarded. One of the Japanese flight attendants came on and announced, in Japanese, that we were waiting for one of the passengers who had checked in but not boarded, and at the same time they were seeking to remove that passenger's luggage just in case that person didn't make it. There was a fair amount of detail in the announcement. This largely matched what was said in English as well, although there was less detail in English.

When we got to the Portuguese announcement, the flight attendant said what was going on in a curt, single sentence, saying the delays were based on "technical difficulties".

I happened to be sitting next to a Japanese-Brazilian, who noted that that's thanks to a cultural difference between the two. Whereas the Japanese will give you lots of detail about things like that, in Brazil you'll be much more likely to just get enough to keep you appeased. So the difference in "translation" here stands as one of many examples of how the culture of the language you're speaking might manifest itself in speech—or in a lack thereof.

Native speakers using foreign languages in their native tongue

Although the title of this post may sound oxymoronic, bear with me.

One of the Japanese podcasts that I listen to is 日本経済新聞＜総合版＞ (Nihon Keizai Shinbun Sougouban), which focuses on economic issues in Japanese and is of course aimed at native speakers. However, after commercials, an American announcer pops in and says, "The news continues on Radio Nikkei." In English. For those of you who've spent any time in Japan, that's hardly surprising, but could you imagine the parallel in the States? If they threw the same thing into an English podcast in, say, Spanish, I'd expect that most people would have no idea what's being said and that's why it rarely, if ever, happens in the States.

I'm not convinced that everyone in Japan would know what's being said in this case, although I might guess that the subscribers to this podcast are probably a bit above average. Still, everyone in Japan has studied English; it's required in school. So, in theory, they should be able to understand it.

So here's an interesting question. If a foreign language becomes so well understood among speakers of a given language that they throw words, phrases, and even entire sentences from that foreign language into the dialogue when using their native language, has that foreign language actually become part of their own language? Think about it another way; if someone comes to Japan from, say, China, would they need to understand English to the same level as the Japanese do in order to understand what's going on in Japanese? They very well might. Indeed, the Chinese are a very apt example, because one of their trouble points in Japanese are words written in katakana, which are primarily from English and don't share the Chinese character roots that many Japanese words do.

Link: Nikkei Shinbun Podcasts (in Japanese)

Trouble switching between langauges

My Japanese father-in-law is studying Chinese. He's a major Sinophile, and I'm pretty sure that when he retires we'll be able to find him wandering around some obscure places in China. He's probably pretty happy that his daughter and son-in-law speak Chinese, and that our kids are effectively being raised trilingually, with Chinese one of the three.

I'm now back in Japan after a two-week stint in China, and I've come back with a suitcase full of Chinese children's books for the kids. When my father-in-law heard this, he wanted to see them, and he immediately grabbed one and started going through it, asking me questions about what they were saying.

He was asking questions mostly in Japanese but with some of his Chinese thrown in there. I found that, if he used Chinese, in replying to him I'd slip right into Chinese, even though I knew I should be using Japanese for him to understand. He might say something like 这是什么？ ("What is this?"), and, knowing full well that if I just broke out in Chinese to explain it he probably wouldn't understand, my first reaction was nevertheless still to start off with Chinese. It was as if by hearing the Chinese my mind had switched into Chinese mode and I had to think consciously to switch it to Japanese.

Read more...I found I was having particular trouble when I had to explain a Chinese phrase in the midst of Japanese. One book he looked at is called 丹利的菜园 ("Tanley's Vegetable Garden"). (Tanley is my best guess as to what the name is supposed to be in English.) While Japanese have an edge in understanding words made of Chinese characters based on meaning, such as 菜园 ("vegetable garden"), phonetic words, such as 丹利 (Tanley), don't mean very much to them. So he asked me what that was. To answer him, I said, "I think the rabbit's name is Tanley," using the Chinese word for Tanley: ウサギの名前は丹利だと思う. To say that, I had to be conscious of what I was saying in order to avoid continuing on in Chinese.

More broadly speaking, being in China for two weeks seems to have put me in Chinese mode. When I got back to Japan on Sunday, I found myself responding with hèi 嘿, when someone called me, which would roughly be the equivalent of "Yeah?" in English. The Japanese equivalent would be hai, but Chinese was just jumping out of my mouth.

One of my most interesting examples of this sort of issue occurred when I just returned to the States from Brazil. In Brazil, I wasn't using anything but Portuguese, so I was completely converted over to Portuguese mode. It was maybe the first or second day I had been back. My mom was pulling something out of the dryer and asked me a question about the clothes. I responded to her, and she laughed awkwardly. The problem was that there was nothing funny about what I said—it was just some mundane comment about the clothes—but when I thought back to what had just came out of my mouth, I realized it was Portuguese. The thing that made this so interesting was that I didn't even realize that I had used Portuguese until her response made me replay it in my head.

So, I'm curious... have any of you had anything like this happen to you before? If so, drop a line in the comments.

The blurry lines between formal and informal forms in Japanese

I've got a question about Japanese that I'd like to address to the experts (Tae Kim, I hope you're listening!).

Most Japanese grammars present the formal desu/-masu forms and the regular forms as a dichotomy: you pick one and use it 100% of the time with a certain person or you pick the other and use it 100% of the time with that person. The thing is that a lot of native Japanese speakers mix up the two in actual usage with the same person. My question is what rules do these follow? When can you throw in a few informal forms in otherwise formal speech and vice versa? There seem to be a variety of conditions for this, but I've never heard anyone try to explain it.

Read more...Sometimes the reason for such mixing is clear. For instance, friends who otherwise never use the formal forms with each other will sometimes use them jokingly, creating an effect of feigned formality that can often be used for sarcasm. Parallels to this usage can be found in all the languages I've learned; think of using "Would you be so kind as to pass the bread?" to your boyfriend of girlfriend. You're either joking or annoyed.

But there are other times when it's not so clear.

For instance, my Japanese father-in-law typically only uses the informal forms with me. But he'll sometimes throw in the desu/-masu forms as well. It's probably more than 95% informal forms. He seems to use the formal forms when he wants to emphasize a point, and typically it's either a desu yo or a -te masu. Sometimes it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with making a point. For instance, if I say something like, "Can I borrow this?", an informal way to say "Sure" would be "Ii yo", but he might say "Ii desu yo". While that sounds more formal, it certainly doesn't feel more formal, and he'll whip right back into the informal forms on a dime after that. My mother-in-law and him also often will toss in formal forms when they are speaking to each other in roughly the same manner.

Another instance I encountered was on the train a few days ago. I was sitting down and two guys got on and were standing in front of me talking. Based on how old they looked and what they were saying, I got the impression that they were college kids, one younger than the other. The younger one was generally using the formal forms while the older one was generally using the informal forms. That is typical enough. However, while the older one didn't seem to include any formal forms, the younger one would on occasion include some informal forms.

It's clear that the use of these forms is not a complete bifurcation. There are shades of gray, in which you can throw some informal forms in with formal forms and vice versa, and I'd love to know what the rules behind this are.

Why do we call Japan "Japan"?

Kelly of Aspiring Polyglot left this comment on my earlier post about how to say "China" in Russian and Japanese:

Would you happen to know why we call Japan 'Japan' and not Nihon or Nippon?

This is one that I dug up a long time ago because I wondered the same thing.

The kanji for "Japan" are 日本. They respectively mean "sun" and "origin", or together "origin of the sun". This is of course from the perspective of China, to the East of which Japan lies in the same direction as where the sun rises. That's also where English gets "land of the rising sun" from, which is simply a more nuanced translation of the characters than "origin of the sun".

Read more...The word in Japanese is pronounced Nihon or, with a bit more emphasis or formality, Nippon. Nihon is actually a relatively recent shortening of Nippon, which in turn is a shortening of the readings of the two characters following normal character combination rules. 日 can be read nichi or jitsu in this case, and nichi is preferred here, while 本 can be read as hon. Typically, when two character are adjacent to each other in a single word, the first ends in chi or tsu, and the second starts with h-, the chi or tsu is dropped, the consonant doubled (or っ is added for all of you who are beyond romaji), and the h- becomes a p-. You thus get Nippon. You can also see the pattern in, e.g., ippon (一本, いっぽん, "one long, slender object") combining ichi and hon, or in happyaku (八百, はっぴゃく, "eight hundred") combining hachi and hyaku.

Once I had figured all this out when I was first studying Japanese, I thought I had figured out where "Japan" came from as well; obviously people had just used the other reading for 日 at some point, i.e., jitsu, which would have resulted in a reading of Jippon, and that's only a linguistic hop, skip and a jump away from "Japan".

As it turned out, I was on the right track but not quite there.

Nihon and "Japan" ultimately share the same etymological roots, but the path to the English word isn't very clear. It's believed that it came to English via one of the Chinese dialects' pronunciation of the characters 日本. It's these same pronunciations that likely supplied both the j in jitsu, and in "Japan", so my guess was a wee bit too high in the etymological tree.

Marco Polo called Japan "Cipangu", which, in Italian, would be pronounced like "Cheepangoo". (The gu is from the Chinese character 国, meaning country or kingdom, and which is currently pronounced guó in Mandarin.) This is thought to have come from a Wu dialect like Shanghainese. The Portuguese also brought words like Giapan over to Europe, which ultimately led to the English word. Below are a few of the Chinese dialects that might have been involved and their modern day pronunciations of Japan:

Cantonese	Jatbun
Fujianese	Jít-pún
Shanghainese	Zeppen

Links:
Names of Japan on Wikipedia
Japan in the Online Etymology Dictionary

Getting exposure to your target language in a plane

I'm currently on a plane on my way to Tokyo for a week-long trip there followed by a week-long trip to China. Sitting here, it's obvious what a useful environment for language learning your flying time can be; the by-necessity multilingual environment of a flight to another language zone means you can easily get some exposure to your target language while in transit that probably isn't always readily available outside of where the language is spoken.

Read more...The first opportunity you'll come across are the flight attendants, who will probably be there to greet you when you get on board. Greet them in your target language, and if you've got any questions, try to ask them in the target language. They'll probably initially make assumptions about what language you speak. On a flight like mine from New York to Tokyo, Japanese-looking Asians will be initially addressed in Japanese and everyone else will initially be addressed in English, if the flight attendants have the language skills. I'm on a Japan Airlines flight, so most of the flight attendants are Japanese but of course all of them also speak English. Before I said anything to them, they predictably spoke to me in English, but once I spoke to them in Japanese they switched to Japanese. Some of them seem to be prefer Japanese when possible, and I'm more than happy to accommodate. You'll sometimes find that even if you speak your target language, they'll still won't use it back to you, but be stubborn; don't switch back just because they don't deem you target language worthy. Some flights will not have so many target language speakers, such as my typical Continental flights to Japan. In that case, you can direct any questions you have to those who speak the target language.

Although you're more likely to need to communicate in some way with the flight attendants, your fellow passengers are another good source for target language exposure. There's probably a pretty good chance that the person sitting next to you is a target language speaker. Find a way to strike up a conversation. Unfortunately, the person I'm sitting next to right now is a bit reticent and has been sleeping most the time, but on other flights I've had great conversations with those sitting next to me.

When they come around with reading material, grab something in the target language. Even if you're not that strong in the target language, get a newspaper or the like and see what you can understand. A few words here and a few words there might be all you can get, but it's nevertheless more exposure. There's also some reading material in the seat pocket in front of you and on signs around the plane. Although safety instructions and the like might not be the most exciting things in the world, they're usually in the target language and one or more other languages, so you've probably got a translation already sitting right in front of you.

The onboard entertainment is another good source. It will typically be in multiple languages, either with target language audio or with target language subtitles. Watch some of these to see what you can pick up, or if you're getting it all just sit back and enjoy.

And, of course, don't forget to be a good little Boy Scout and "be prepared". With a laptop, iPod, electronic dictionary, and an array of other possibilities, you can make that "wasted" flight time quite productive.

Saying "China" in Russian and Japanese

Today I came across Китай (Kitay), the Russian word for China. Curious as to how China ended up with that name in Russian while most other languages that I'm familiar with have a form similar to English, I guessed that it was related to the English word Cathay and Wikipedia appears to have confirmed that for me. They both seem to trace their roots back to Qìdān (契丹), which I'll wager was pronounced "Kitan" or the like back in the day.

If you that's not enough useless knowledge about what China is called in various languages, then I've got one more for you. In Japanese, China is generally called Chuugoku (中国), but they've got a couple of versions like "China" as well, one which is A-OK and the other which is taboo. The one that's fine to use, and is even kind of cute, is just taking the word from modern English: Chaina (チャイナ). Like many English words, the Japanese flexibly stick it into their script and then use it freely, if informally, although the only place I've heard it commonly used is in a contracted form to say Chinese: Chaigo (チャイ語). You'll particularly hear college students use this one when discussing studying languages, and they do the same sort of contraction with other languages as well. For instance, "French" becomes Furago (フラ語) instead of the full form of Furansugo (フランス語).

The term you don't want to ever use in Japanese is Shina (支那). Although the mayor of Tokyo might beg to differ and has been known to use it, it is generally offensive to Chinese people due to its wartime use, despite its uncontroversial origins dating back to Sanskrit (read the whole story here).

Bilingoz review: Great specialized Japanese vocab, could use some better study methods

Bilingoz (via Aspiring Polyglot), the brainchild of Mark MacIntyre, a Canadian who has logged nine years in Japan teaching English and finding the existing tools insufficient to teach those with a need for specialized vocabulary, is a study aid for English speakers in need of specialized Japanese vocabulary (or vice versa, I suppose), such as accounting, dentistry, metallurgy, etc., and one in particular that attracted a lawyer like me: law. So I kicked the tires by testing out my knowledge of basic Japanese legal terms, which (thank goodness) I seem to know pretty well.

Read more...Here's what you can do on Bilingoz:

• "Study", i.e., play a matching game in which you are presented with a six-by-five grid, with each square of the grid containing either Japanese or English. You must then match up the squares, similar to the child's game Memory.
• Take a "quiz", i.e, do a multiple-choice quiz, which randomly selects wrong answers from the English translations of other vocab.
• Listen to an audio recording of the words in Japanese at the basic level (i.e., their least advanced level). This is incredibly convenient and will save you a lot of time when you can't recall how a character is pronounced. Hopefully, they'll be added to the more advanced levels sometime soon.

And that's about it. Not quite a one-trick pony, but not far from it.

The exercises suffer from the process of elimination problem, which I've discussed before; because you can use testing strategy to eliminate answers, you can often figure out the right answer without really recognizing the word when you see it. I confess to finding the Memory-likegame mildly entertaining, but I don't think it would be as effective as a more standard flashcard-based system. I'd love to see them add traditional flashcard review as an option.

The other big downer is that it doesn't record your progress. You don't log in, so there's no record of what you have or haven't studied, meaning that you'll probably repeat words you already know in the exercises while trying to cover those that you don't.

Nevertheless, the vocab lists are of high quality; I wish I had them when I first began learning Japanese legal terms, because using these tools could have saved me some time. And the pronunciation recordings at the basic level are quite convenient. While the tools leave something to be desired, they are not without their utility and I'd recommend Bilingoz if you need specialist vocabulary in one of the categories covered.

Saturday Chinese school for my daughter (and me)

To get back to the theme of ethnic experiences in the U.S. that I touched on earlier, many of you in the U.S. or Canada may remember from your childhood that you, if you're Asian, or your Asian friends always had to go to school on Saturday. While the rest of us were getting our brains rotted out by Saturday morning cartoons, Asian kids' parents forced them to do more school, as if any kid thought five days wasn't already enough. Those forced to go never seemed very happy about it, and often rebelled and stopped going when they got old enough to pull it off. As much as these kids may have been unhappy during classes, those who actually ended up sticking with it ended up (hopefully) thanking their parents, because they were probably pretty darn good at the languages that those classes were teaching them.

My daughter, age four, just kicked off her experience with this Asian-American tradition with Saturday Chinese school (yes, that is despite her Japanese mother and her Italian-American father). We recently discovered that there's one of these schools about ten minutes from our house and, although we missed the first semester, we were eager to get her started and finally got around to it today. While she's had Chinese nannies and babysitters for most of the time that she's been speaking, we found that she was progressing a lot more in English (she goes to English nursery school every day, karate once a week, and dance occasionally) and Japanese (she goes to Japanese Kumon classes twice a week and ballet once a week) than in China, whereas Chinese was originally her best language (she started speaking while we were in China).

As it turns out, her Chinese classes here are as much of a language experience for her as they are for my wife and me.

Read more...One of Felicia's babysitters had called the school this week to see what we needed to do to get her enrolled, as their online registration wasn't working. He basically said just go there at 9AM on Saturday to take care of whatever paperwork there was, and she should be set for class at 10:45AM.

We show up at the middle school where the classes are held to see a parking lot full of Chinese people (they were probably mostly or at least partially Chinese-American, but let's just keep it simple and call them "Chinese"). We then go into the cafeteria, which was something of a base for the classes and a gathering places for pretty much every one related to a kid attending any of the classes, and this too was chock full of Chinese people with an occasional white person (case in point) floating around. In the typical entrepreneurial Chinese style (that somehow, amazingly, Mao managed to suppress for a few decades last century), one person set up a store of various snacks and drinks on one table, looking like they had just bought bulk and driven it straight over here. And some of the scenes there were straight out of a movie like The Joy Luck Club, such as the cafeteria table claimed for a game of mah-jong by a group of grandparents, with grandchildren running around at their feet.

We wandered around the cafeteria for a bit and weren't sure who was in charge until someone started setting up a printer and a scanner at a desk near what I suppose was supposed to be the front of the cafeteria. So we walked up to them to inquire about what we needed to do.

We thought there might be a little issue about our daughter starting in the middle of the year, so my wife, who thinks I'm a better negotiator, had me do the talking. Although I'm pretty sure they all speak English just fine, I opted to use Chinese because of a concern about the classes. There's a Chinese class for Chinese speakers, like my daughter, and another for Chinese learners, i.e., English speakers who are starting to learn Chinese. I was concerned that they'd see my white face and think, "Oh, here's another one for the foreigner's class," and so I hoped to evade that discussion by going at them in Chinese. Doing that, they would assume that my Japanese wife is Chinese and then just put my daughter in the class that promises better language exposure by not using English (although the teacher did keep saying "sticker" in English while speaking Chinese in lieu of the perfectly available Chinese word tiēzhǐ). Sure enough, the mid-year start date was raised as an issue. We weren't concerned about my wife speaking up either, because her accent's good enough that she falls within a range that sounds Chinese, and Chinese people are always generically asking, "So you're from Southern China?" when they hear her talk.

Their first answer was, "No, we're full,", but one thing I found to be true in China was that, if someone initially said no to you, persistence could turn that into a yes, and I intended to see if the same thing worked here. The rational analysis sometimes seemed to be, "Is it less of a hassle to just say yes to this guy or to keep saying no?" If they say no and you just walk away, that's a piece of cake for them, but if you make a nag of yourself suddenly it becomes easier to just let you do whatever you want. (This is something I discovered as a kid worked with my parents too, but I'd rather my kids come up with this idea.) For instance, when I was studying Chinese in Beijing, the placement test put me a level or two below the top of maybe a dozen levels, but I wanted to be in the highest level possible because of how rapidly you can learn when you're immersed. When I was first told no, I kept bugging the person who told me no and several other people until I finally got bumped up, clearly above what the test results had gotten me. I'm not sure if this works in all bureaucracies in China (unfortunately, in some, a wad of cash will work much better), but it usually worth a shot.

The first answer we got from the Chinese administrator was, "Sorry, it's the middle of the year, we're full." So I said that we had called earlier this week and they said to show up at 9AM and we should be able to take care of everything. He asked who we spoke to and, since the babysitter called, I had no idea. I did know, however, that it was "the guy whose name and number were on the website", and I told him so. Apparently he had no idea who that was. After effectively repeating this interchange a few times, he finally gave in. I think he might have thought that the person our babysitter had spoken was someone important that was higher up in the administration, so he was weighing potentially needing to deal with that guy or just letting us sign up. He went for the signing up.

So we take care of the paperwork and whatnot and we're sitting in this cafeteria full of Chinese people. And then my son reminded me what good language-learning tools one-year-old kids can be; my son kept going up to people and pointing at them, and this would repeatedly result in them calling him cute and start talking with us.

My wife eventually left to run some errands, leaving me to escort our daughter to class. After dropping her off and again getting a chance to converse in Chinese - this time with the teacher, I was left alone. There happened to be free Chinese-langauge newspapers there so I picked one up and started reading it. It appears that the de facto standard Chinese in the U.S. uses traditional characters, and there were a few that were driving me nuts because I was sure I knew them as simplified characters but the traditional versions weren't ringing any bells. In any case, one of the articles I read was criticizing China's stimulus plan, saying it only helped bureaucrats' favored companies, while the U.S. stimulus plan was aimed at the average person. A pretty interesting read, but it was a shame I didn't have my dictionary with me because now I have to go back and reread it to find all the words I didn't know, if I even end up bothering to do so.

Today also happened to be the day of what they called "parent-teacher conferences", but were less the one-on-one meeting that that term conjures up than the teacher giving an update to all the parents at once. So I got to sit through my first such meeting in Chinese today, and I was surprised at how easily I was able to follow what she was saying. There were only two words I didn't get, but since they are things that the kids will be doing this upcoming semester (I got that much), I'll probably be learning the words soon enough.

So now we have a chance every Saturday to hang out in a hall full of Chinese speakers, and as my daughter makes friends and we meet people there, I'm sure we'll be putting our Chinese to great use. This is just one example of the many creative ways that you can find people to chat with, if not outright native-speaker tutors, and also get other kinds of exposure to your target language in less-than-obvous places far from the language zone. If you had asked me where I could find hundreds of Chinese people gathered together every Saturday in the New Jersey burbs just a month ago, I'm sure I would have had no idea. But now that I have found just that, it's definitely a great language-learning opportunity for all members of my family - and not only those for whom we're paying tuition.