So, in my post a few days ago, I forgot to mention that I finished my finals for this semester on Saturday. My last final was for my main class, the class where I study all aspects of Japanese. The final was split up into two days. The first day was kanji (Japanese characters), grammar and essay writing. The second day was the speaking test.
After I had finished writing my essay about American living spaces (I chose to write about log cabins lol), I looked back over the essay and I had the feeling that I was finally getting the feel of Japanese grammar. I thought it really looked like something that I might find in my Japanese textbook for better or worse lol. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how well I did, if they do, in fact, give me the exam back. Since it’s the end of the semester and I’ll be in a new class next semester, I don’t know if they’ll return it or not.
Anyway, the second part of the final was the speaking part. We had to speak for five minutes in Japanese about a particular topic. I chose to speak about American food. I talked a bit about Native American food like corn, squash and venison and then I talked about American food like hamburgers, hot dogs, ice cream, apple pie, etc. I also spoke about America’s process of taking other country’s food and then “fast food”izing it lol.
After I spoke for five minutes about American food, my teacher was talking to me about how I did and she said (in Japanese of course), “There weren’t any grammatical errors really…” which is good because Japanese grammar is very different from English grammar and it is hard to get a grip on.
Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say the grammar is hard. It’s easy to go through each of the rules and learn it. The hard part is actually knowing how to form the sentences so that it sounds natural.
When I first started learning foreign languages, I thought it was just about learning vocabulary and grammar rules. But more recently, I’ve begun to realize that it’s not just individual vocabulary and grammar rules but actual chunks of the language. A word is almost never alone, it is always surrounded by other words so to study a word alone is not natural, I think.
Also, studying individual words leads to a process where when speaking the language, one tries to pull all these individual words together and is unaware of the underlying process that binds them together. For this reason, the sentences that are created seem unnatural to native speakers. Some grammar constructions just aren’t used in certain cases and some words just aren’t used with other words.
I remember a few years ago, I went with some friends to Taiwan over the summer to visit my Taiwanese friend Jimmy. One of my American friends asked how to say something like, “I am able to speak Monkey-speak” (Monkey-speak being the construction of the word “monkey” in addition to the Chinese word for “language” which is placed after a word to denote a language). My friend Jimmy translated it like that and then my friend tried to say the Mandarin phrase to his older brother, Peter, to see if he would understand his accent.
In fact, he did not understand it. Peter said that it didn’t really make sense because nobody would say that. He said that it would be like saying “Your writing is like turkey scratch”. The point is that nobody says “turkey scratch”, you only say “chicken scratch”. To say something like “turkey scratch” or “pig scratch” or “fly scratch” or something would not sound natural.
Likewise, there are many such chunks in our language where certain words just end up with other words. If you don’t have a good feel for this and just try to substitute individual words in, you’ll end up with an unnatural feel.
For this reason, I’ve made a shift from studying grammar rules and individual words to studying chunks of the language. If I find a phrase or a sentence in something I’m reading, I write down the entire sentence instead of just individual words. This is so that I can learn the grammatical structure, as well. Later, I can use the exact sentence in speech, or I can swap different words in.
I think when native speakers acquire their native language, they do so by learning and using these chunks. A child is never forced to learn individual words and grammar rules and then be expected to make up sentences on his or her own because a child is surrounded by speech which includes a series of words. In fact, children don’t even have a sense of separation between words. They merely listen to the stream of conversation around them and their brains eventually begin to figure out things like “let’s go….” followed by a verb is one particular sentence structure while “I’m about to….” is another.
The difficulty for an English speaker learning Japanese is that these types of structures are not transparent between the two languages. That is to say that I can’t simply swap in the Japanese word for “let’s” and “go” and then come up with the equivalent Japanese expression. It just doesn’t work that way.
When I was learning Spanish, of course I had no idea at the time, but in fact, I already knew a lot of Spanish before I even started to learn it. Before I even knew what “hola” meant, I knew a lot of Spanish. This is because a lot of the grammatical structure is transparent between Spanish and English. For one thing, there are a lot of equivalents for those sorts of phrases I was talking about before. The “let’s go…” and “I’m about to…” types of phrases. But let’s look even more simply.
When I first started learning Spanish, my teacher never had to explain to us the fact that the subject comes before the verb. She never really had to explain that the object usually came after the verb (excluding those words for things like “it”).
She would write a sentence like “Yo voy a la tienda” (I’m going to the store) and there we had it. The grammatical structure of this sentence is 100% transparent between the two languages. All you have to do is swap out the English words for the Spanish words and you have a natural sounding Spanish sentence.
In Japanese, the same sentence would be ?????(mise ni iku) which is something like “store to going” (to include the word “I” would sound unnatural here). As you can see, if you’re an English speaker learning Japanese, you need to learn the structure as well as the vocabulary.
Additionally, I remember when my class was learning phrases such as “Yo tengo hambre” in Spanish and people thought it was so confusing because literally it reads “I have hunger”, whereas in English, we would say “I am hungry”.
But even in cases like this, knowing English has supplied a lot of help. For example, the word for “I” is at the beginning of the sentence in both cases and the verb is in the middle. The word for “hunger” also comes at the end for both sentences. Additionally, the shortest word is the pronoun in both cases. Also, “hungry” and “hambre” are similar sounding/looking words. Let’s also not forget just the fact that both sentences are written in the Roman script thereby also providing support for English speakers trying to learn Spanish.
Basically, one just has to learn the fact that in Spanish, they use the verb “have” for this type of sentence instead of “be”. Besides that, the sentence leads to transparency and other clues which help English speakers. As you can imagine, the equivalent Japanese phrase does not lend itself in any of these ways to the English speaker and thus, the English speaker has to learn/remember more pieces of information in order to grasp that particular sentence.
Presumably, this is why Japanese is considered a harder language for English speakers than Spanish. There are simply more pieces of information to learn and less clues for the English speaker so the amount of total information required to learn to get a general grasp of it is far more than the amount needed for Spanish.
This is how I came to learn that studying chunks of the language is more beneficial than studying individual words and grammar rules. If one studies simply individual words and grammar rules, one loses all of that sort of thing I was talking about before. For learning Spanish, one can get by pretty far with just studying the words and grammar because a lot of the underlying structure is transparent between Spanish and English (as I showed before). However, with Japanese, if you tried to do this sort of thing, you would be in quite a bit of trouble since the underlying structure is completely different. For that reason, you can gain the rest of the language when you study chunks. That’s why I try to write down phrases and sentences on my notecards instead of just individual words so that I can (try to) learn the structure, as well.