robbieinjapan.com

So, I finally got a TV here.

I live in an international student dorm, so when students move out, they often leave things here that they usually have at home already and also things that they can’t take home on a plane like televisions, rice cookers, toasters, etc.

It is nearing the end of the first semester (I have two more classes left and one final!) and so there are some students here who are getting ready to move out.

A few days ago, I went to talk to my German friend, Akram, and he mentioned that there some things including a TV in the place where people leave stuff for others to take (he had, of course, already taken a bottle of sake from there). Since he already had a TV in his room (he was lucky enough to receive one at the beginning of the semester), he helped me get the one in the lobby.

So now, at long last, I am able to watch Japanese TV whenever I please. I’ve only seen TV here for a few days but I already have many topics I could talk about, lol. For now though, I’ll talk about something I just saw a few minutes ago.

I think they had just been playing some anime kids show and it was just ending when they had this short segment come on about language usage. It must be a weekly thing because this time, they said they were going to talk about a particular usage of a word. Namely, the use of ???(zenzen) with non-negative words like ????(daijyoubu). Usually, ???(zenzen) means something like “not at all” and thus, is only used with words that have a negative meaning like ?????? (oishikunai, not delicious) so it would be ???????? (zenzen oishikunai, not delicious at all).

My guess is that because ?? (zenzen) has the feeling of an extreme (in the normal case, the extreme of negative), it has recently come into usage as describing the extreme in the other direction by simply combining it with positive words like ???? (oishii, delicious) becoming ?????? (zenzen oishii, completely delicious).

Anyway, the interesting thing was that the man was talking about how it’s not really correct usage to use this construction of ?? (zenzen) with positive words but then he showed some statistics. They asked people if they would say “?????” (zenzen akarui) which means something like “really bright”.

6.5% of people 60 years of age and older would say it but 54% of teenagers and 20 year olds would say it. There was a gradient from this age group all the way up to 60 years of age with the percentage of those who would say it diminishing until the 6.5% point.

This is an interesting thing to see a language evolving. If children learn a language from their parents and other people who already know the language, then how does the language change? It’s amazing to see that a language already has significant changes in usage made to it between two generations. If this grammatical construction in the TV program seems unnatural to most people aged 60 years and older, then how did it become natural for those aged 20 years and younger?

While this grammatical construction of ?? (zenzen) with positive words is technically incorrect grammar now, it’s possible that in the future, if more and more people use it, it will reach a point where it is proper grammar.

For this reason, I think it is silly how back in America, people try to curb English into “correct grammar”. “Correct grammar” today was probably at some point “incorrect grammar” many years ago. And besides, who is to say which grammar is “correct”? Is the English spoken 50 years ago the “correct” English? Or is the English spoken 100 years ago the “correct” English. What about 200 years ago? 500 years?

As a result, I remember a professor I had my freshmen year of college who was particularly obsessed with correct English grammar usage. We spent much effort and time fixing our English grammatical “errors”. For example, I quickly searched google.com and found this sentence from an interview: “No, one of the reasons I’m even here today is because I have to quickly go downstairs and edit these shows so they could go on in November because we didn’t think we’d be on until January.” My teacher would flip out if he ever saw this sentence because it has a split infinitive: “I have to quickly go downstairs”. Technically, you can’t put words between an infinitive, in this case, ”to go”.

There are many other examples which are becoming common use in English which violate former English grammatical rules. I don’t think there’s any particular merit in stopping these changes since, as I said before, the “incorrect” grammar today will be the “correct” grammar tomorrow. I wonder if I should have tried to apply Shakesperian English grammatical rules to my professor’s English since surely Shakesperian English is older and therefore the more “correct” English. Yet, at the same time that I see no merit in stopping changes, I also recognize the fact that many people take English grammar seriously (like my professor) and that not using proper grammar reflects poorly on me. Perhaps being able to use “proper” grammar is simply a sign of education and high status, like knowing which fork to use for which course when eating dinner.

At any rate, it’s interesting to me how language evolves since clearly native speakers do not speak a language by grammatical rules. That’s not how it was learned. When you grew up, you didn’t have to learn the subjunctive case or think about grammar constructions involving superlatives. Your learning of language and its usage is based on what “feels” correct which was developed after hearing the language spoken around you in perhaps millions of examples since you  were in the womb of your mother. Because we don’t learn our native tongue through grammatical rules, the sense of what “feels” right is apt to change. I think this is why language evolves from generation to generation.

Also, this leads to some challenges for the language learner because the grammar explanations given for certain aspects of a language are contrived or don’t even make much logical sense. This is because language is spoken based on feeling, not grammatical rules. I remember when I was in high school and we were learning Spanish which is quite close to English when compared to something like Japanese and even then, our teacher described some grammatical point and everyone had a problem with it. The reason everyone had a problem with it was because logically, it didn’t make much sense.

It was then that I began to realize that I should forget about grammar “rules” and begin to think about the language in terms of how it “feels” to a native speaker. So for that particular point in Spanish, I began to think about what the Spanish speaker would be thinking or feeling when they wanted to express a sentence using that grammatical point, and that’s when it started to make more sense to me. For the others in my class though, they got upset since there was no real logical way to think about it.

Of course, one shouldn’t just throw out the concept of learning grammatical rules to learn a language because I think this is one of the advantages an adult learner has over a child in learning a language. Learning the rule helps me pick up the language faster because it’s easier for someone to tell me that putting a ? (ru) at the end of a verb makes it “positive, incomplete” than to have to listen to hundreds of examples before realizing that it means that.

It’s just that in some cases, there are no clear, concise, logical rules to follow. I think another example of this is the fact that native speakers of a language could never explain to a foreigner trying to learn the language a grammatical rule concerning their native tongue. This is why just being able to speak your native tongue does not mean you can be a teacher of the language to a foreigner!

I learned this a few summers ago when I studied Japanese under Eleanor Harz Jorden, the writer/creator of the most commonly used Japanese as a foreign language textbook in the world and somehow we got into this discussion and to make her point, she asked me, “In English, when does one raise one’s intonation at the end of a sentence?” and I said, “One raises one’s intonation at the end of a sentence when one is asking a question”. And then she said, “How do you know?” and I realized I actually had no idea when one raised one’s intonation at the end of a sentence since in the question, ‘How do you know?’, you don’t raise your intonation at the end.

Anyway, the answer to this question, in case you are wondering, is that we English speakers raise the intonation of our voices at the end of sentences when we are asking a question that we expect has a yes/no answer to it. For example, “Are you okay?”, “Did you eat yesterday?”. When we ask other questions that do not have yes/no answers to it like “How do you know?”, “Where are you going?”, “What did you do yesterday?”, we do not raise the intonation of our voices at the end. If a foreigner asked me that question, “When do you raise the intonation of your voice at the end of a sentence?”, I probably would have just given them that response I gave to my teacher… which is wrong. This is why I think that being able to speak a language natively does not mean you can teach it.

Nonetheless, many people speaking English natively with no training for teaching it still teach English here in Japan and probably all over the world.

On the flip side of the coin, this leads to a guideline. If you ever have a question about a grammatical point in a language and ask a native speaker about it, 1) they will not be able to explain it to you properly and 2) despite not really knowing how to explain it, they will try to make up an explanation anyway (which is often times incorrect) and give that to you.

It’s best to consult a grammar book or a teacher who has been trained in teaching the language so you can avoid these traps. Actually, just two days ago, I happened upon two of my friends in the dorm studying for a test in their grammar class. One thing that was going to appear on the test was the difference between “??????” (~you to omou) and “?????????” (~you to omotteiru). I guess neither of them had been paying attention in class because they didn’t know the difference between the two, and so it turned out that each one of them had asked a different Japanese friend to explain the difference. Interestingly enough, the two Japanese people asked had given two different explanations for the difference! Not only that, but when I looked over at my friend’s notes and saw the explanation, it was actually incorrect! I guess it’s a similar to my incorrect response to the question of when we raise the intonation of our voices in English.

There’s more to write about learning languages and my views on it but I’ll save that for another entry. For this entry, I think I’ve written enough, lol.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.