The writing's on the wall...

...and it's in English. Or so it seems, in some ways at least.

Recently, two major Japanese companies have announced that their official language for business - even internally - will be English. (I'm not entirely sure why this is headline news, as several other companies have already adopted this policy some time ago, but never mind about that.) They are both trying to break into international markets, so the potential benefits are pretty big (not denying that there will of course be disadvantages too, given the poor English language skills throughout the population here). English language education is also being introduced at earlier stage in education. That's over the howls of the nationalists, of course, who argue that the children will be "confused" by this and that English should be left until they are more secure in their Japanese.

From their own parochial and reactionary point of view, I wonder if they may have a reason to be fearful. For while all the research I have read indicates that bilingualism is easily instilled at an early age, and that starting early does not harm understanding of the "mother" tongue, there is also interesting new research showing how patterns of thought are shaped by language. In that study, it was found that people who learnt (as children) a primitive sign language which did not include clear concepts of relative position (left and right, under/over etc), performed much worse in tests of spatial communication than those who learnt a later version of the language which did.

So it is not implausible that learning only Japanese could be a factor which contributes towards ensuring that children learn to think only as Japanese.

We have been amused in management meetings where everyone is rattling along in Japanese, interspersed with words like "management" and "communication". It's a cheap shot to say well, the Japanese language obviously does not include these concepts. And only partly true. More accurately, these words are used to mean the Japanese version of what the original concept was, which may bear little relation to what we would expect. Like a "diet", for example - which includes anything related to exercise, as well as a reduction in calorie intake itself. And "smart" means slim. Once, someone here (well-educated, with overseas experience) proudly described the Japanese funding arrangements as "very democratic", because all of the senior sensei were given reasonably equitable budgets to disperse as they saw fit among their minions.

No, that is not "democracy", it's a feudal hierarchy. But confusion between the two might explain rather a lot about Japanese politics.

The lack of distinction between "right" and "privilege" is also notable IMO. Here, we are allowed to do whatever the Govt allows us to do. And it doesn't matter if we understand the law, so long as we obey it.

So I wonder what would happen if a generation of genuinely bilingual Japanese children grow up with a facility to understand and debate the differences between rights and privileges, or democracies and feudal hierarchies. It could make for interesting times. No wonder the reactionary bigots are against it.

Meanwhile, JAMSTEC is still bravely holding back the tide of English, Canute-like. This makes it very easy to ignore the deluge of administrivia that fills my email inbox. Long may it continue!

Now they tell us...

"There is no need to be able to write by hand all the kanji"

That's fortunate really, since the junior high school level Kanji tests that I showed to a few highly educated university graduates were entirely beyond them. Nevertheless, the list of "daily use" kanji that everyone is supposed to learn is set to grow, to include such gems as "momme" (匁) which my iMac doesn't even know - I had to cut and paste that from a web page. Apparently it's a unit of mass equivalent to 3 3/4 grams and used in the pearl industry. "Daily use" indeed.

Update: OK, I'm wrong, momme is being removed, but utsu (鬱) is being added. I can't even see the different strokes in that!

How long??

Via Japan Probe, I found this truly amazing video:



And I thought I was bad at Japanese! Of course, I've been here for 8 years, but not formally studying Japanese for that duration, in fact I have a full time job that involves very little contact with the language and no real incentive to learn (no matter how well acclimated I become, I'll still probably be randomly thrown out with little notice and less justification at some point in the future, given how typical that experience is). Nevertheless, I can manage a few simple phrases about how long I've been here and whether I can eat natto. Shockingly, this interviewee was majoring in English at university! Presumably when she graduates she will end up in the Engrish slogan-writing division of some company. Well, that or "teaching" English to unsuspecting Japanese children, who will themselves end up incapable of stringing two words together after 7 years...the mind boggles.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should point out that there are very many highly capable English-speakers here. In fact I think that almost everyone in my institute is far better than this specimen. But maybe not all.

Can you speak Japanese?

Funny how these things come in a bunch.

I've already posted about these vague proposals JT about revamping the visa requirements for Japan, including language skills testing.

Now a similar sort of idea has popped up again, but there's still no sign that anyone has actually thought it through. Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion, let me say at the outset that of course it is not unreasonable to impose some sort of language requirement on permanent residents and citizenship applications. These people are (in principle) here to stay as members of Japanese society. There already are de facto requirements, if not exactly de jure, in the form of paperwork and a face to face interview (no interpreter allowed!). Exceptions are only made for mass murderers on the Interpol wanted list (eg), and I don't want to stay here that badly.

It's not really clear what is being considered - there is no such thing as a "long term visa" anyway, with most categories limited to 3y. And obviously it would be a complete non-starter to hope that foreign professionals or wannabe English language teachers would take Japanese lessons just on the off chance that they might get offered a short contract here at some point in the future.

So I am still waiting with interest to see what concrete proposals, if any, actually see the light of day.

Children to read by sixteen - Tories

"The Conservatives have set out plans which they say will ensure children can read by the age of sixteen."

Actually they said six, not sixteen. I wonder how that would go down in Japan, where the curriculum covers the most basic 2000 kanji (not enough for true reading fluency by any means) by the age of about 16. Jules's boss (who has several children) mixed disbelief and astonishment when Jules mentioned some time ago that she could read before she went to school - "that's not normal, is it?"

Of course there are different interpretations of what it means to be able to read. I wouldn't expect a British 6 year old to be able to handle the more sophisticated newspapers or novels. But I find it hard to understand a world in which secondary school pupils also cannot read these things!

Kanji are crap

Readers may not have heard about the latest Japanese pension scandal, which helped to bring down the PM. Roughly 50 million account details in the national pension have been lost, meaning a whole lot of people risk not getting what they are due.

Here's an amusing snippet from a recent newspaper article:

The Social Insurance Agency failed to enter names for more than 10 percent of the 50 million public pension accounts whose rightful owners are now unknown apparently because the kanji characters created too much work.

[...]

The agency said employees had failed to enter the names likely because figuring out the proper kanji for account holders' names was too enormous a task.

So 5 million people have lost their pensions because the officials cannot read and write kanji properly (names are particularly difficult, not that this excuses simply abandoning the accounts).

I'm sure they would agree it's a small price to pay for such a "beautiful" language.

Lost in translation

Attending Japanese project meetings is often a bit frustrating, to put it mildly. Part of this is due to them being in Japanese, so although I can get the gist of it these days (especially with the help of the presentation) I can't understand the nuance or contribute significantly to the discussion (I could - and occasionally did - say something in English, but it's hard to be sure that it hadn't already been covered adequately). When the project is closely related to my own interests, it's particularly frustrating, but I have to just shrug and let them get on with it. The quid pro quo is that they generally let me get on with what I want to do too.

This new project that I'm involved in seems to have as its overall aim "Motivating the public to take action on climate change based on correct scientific information". I'd have been much happier if this had been written as "Supporting the decision-making process through the best available science". The official version sounds rather too much like "Instilling patriotism though a correct view of history" which is what the J-govt is trying to do through its censorship of history textbooks and the like in schools these days. Combine that with re-writing their "outdated" constitution that currently forbids military aggression, and it adds up to scary stuff for Japan's neighbours, but that's another story. I'm assured that in this case "correct scientific information" (direct translation of 正しい科学的情報) really does just mean "best available". Time will tell...

It's mildly amusing to play spot-the-loanword in Japanese discussions. Of course all languages have borrowed words from others, usually to describe new concepts that are not already adequately covered (such as the French, who as Bush once famously didn't say, were missing the word for "entrepreneur"). Of course a lot of Japanese originally came from Chinese, but more recently there have been Western imports such as "erebeetaa" (elevator) and "bataa" (butter) that presumably came together with these products. Jules and I noticed two loan words in particular that came up regularly in the discussion of the project plans: management and communication. I hope they catch on :-)

An ethical foreign policy?

Some of the bureaucrats here really haven't got a clue. This is another all-too-typical example of the sort of mindless box-ticking mentality that dominates here.

The backstory to this is that a year ot two ago there was a minor scandal with some Tokyo University professor being caught falsifying data. Fortunately it coincided with the South Korean cloning thing so didn't attract much attention, either at home or abroad. Still, someone obviously considered it was important for all scientists to have a refresher course on research conduct.

So today this arrived in my mailbox (edited highlights):

We will have a briefing session in the title above [Briefing Session for FRCGC Rules for Conduct in Research Activities].
All who are engaged in the research activities are required to attend the session.

Please note the language used in the session will be Japanese.

Date and Time: Friday, March 30, 2007 14:00 - 15:30

OK, there will be an English-language handout, which is more than they have yet managed for the new employment system. But really, which genius thought it would be useful, let alone important enought to make it compulsory, for people to sit through some old fogey waffling on for a full 90 minutes in a language they don't understand? Of course, once you understand the bureaucrat's mindset it makes perfect sense: it's not important that we actually understand the new rules, it's important that they can tick a box to say that we have attended a lecture in which the rules have been explained to us...

Of course my lab would be well within their rights to demand Japanese language ability from all employees if they wished - but to do so would be to essentially rule out any possibility of attracting researchers from abroad. The lab seems to have some aspirations of internationalisation, and when I was first employed, English language ability (and not Japanese) was specifically required. However, that seems to have been dropped in more recent recruitment.

I wonder if they will arrange a special 90 minute one-on-one session for jules when she returns from her trip :-)

Second childhood

Partly as a reward to myself for passing the JLPT 2 test, and partly to help with further learning, I decided some time ago to get a Nintendo DS lite. This took some time as the Yodobashi stores have been permanently sold out (and not even taking orders) and I didn't want it so much as to actually go to Tokyo and pay over the recommended price at the handful of shops that were price-gouging (yeah, "matching supply and demand").

By chance, I wandered in to the Yokohama store on Friday evening just as they had a batch in, so I joined the queue and am now the happy owner of a blue plastic child's toy :-)

As I said, it's for study really, and I've got a couple of kanji-learning applications, this Kanji Kentei drill program and this new release "Nazotte oboeru otona no kanji renshuu" (trace and learn kanji practice for adults"). Both of them go through the 1945 jouyou ("daily use") kanji in the standard order that every schoolchild takes about a decade to learn. The former application is aimed squarely at a series of kanji exams that this organisation organises, with lots of questions in that style. The latter is (despite the name) more like a children's learn-to-write program with patterns to trace over.

Although I had to learn to read about 1000 kanji for the JLPT test, that was just multi-choice with no writing required, so I'd hardly learnt any writing at all. In fact writing is completely irrelevant to my daily life in Japan (I've never found anywhere that normal Roman characters are not usable) and even native Japanese often struggle a bit when forced to write by hand. However I'm sure that the action of writing will help to embed the shapes in my memory and I'm also tempted to have a go at one of the kanji tests this year as the JLPT1 is too big a jump in one step and the Kanji Kentei tests are more finely graded.

I was rather surprised on starting up the Nazotte oboeru program that the first practice set of kanji which it presented me with were rather difficult ones which I had no idea how to read or write. It turns out that the program judges your starting level based on your age - I had thought it was a little intrusive to ask for date of birth along with name to personalise the game at the start, but hadn't thought it would really matter. So now according to the machine I am James aged 5 again :-)

Both the programs are aimed solely at Japanese, not foreign learners of the language. They rely on the user knowing a lot of vocabulary (written phonetically), and as such they are not really suitable for beginners. They certainly do not replace my home-brewed English/Japanese flashcard program but should augment it usefully. There's certainly plenty of japanese reading practice in the programs! I'm also going to try some graphic novel/adventure games, of which a select few are available in dual language Japanese/English versions.

2006 JLPT 2kyu test & answers

No doubt breaching all sorts of copyright restrictions, but nevertheless, someone has posted 2006 JLPT 2kyu test & answers here (with a couple of mistakes at least, by my reckoning). Of course, it's too late for me to remember how I answered many of the questions, but I reckon I might just have sneaked a fail, which will be disappointing (not that it actually matters). Have to wait a few months for the official answer still.

JLPT done

...so I can now forget everything I have memorised over the last 6 months :-)

I won't reveal any details of the test as it still hasn't started in some parts of the world.

The day started rather inauspiciously with someone deciding that now was a good time to jump in front of a train. I guess if you are going to bring the network to a halt, early Sunday morning is one of the less disruptive times to do it, but there were still plenty of us up and about at that time. Fortunately I had given myself plenty of time, so after a brief panic I got a bus to Ofuna and still arrived at the exam site with plenty of time. It was interesting to note that (a) there were probably something like 1000 people, just for the 2 kyuu exam in the Yokohama region and (b) many (most? all that I heard speaking in Japanese, which was quite a few) of them were really pretty fluent in Japanese. I suspect I would have been in the bottom 1st percentile for that, but it's not a spoken test!

I think the first couple of papers went about as expected. I was pleased to overhear a couple of people talking about the aural exam just after it finished, confirming that a couple of my "probably right" answers were in fact correct. I came a bit unstuck in the middle of the third paper - reading comprehension and grammar, which is always a bit of a desperate race against time - but finished with an easy reading section (3 questions, 15 points) which means it can't have been that bad overall.

The exam didn't seem particularly hard compared to the practice tests (and last year's exam) which means I should have passed by a modest margin. [For reference, that means that this book of practice tests which I had struggled with is clearly way too hard, and this one is much more realistic (although in contrast to the first book it doesn't explain the answers, and it also has a few misprints).] But I will have to wait and see. Since the answers are marked on a multi-choice machine-readable card, this will only take.....more than 2 months. Yes, there is no typo there. It's like getting reviews out of GRL :-) Probably they have to arrange a line of OL's bowing and making cups of tea while a Shinto priest waves hs magic wand at each answer sheet. And then arrange an meaningless interview for each exam sheet that passes the 60% threshold, which no one can give any plausible explanation for (sorry, in-joke there).

Pass or fail, I don't plan to take 1 kyuu next year. I guess I could probably just about make it if I really tried, but slogging though another 1000 kanji (and the rest) would test my patience. Rather, I would prefer to aim for "has the ability to converse, read, and write about matters of a general nature" which nominally describes a 2 kyuu candidate. Yeah, right. A language exam that doesn't actually test either speaking or writing ability is a strange (and rather badly designed) beast indeed. Still, studying for it has certainly enhanced my ability to read and comprehend Japanese.

Another JLPT test

Hmm..that's a redundant "test" there in the subject line...like when I use my personal PIN number at the automatic ATM machine. Never mind.

As had been threatened, my Japanese teacher gave me another test as practice - the real 2005 exam. Since yesterday was a rainy holiday ("Labour Thanksgiving Day"), I stayed at home and did it. She seemed rather surprised that I passed by a clear margin (67%), but that's because she doesn't realise that I've been teaching myself the half of the syllabus that she hasn't had time for in our lessons :-)

Obviously, the exam was at the easier end of the tests I've tried - especially the kanji/vocab paper, and the grammar section of the last paper both of which I got "personal best" scores on. The real surprise was the reading conprehension which was far longer than I'd got used to - 24 questions in all, compared to a usual 18-20. So I really struggled for time on that and had to mostly just scan the texts quickly and choose the most plausible answer. The little homilies are invariably written from a very standard middle-class liberal perspective so the gist is generally something about bringing up or children well (whilst allowing them their freedom to develop) or looking after the environment...rather mind-numbing-stuff, to be honest.

Not much I can do now except hope the real thing (just over a week away) isn't much harder.

Testing times

Did the last one of my JLPT practice tests last weekend, and got 67%. It was the 4th of the easy set though, which leaves me none the wiser as to my chances. If the real test (3 weeks away) is as easy as that one was - which seems unlikely - I'll surely pass. If it's as hard as the one I did 3 weeks ago - which I suspect is more likely - I might well fail. I'd be surprised to not get something in the range of 55-65% but that doesn't help much given the 60% pass mark! I did manage to pass each individual section for the first time which was moderately pleasing. I've also still got another 100+ kanji to wade through which might be worth an extra point or two - although I'm probably forgetting old ones as fast as I'm learning new ones now :-)

The exam is (for me) being held in some out-of-the-way place I've never heard of called Fuchinobe. I'd been hoping/expecting it to be somewhere around Yokohama but it's nearer to Hachioji - a full hour by train and then a 30 minute walk (ok, in theory there is a bus, but they warn it might be too busy unless I'm early enough that I might as well walk anyway). Since I'm half-an-hour from the station at this end too it will be an early start for a Sunday morning.