I spent far too long thinking about how to learn Japanese rather than simply learning it. It was a bit of a shock when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to “pick up” Japanese the way I had acquired the other languages I had come to enjoy in my years of living among the Latin dialects of Southern Europe . Y and I arrived in Kumamoto in April 1986. I brought with me Modern Japanese, which I’d used for a course in Auckland --my one, brief attempt to learn Japanese. Victor, a New Zealander doing post-graduate study in Hiroshima, had showed me his little orange kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) dictionary and I had bought a copy, little realising that it was useful to Victor only because he already knew a lot of kanji. It was pretty useless to me since you had to know a lot of kanji before you could use it to look up kanji.
I had only part time work during our first couple of years in Kumamoto, so there was time for studying written Japanese. Y wondered why I bothered, since she knew how hard it was for Japanese kids to learn kanji and she didn’t think it was feasible for a lanky New Zealander in his late thirties.
I remember sitting at the kotatsu (a kind of a cross between a heater and a table) in front of the television at Y's father’s house （ next to our own little cottage), trying to penetrate the mysteries of one of the world’s most complex linguistic codes. I sweated away and, after three months, I finally managed to read something outside of the textbook. I deciphered the word “駐車場 (chuushajo/car park)” as we parked our battered Nissan behind the local Daiei shopping centre. My pleasure at this achievement was undermined by the realization that, if I continued to progress at that rate, it would take me decades before I could hope to read a newspaper.
During my first couple of years in Kumamoto, an English friend and I spent hundreds of hours working out how to use the various dictionaries, and dreaming up new systems which would make these dictionaries easier to use for foreign neophytes. Looking up Chinese Japanese words in a dictionary seemed almost as hard as learning a language in itself.
After seven years of looking for a smart way of learning Japanese, I finally tried the all too obvious method Japanese people have been using for centuries: I started learning the characters by simply writing them out, again and again. Each morning when I got up, I would rub the ink stick onto the black stone base and let it colour the water until I had a little pool of ink, sometimes blue, sometimes black. Then I would copy ten kanji into the square boxes of a Japanese primary school exercise book. I would write each character fourteen times making a total of 140 per day.
I did that for almost a year. There are about 2,000 characters, which kids graduating from school are expected to know. It took me the best part of year to work through them, with the inevitable times off. I was not sure whether this method would “work” any better than the others I had tried. Certainly, at the end of the year I was still only able to write a miserable few of the characters without copying. However, I found that I could read and recognize more of them than I had ever been able to do in all my years of looking for short-cuts.
The spoken language was not much easier. It was years before I could participate in group conversations in Japanese. Since we had no money to speak of when we arrived in Kumamoto, I never considered doing what most people who are serious about living in Japan accept as a matter of course: devoting two years of full-time study to the language, before settling down to the business of everyday life. People like missionaries and diplomats.
Missionaries have told me that, even after their two years of study, they still did not “know” Japanese, but they knew enough to be able to learn from their everyday life in the language. In other words, after a couple of years of full-time study they were pretty much at the level I was on my first day in Spain or Italy.
I had always considered that I liked languages and accepted people’s judgement that I was “good at languages”. When I hit Japanese though, I realised that the Romance languages I had been learning were hardly different languages at all and barely escaped the categorization of dialects of Latin. To my chagrin, I realized that the dialects of Japan were just as different from one another, and from standard Japanese (標準語/hyoujungo), as French was from Italian. I realised how different local speech was from standard Japanese when I went to a language teaching conference in Hamamatsu, near Tokyo, after six months in Kumamoto. I went with Abel, an American friend (and mentor) who had been in Kumamoto for thirteen years when I arrived. We stayed with friends of his wife’s family. To my surprised gratification, I found I could understand a lot more of what people were saying to one another in that family than I could when I listened to Yuko’s family.
The reason? Y and her family spoke Japanese that was heavily influenced by their native dialect, the variety of Kumamato dialect spoken in the volcanic region of Aso. Here are a few examples to give you some idea of the differences.
“It’s hot” would be “Atsui desu!” in standard Japanese and “Atsuka bai” in Kumamoto dialect. “What are you doing?” would be “Nani wo shiteru no?” in the Japanese textbooks and “ Nan ba shotto?” in the dialect.
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