A horrible sentence should be a horrible sentence in any language

I get the impression that I’m doing something wrong. I think there’s a quicker way. Nothing to do with study technique, but more to do with the way I’m thinking about the foreign language.

I feel there’s a shortcut. A better way to remember. A better way to retain the information—to somehow connect word and meaning faster and more permanently.

Take a sentence like this:

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？

In Chinese this sentence is an exotic thing to me. I’m in awe of it in a way. The use of 把 to indicate the direct object is something I can’t comprehend yet. The Chinese characters are both complex and beautiful (one of the main reasons I am interested in the Chinese and Japanese languages) and the sentence is something that is pleasing to the ear.

In English, on the other hand:

Where did you put the keys?

Oh God! What a horrible sentence. Could it be more mundane and everyday? A sentence that can only irritate, or cause frustration. “Oh, crap, somebody wants the keys. Now I have to remember where I put the damn things—I can never remember where I put the damn keys!! I might have to look around for them for a while, they must be lost if he/she’s asking for them. Crap!”

The words ‘exotic’, ‘awe’, ‘complex’, ‘beauty’, ‘interest’, and ‘pleasing’, are clearly words not springing to mind when I hear this sentence in English. So perhaps this is where I am going wrong. This is where my brain is taking me away from the reality of the situation.

你把钥匙放在哪儿了？should also fill me with dread. This is also a sentence to be feared: a sentence to strike fear into the heart.

This must be the shortcut to connect the meaning with the language (something I’m sure all those linguists go on about). This is the shortcut I need to start taking more often.

Note to self: must stop appreciating the beauty and sound of foreign sentences and Chinese characters and start taking note of the unpleasant consequences they can cause.

The language of earthquakes and disaster

"けっこう揺れてるね。Kekko yureterune"

This is a sentence I've heard quite a lot over the past few weeks. Roughly translated as "It's shaking quite a bit isn't it."

It's now over a month since the day when the Great Tohoku Earthquake hit Japan, but the effects of that day will continue for some time. One of the more noticable effects here in Tokyo are the continuing aftershocks.

Coming from the UK I had never experienced an earthquake before arriving in Japan five years ago. The UK seems to be ideally positioned, somewhere in the middle of a large, relitively stable, tectonic plate. Every 5 years or so you would hear a story about some minor eathquake hitting a small town somewhere, but these were pretty rare and freakish. Certainly, nobody I knew had ever expereinced one in the UK.

Over the past month I've often thought what a disaster on this scale would be like in the UK. How would the British people, government and emergency services deal with something like this? The only reasonable answer I can come up with would be to say that they certainly wouldn't deal with it as well as the Japanese.

One interesting point for me, being interested in languages, is all the new words and phrases I've come across in the past month. Listening to Japanese people talk about earthquakes has got me thinking how in the UK, not only do we not have the technology or knowhow to deal with something like this, we also don't have the vocabulary.

Here are a selection of words that I've become familiar with over the past month.

"地震 Jishin": Earthquake. In English we have 'earthquake': earthquakes are pretty common around the world, so it's not surprising that English has it's own word for this. But next we have: "震災 Shinsai" This translates as earthquake disaster, not a terribly common term in English. I guess in the UK, a disaster is a disaster, we don't have special words for different types of disaster, because we just don't have enough of them. In Japan this disaster is called "東日本大震災 Higashi Nihon Dai Shinsai" The Great Earthquake Disaster of East Japan.

The classic word that has crossed over from Japanese to English of course is "津波 tsunami". Sushi is from Japan, so is tsunami!

The Japanese method for measuring earthquakes is different from the rest of the world. In Europe we use the Richter Scale, measuring earthquake magnitude from 0 to 10. In Japan, they have a scale from 1 to 7 which, more relevantly for people living here, marks the violence of the shaking experienced in different areas during an earthquake. So in Tokyo on March 11th we experienced "震度５Shindo Go" Shaking intensity of 5. (pretty scary I might add). In the past few days however, people in the Tohoku region have been experiencing aftershocks ("余震 Yoshin") of "震度６Shindo Roku"! There is also "弱 Jyaku": weak, and "強 Kyou": strong, that are sometimes added to these measurements. I think these are upper and lower measurements for each level, so a "震度６弱 Shindo roku jyaku" is stronger than a "震度５強 Shindo go kyou".

Here are two words that really nobody wants to have to be distinguishing between "横揺れ Yokoyure" swaying from side to side, and "縦揺れ tateyure" vertical shaking, pitching. Both used to describe the type of movement experienced during an earthquake.

After such a devastating earthquake and tsunami the destuction left behind is unimaginable. In Japanese they have "被災地 Hisaichi" I think disaster zone is a good translation of this. "被災 Hisai" just means suffer from disaster, and "地 Chi" is a suffix for place or area. You also have "被災者 Hisaisha" The people affected by the disaster, many of whom have become "避難者 Hinansha" Evacuees, and are now living in "避難所 Hinansho" Evacuee shelters.

Listening to the way Japanese people talk about earthquakes gives a good indication of how much of an integral part of life it is here. This familiarity gives them a great advantage when dealing with this kind of emergency. I think this is reflected in their measured reaction to the events of the past month. In the UK, if something like this were to happen, we would have to find a whole new set of vocabulary to deal with it, and I think this would add to the difficulties.

Checking out the cherry blossoms trees in Tokyo

Today I went for a walk in Tokyo and took some photos of the Cherry Blossom trees in full bloom. Take a look at the photos below.

目黒 Meguro

根津 Nezu

根津 Nezu

東京大学 Tokyo University

目黒川 Meguro River

目黒川 Meguro River

Getting the gist from the start

After my Chinese lesson this morning, my teacher and I exchanged a couple of emails. I told her that I thought I had improved—thanks to her—and I was enjoying my lessons. She agreed that I had improved, which was pleasing, and wanted to know if she was speaking too fast for me, and whether I wanted her to slow down a bit from time to time. I've been thinking over my reply this afternoon.

There are times when I'm listening to my teacher speak that it feels like I'm just being bombarded with a succesion of strange sounding Chinese noises which seem completely devoid of meaning. This can certainly feel a little daunting, and even depressing—'how the hell I'm I ever going to get a grasp of this language', kind of feeling. But other times I find myself being able to understand most of what she is saying, and I'm able to distinguish just the individual words that I don't understand.

The conclusion I've come to is is that it is very important to be 100% tuned in as soon as she starts speaking and make sure that I'm listening carefully to the first few words of what is said. I find that if I don't do this, the sentence just becomes a blur, because I find myself fishing in the dark for meaning later on in the sentence.

Chinese has a lot of similar sounding characters—often only distinguishable by the different tones being used—for example: 急 jí second tone，既 jì fourth tone, and 几 jǐ third tone. When these sounds are part of a longer, familiar set of words (or phrase) distinguishing which one is which is is not much of a problem. If you remove the context of the sentence however, and start trying to distinguish between these sounds on their own, at least at the beginner level, it becomes a monumental task, and a few words that you already know can sound incomprehensible.

An example sentence might be:

钱都花了，要去银行
qiándōuhuāle, yàoqùyínháng
All the money's gone, I have to go to the bank.

This is a fairly simple  sentence, and shouldn't pose any problems, but I find that if I miss the first couple of words, I get lost and I'm grasping at the later sounds to try and work out what is going on.

My train of thought might go something like this:

Ooo, Chinese, wait... hualeyaoqu... hm, leyaoquyin...not... Oh.... she's finished. What was that? Crap, now she's waiting for a response. err.... 请你再说一遍。(Please say it again.)

On the other hand, if I'm prepped, ready and waiting, it might go something like this:

qiandou... ah.. all the money... huale, has been spent... oh... missed a bit... yinhang, ah, bank. OK, so, she's spent all her money and needs to go to the bank. Hmm, 哪儿是一家银行。(There's a bank.)

Of course, given time, once you become more advanced, I'm sure this becomes less of a problem, and it becomes easier and easier to pick up the gist halfway through a sentence—like you do in your fist language, I guess. But for now it means that I have to be on my best listening behaviour all the time, to make sure I'm not just sat there listening to a barrage of Chinese noises.