Sono Inglese di Gerrards Cross: a language learner's blog: Tokyo

Showing posts with label Tokyo. Show all posts

Sunday, 29 May 2011

Getting more opportunities to speak: a trip to the barbers

I've been bemoaning of late my lack of opportunities to use Japanese in daily life. This might sound kind of strange seeing as I live in Tokyo, but I don't actually have a circle of Japanese friends that I can meet with regularly and chat away in Japanese with. I do have Japanese friends, but I tend to hang out with them one at a time, and this means we often use English, a) because I get tired of trying to speak Japanese quickly, and b) because more often than not, my friend's English is usually better than my Japanese.

I think it's important to find a group of friends to hang out with because then the conversation naturally tends to be Japanese, and it also means you don't have to be supplying 50% of the input.

Anyway, that's besides the point of today's post. My lack of opportunities for natural conversation emphasised the importance to me of the more manufactured experiences that you can make for yourself like the one that I had yesterday and I want to mention here.

Since coming to Japan I've tended to shy away from using the old style barbers you see dotted around town. I think this may have something to with the fact that when I first arrived here I remember naively walking into one of these barbers expecting at least some basic English ability from the proprietor and suddenly realising that I had to put my measly two-to-three weeks of beginner level Japanese study into immediate effect. This wasn't overly successful if I remember correctly, and may have left a bit of a mental scar.

Anyway, since then I've mainly been using the 1000yen - 10 minute - barbers you find in most train stations around Tokyo. It's quick and simple and doesn't require a lot of communication. Yesterday however I went to an old-style barber close to where I teach in Tokyo for a change, (my last 10 minute haircut was a bit of a disaster prompting me to take the plunge) and I realised I've been missing out on a great opportunity for some Japanese conversational workout these past few years.

The barber was a very friendly older lady— in her 60s I'd say. I asked for a short-back-and-sides, we negotiated over the length of the clippers, and she got down to work. After a few minutes of silence I dived in and asked her how long that particular barber shop had been open. That was all I had to do: we didn't stop talking for the next 40-odd minutes (Well, if I'm honest she did most of the talking, but I got a few questions in, and offered a few opinions on this and that—the Royal Wedding for example). The haircut cost 3000 yen and it took 50 minutes longer than at the station shop, but as far as getting a language workout it was time and money well spent—the haircut wasn't bad either.

Barbers are a bit like taxi drivers I think, wherever you go in the world, they like to chat. So I think I'll be avoiding the 10-minute "fast-cut" barbers from now on, and take advantage of these barbers who despite costing a bit more have time for a good old-fashioned chinwag.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

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.