The way we see things

Read in Japanese

If you are a language teacher, have you ever recorded your class while you are teaching and analyzed the video? The results can be surprising and enlightening! I recorded my Japanese class once when teaching in the United States. The recording was for my final project in a course I was taking. As a first step, I watched the video and transcribed it. I still remember feeling nervous about watching myself teaching. There were many things that I didn’t notice while I was teaching: I misspelled some Japanese words on the blackboard, I misunderstood a student’s question and my voice became quieter when I had to speak in English. Analyzing your own teaching is a great way to identify your own shortcomings, and understand how and what your students have been learning from you. By analyzing my own recording, I learned that I was unconsciously introducing Japanese discourse manners to my class.  

In the last post, I made the claim that it is important for learners to experience socio-cultural standards of language in a classroom. I also mentioned that there are (but are not limited to) three preferred conversational styles in Japan. Do you remember them?

1. Ask for the listener’s agreement with one’s speech using “ne” (similar to “right?” in English)

2. Speak in relation to the previous speaker, showing that one’s comment is related to the previous speaker’s utterance

3. Nod frequently to show that one is actively listening to the speaker

As you may have realized, there is a common requirement for these manners: listening to the speaker attentively. It may sound like an easy thing to do, but we all know that it is not always easy to be an attentive listener. However, Japanese society values listening skills more than speaking. Thus, the ability to listen carefully is an indispensable skill to obtain by a sophisticated language user of Japanese.

When reviewing my recording, I noticed that I was showing the importance of attentive listening implicitly. I was performing those three mannerisms all the time when I was interacting with my students. Also, I was creating classroom situations in which all students need to listen to others’ presentations carefully. For example, I asked one student to present and then directly asked another student “what do you think of that?” before I gave my feedback to the original presenter. To give a comment to the presenter, all other students had to listen to what was said. One may wonder if implicitly introducing conversational manners is actually effective. My study had some positive results.

I also realized that the way I was teaching was very similar to how I had been taught in schools in Japan. Other than the observations I mentioned above, I witnessed more instances in which students listened rather than spoke in class, which is a normal scene in Japan. Thus, I was very surprised to learn from studies conducted by others that some students feel uncomfortable in foreign language classes that have a different interaction style from what they are used to. Perhaps some students in my class have been experiencing difficulties if I use the Japanese style of interaction? If so, this presents an interesting dilemma, which I will talk about next time. See you in 2 weeks!

英語で読む

突然ですが、教師をなさっている方で、ご自分のクラスを録画してご覧になったことがある方はいらっしゃいますか。私は一度だけあります。大学院のあるクラスで、自分がクラスを教えている様子を分析するという課題が出されました。当時、私はアメリカの大学で日本語を教えていたので、その様子をビデオに収めることにしました。その後で、そのビデオを何度も観ながら書き起こしをしたのですが、とても恥ずかしい気持ちになったのを今でもよく覚えています。板書を間違えていたり、生徒の質問を聞き間違えていたり、英語を使う時は声が小さくなっているなど、実際に教えていた時は気づかなかったことがたくさん見つかりました。そして、私は自分が無意識のうちに、どのように日本の会話作法を生徒に紹介していたかを知ることができました。

前回の記事にも書きましたが、みなさんは会話をする時に、話の結びに「ね」をつけて聞き手の同意を求めたり、発話時に前話者と自分の話に関連をもたせたり、相槌をうちながら話を聞くことを知らず知らずのうちに行っていらっしゃいませんか。これら三つの行動に共通している特徴は、聞き手が話し手によく耳を傾けているということです。「聞く」ことを重視する日本社会で育つうちに、自然と身についたマナーなのだと思います。

話を戻しますが、そのビデオの中で、私は生徒と会話をしている時に何度もこれらの会話作法を行っていました。また質疑応答の時には、一人の生徒に発言させた後に他の生徒にその発言内容についての意見を求めるという流れを通し、一人の生徒の発言をクラス全体が聞いていなければならないという状況を作っていました。この他にも、生徒に「聞く」活動を促している様子がいくつかみられました。

私達が学生だった頃を思い返してみて下さい。クラスでは、積極的に「話す」というより「聞く」ことが多かったように思いませんか。主に先生が話をして、生徒は静かに聞いていて、名前を呼ばれた時だけ発言するというのが主な流れだった気がします。私は、気づかないうちに自分が経験してきた授業の形態を自分の授業に組み込んでいたのだと気がつきました。更に、この発見は私にあるジレンマをもたらし、授業の進め方についてもう一度深く考えるきっかけになったのです。次回はそのことについて書きたいと思います。

Listening to music is one of the best ways to learn a language.  In the midst of conversation, you might hear part of a phrase you once heard in a song, and the tune in your head helps you complete it. But, what happens when a song is mistitled? That’s perhaps all the more reason to remember it!

Kyu Sakamoto - Sukiyaki by Knightrdr

We are all familiar with Kyu Sakamoto’s hit song “Sukiyaki”, which topped the American billboard charts in 1963 and has been covered by countless musical artists since. The original Japanese title was 上を向いて歩こう(Ue o Muite Arukou), which literally means “I look up when I walk”. “Sukiyaki”, on the other hand, is actually a mouthwatering semi-sweet Japanese stew made of thinly sliced beef and vegetables and cooked in a cast-iron pot. Well, given the lonesome mood of the lyrics, I would have to say that a bowl of this satiating dish would be the ultimate comfort food (along with a cup of sake set aside!)… But, seriously, how did we get the name “Sukiyaki?” 

Long story “short” (you’ll see my point in a minute), the head of UK-based record label Pye got ahold of the song on a trip to Japan in 1962. With the intention of recording a new version, he decided that a shorter title was easier to pronounce -- and settled on “Sukiyaki”. Whether an intentionally smooth move or just an inconsiderate one, this new title took over in the English-speaking world and the song went on to sell 13 million copies! This is a fascinating fact that mingles with another interesting misrepresentation…

While “Sukiyaki” is no more synonymous with beef stew than the Cascades’ “Rhythm of the Rain” is with hamburgers, what we have come to know the song to mean may also be different from what lyricist Rokusuke Ei intended… Rumor has it that a disillusioned Ei wrote the song after attending a protest of the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States of America and Japan!

For our benefit, ignorance is bliss and the song is as memorable as the dish! It is beautiful, catchy and carries the sentiments of love and loss of all kinds. The simplicity and repetitiveness of the original lyrics also make this the perfect song for beginner learners of Japanese! Here’s a site that has turned “Sukiyaki” into a full flashcard-style lesson: Memrise.  Below, Glyph’s Education Lead, Nozomi Liao, also provides 3 short grammar lessons from the song!

What songs have helped you learn a foreign language?

Japanese Grammar Lessons from “Sukiyaki”:

• 歩こう <a ru k-o u>

Volitional Form of ‘to walk’: Verb stem + yo u/o u

Volitional form is used to express either one’s own voluntary decisions/thoughts or a casual invitation as “Let’s~”.

Examples:

お昼（ひる）ご飯（はん）を食（た）べよう。Let’s have lunch.

手紙（てがみ）を書（か）こう。Let’s write a letter.

一緒（いっしょ）にコーヒーを飲（の）もう。Let’s have coffee together.

• こぼれないように <ko bo re na i yo u ni>

Negative form of ‘to fall/spill/overflow ’ + ‘in order to’ = ‘in order not to~’

Negative form of a verb is structured with ‘preます (こぼれof こぼれます) followed by ない.

Examples:

忘（わす）れないように書（か）いておきます。I’ll write that down in order not to forget.

帽子（ぼうし）が飛（と）ばないように結（むす）んでおきます。I’ll tie the hat in order not to let it fly away.

• 泣きながら <na ki na ga ra>

Verb Preます  + ながら ‘while’ = while doing ~

ながら expresses two actions taking place simultaneously.

Examples:

音楽（おんがく）を聞（き）きながら掃除（そうじ）をします。I clean while listening to music.

テレビを観（み）ながら宿題（しゅくだい）をします。I do my homework while watching TV.

A while back, a Glyph friend and I wrote to each other about hyphens and their proper usage. Two-hyphen terms are sensible enough – you add a hyphen when you're turning a two-word phrase into an adjective that precedes its noun: long-term investment, full-time employment, slow-cooked meal...

You can also have an investment for the long term, or an employee who works full time, or a poorly assembled machine that needs no hyphen because the word "poorly" is an adverb describing "assembled", not "machine". 

Then there are the obvious three-worders: analog-to-digital converter and step-by-step process.

Others aren't so clear... I'm second-guessing my addition of a second hyphen in the term "late-19th-century", even when used as an adjective preceding a noun.

How do you handle that one? Do you like hyphens? Do you overuse them?

While trying to make sense of words that sound or are spelled the same (homophones, homographs, etc), I stumbled across something that only seemed obscure – polysemes. Are they actually metaphors? (No, a metaphor is more involved) Are they actually homonyms? (words that look and sound the same but have different meanings) Not quite. They're very similar, but the difference seems philosophical.

Homonyms have different origins and, in general, feel a bit more coincidental. These are words that mean different things, but just happen to look and sound the same. I'm sure American English never meant for the animal bat (from "bakke") to have the same spelling and pronunciation as the baseball bat (from "battre"). Word evolution just happened to have the same end point.

Polysemy, on the other hand, seems a bit more vague. It deals with use of the same word in multiple ways, or in related ways. Some examples drawn from across the Interwebs: Can you GET the door? Do you GET what I mean? Did you GET going? Are you eating your LUNCH? Are you out to LUNCH? Did you ace your EXAM? Did you photocopy the EXAM?

Polysemous words tend to be treated as different uses or related uses of the same word, rather than totally different words that happen to look and sound alike.

Is this accurate? Is this actually less exciting than it seems? Do you have a favorite?

Glyph Language Services presents: Quick Language Lessons 

Glyph Language Services offers a wide spectrum of linguistic services, one of which is language teaching. In this video, one of our Japanese language teachers -- Nozomi -- gives a quick lesson on the emphasis of syllables.

The first in our series of language learning videos! 

Look for more lessons soon!

One of our recent staff polls was about misheard lyrics... What lyrics have you misheard, whether as a kid or later in life? Here's a selection of responses from Glyphers:

Preying Semanticist: "'Deck the halls with balls of jolly' is what my youngest daughter could be heard singing at Christmas "

Preying Semanticist: "'Deck the halls with balls of jolly' is what my youngest daughter could be heard singing at Christmas"

Traveling Salesman: Back before there was an easy way to find out what the actual lyrics of a song were, there were many of us who though Jimi Hendrix sang, “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy”  (whereas it was really “S’cuse me while I kiss the sky” from Purple Haze)

LexiCon Artist: "[My girlfriend and I] were watching a video of "Little Deuce Coupe" by the Beach Boys and she was flabbergasted that the lyrics were not 'My little two scoop..' (she thought it was about an ice cream cone??)"

What lyrics have you misheard? Please share!

When I moved from Texas to Seattle one summer in the late '80s, among other impressive sights was that of large numbers of geese on a Lake Washington beach and pier.

“Wow. Look at all those wonderful geese!” I exclaimed earnestly – and naively – seeing the birds for the first time. In my utter ignorance of the details of my new environs, I would make many other equally earnest and daft remarks, about raccoons for example (“How cute! Should we feed them dog food?”) and non-native blackberries (“Let’s plant some in the front yard too!”) my first few months in the Emerald City.

“Yes, Canada geese are partial to this spot,” said my companion.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘Canadian geese’?” I asked as politely as I could, trying not to sound too much like the pedantic English teacher that I sometimes unwittingly channel.

“Nope, it’s ‘Canada geese.’ Trust me I worked for the parks department.”

There you have it. Plus I looked it up in a bound dictionary (late ‘80s, remember?). Case closed.

The population of Canada geese in urban areas has increased over the past 25 years, and while I still smile when I see them – unlike when I see raccoons and blackberry bushes – I can’t say they truly impress me anymore.

But their name still does. Why isn’t it “Canadian geese” anyway? Was the person in charge of naming the species unfamiliar with the rules governing adjectival formation? It's probably not “the exception that proves the rule,” the handy default explanation of any and all linguistic and grammatical oddities. It's a no-fault and simple response if ever there was one, though it is certainly as unsatisfactory a response as the parental reply, “Because I said so.”

The flexibility and adaptability of the English language are some of its most endearing and exasperating qualities. Elementary school students in English-speaking countries – and students of English as a foreign language – are taught that the job of an adjective is to describe a noun or pronoun, and that an adjective usually comes before the noun or pronoun it is modifying: the “white house”, for example.

We are taught that colors are adjectives and taught how to recognize the adjectival forms of words we know; the noun adjective becomes the adjective adjectival, for example. In addition to the -al ending, other suffixes serve the same purpose of creating adjectives from existing words:  -ing or –ed, e.g. interest + ing/ed = interesting, interested;  -able/-ible, - ful, -ic, -ive, -less, -ous are all common adjectival endings, as is – (i)an, e.g. Canada + ian = Canadian.

Unpack your adjectives

So why not a Canadian goose? Well, one answer is nouns can themselves play the role of adjectives: a car race, a wedding dress, a grammar lesson. In all cases, the plural form consists of pluralizing the noun being modified:  car races, wedding dresses, grammar lessons, Canada geese.

What about “notary public”, though? Isn’t the adjective, “public”, supposed to come before the noun?

Ah, well, that’s where the adverb “usually” [see above] comes in handy. While an adjective usually precedes the noun it modifies, it doesn’t always, our “notary public” friend being a case in point. Another example is “attorney general”, which refers to a practitioner of the law, not a high-ranking military officer.

The preferred plural form of these “postpositive adjectives” – Yes! We have proof positive: an entire subcategory of exceptions that prove the rule! – is usually (there’s that pesky adverb again…) created by making the modified noun plural: attorneys general, notaries public. Other examples include heir(s) apparent and poet(s) laureate. But, you guessed it, there are exceptions – for example, the correct plural form of professor emeritus is professors emeriti.

The seemingly simple function of the adjective as a descriptive complement preceding its subject was too simple, in fact, to be true. Since time immemorial – or at least since English could be classified as a language  – from pronunciation to syntax, there have been examples aplenty of quirky “exceptions” to grammatical rules in the English language, and odd conventions galore.

The rules, subcategories and exceptions to the use and formation – and even pronunciation – of adjectives seem downright subversive, grammatically speaking, at times. We have, for instance, the adjective baked but it doesn’t rhyme with naked, nor does kicked rhyme with wicked, though of course blessed can be correctly pronounced two different ways...

Adjectives of many types have also been engaging in another subversive activity: replacing adverbs. Our mothers may have tried to instill in us the necessity of using adverbs such as slowly and badly instead of their adjectival cousins (it’s “You are walking too slowly!” not “You are walking too slow!” and “I think she performed badly” not “I think she performed bad”), but they failed in their efforts by following up the lessons with statements like “You did a real good job using adverbs instead of adjectives, honey. A real good job…”

The other day, we had a moment when The Captain (our lead project manager) said "mush pot" and then I, among others, misheard it as "mosh pit." When I poked my head into The Captain's office to ask about the mush pot, he said it's part of a children's game.

So we get on Google for a quick bit, and we find "Duck, Duck, Goose." (Apparently called "Duck, Duck, Gray Duck" in Minnesota... and only in Minnesota) Some versions call the middle of the circle the "mush pot." The person assigning each player as "duck" or "goose" has to sit in the middle of the circle if the goose (chaser) successfully tags him or her.

The mush pot becomes a place of contemplation, a box seat, or a forced rest, especially as a tired person is more likely to be sent there, but most Duck, Duck, Goose participants would prefer not to get caught up in the mush pot because it is a passive, spectator role, and most first graders tend to be very participatory. As people grow up, perhaps the stigma of the mush pot wears off.

Funny we misheard it the way we did, because the complete opposite of a mush pot is a mosh pit – a rock concert phenomenon in which large groups of people jump, headbang, or body-slam near the front row. Numerous sites on the interwebs (such as this one) will say that mosh pits originated at punk rock shows of the early 1980s, and while none of these are connected to any formal surveys or research, most of them point to actual experiences or concert footage from that time period.

Here's a modern one that took place in Dresden at a Hatebreed concert.

When translating and localizing any work or product involving spoken or written language, a variety of factors must be taken into consideration; when forging an accurate approximation of the original creation, a wordsmith’s choices must always take into consideration the nuances of meaning, geo-political implications, and inadvertent double-entendres, just to name a few.

But what about translating the natural world? It would seem that references to nature might be exempt, somehow, from cultural-linguistic interpretation. All human beings, regardless of cultural or linguistic background, breathe air, and depend on water and sunlight to live. All of us walk on the earth and eat things that grow from it. Fire burns, wind blows, water flows.

Take the concept expressed by the words “clean water”, for example. On some primordial level, the words “clean water” in any language or cultural context surely evoke the same kinds of feelings for people all over the globe, don’t they? Essential to survival in the most contrasting of climates, from the desert sands of the Sahara to the tropical rainforests of Brazil, “clean water” is an element of nature; specifics may differ but the words conjure up something thirst quenching, something plants and animals need to grow.

As we wander further afield than earth, fire, wind and water, though, differences in the symbolic meanings in the natural world proliferate.

Flowers are a case in point. Let’s look at the chrysanthemum.

Historical painting of Chrysanthemums from the New International Encyclopedia 1902.

Cultural interpretations abound…

In the USA, the chrysanthemum can evoke memories of homecoming, the “mum” being the corsage flower of choice. And often the bigger the better. Americans tend to have positive and cheerful associations with the flower and Australians give chrysanthemums as Mother’s Day gifts. In fact, Mother’s day falls on the 2^nd Sunday of the month of May in Australia as it does in the U.S., and since May falls in autumn in the Southern hemisphere, chrysanthemums are in bloom.

In Korea, chrysanthemums mark the arrival of fall and the changing of seasons; families stop along the roadside to take pictures of Cosmos, a type of chrysanthemum.

Other varieties of chrysanthemums, though, are associated with death in Korea as they are in many European countries as well as China and Japan.

In France, for example, chrysanthemums [chrysanthèmes [kreez ohn TEM] are readily available for purchase in the fall, and can planted in private gardens for decoration. But they are not an appropriate flower to offer as a gift; on “la Toussaint”, All Saints’ Day, November 1, it is traditional for French Christians to place chrysanthemums on the tombs of deceased family members.

Some homogeneous mixture, anyone?

If you want to avoid the cultural faux-pas of offering the chrysanthemum flower as a gift, other than in the U.S. or to an Australian mother on Mother’s Day, you may want to explore an alternative gift idea that still includes the beautiful flower: chrysanthemum tea. Typically enjoyed in East Asian countries, and restaurants of the same all over the world, chrysanthemum tea is said to have many health benefits, from treating acne to helping cleanse the liver.

Health benefits aside, it has delicious, mild, fragrant taste, in my opinion. But, be careful; the Shogun’s mother did manage, however courteously, to slowly poison his chrysanthemum tea in the musical “Pacific Overtures”…

Speaking of Japan and the chrysanthemum, besides the obvious reference in the title of this article to anthropologist’s Ruth Benedict’s 1946 influential – albeit controversial – work “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”, did you know that the chrysanthemum flower is the imperial seal of Japan and decorates Japanese passports?

The Imperial Seal inscribed on the front cover of a Japanese passport 

The Imperial Seal of Japan, also called the Chrysanthemum Seal (菊紋kikumon^?) or Chrysanthemum Flower Seal (菊花紋, 菊花紋章 kikukamon, kikukamonshō^?), is a mon or crest used by members of the Japanese Imperial family. [from its Wikipedia entry] 

With currently over 5,000 named varieties, I suspect that diverse uses for the chrysanthemum will continue to increase in number all over the globe; to avoid making a floral cultural faux-pas, though, best to check possible international plant-gift choices with someone in the know.

Another cup of tea?