Learning Japanese: There is no Royal Road to Nihongo (Part 1)
People ask me: “How did you learn Japanese?” My short answer is: “With great difficulty.” I am not entirely sure why I chose to study such a hard language. Note that I say study, not learn. I began studying Japanese over 45 years ago; I am still studying it.
The U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute ranks languages according to the number of weeks it should take an average native speaker of English to gain basic facility in the target language. Category I (23-30 weeks of classroom instruction) includes languages like Danish and Dutch (which, let’s be honest, are basically exceedingly guttural versions of English) as well as, paradoxically, Romanian (a Romance language that lost its way and somehow wound up in Eastern Europe). Category II (36 weeks) includes German and Swahili. Category III (about 44 weeks) includes a lot of languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, with tough ones like Hungarian, Kyrgyz, and Russian. Many category III languages use orthographies (writing systems) that are foreign to English-speakers. Think Cyrillic for Russian and Ukrainian, or the Persian alphabet for Farsi and Dari. Then we get to the Category IV languages (requiring, on average, a whopping 88 weeks of intensive classroom instruction): Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. These are the so-called “super-hard languages.”
Given that my four years of high school and one semester of college French had left me unable to speak that language, which is close kin to English, I had chosen an especially tough language for my next attempt at learning a foreign language.
I began my assault on Japanese in the summer of 1978 at Middlebury College’s celebrated summer language program. So far, I’ve been hacking away at Japanese for 2,392 weeks and I am not even close to declaring victory.
I was 19 years old when I began Japanese studies. I went to Middlebury because in those days my school, Rutgers University, did not offer classes in Japanese. The Rutgers course catalog included Chinese, and it was only a few years after I graduated that the university finally set up a Japanese language program.
My parents drove me from New Jersey to Middlebury in bucolic Central Vermont. Middlebury, with the Green Mountains to the east and rolling farmland gently descending to the southern end of Lake Champlain, was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. I shared a dorm room with Bruce, a well-traveled and worldly recent graduate of Amherst College who had majored in classics. Bruce was good with languages: he had achieved a certain mastery of Latin and, having taken a college gap year in Botswana, could also speak some Setswana. He was preparing to spend a year at Amherst College’s sister school in Kyoto, Dōshisha University. He was going to live in Amherst House, Dōshisha’s English-speaking dormitory, and he wanted to learn the rudiments of Japanese. We were both at Middlebury for the nine-week intensive course.
My first Japanese textbook
In it, I learned useful expressions, such as how to ask for a furoshiki (ふろしき), used long ago in Japan to wrap and transport things like gifts and lunch boxes.
Middlebury’s summer language program was started in 1915 with the German School (the First World War created an urgent need to train Americans in the enemy’s language). The major European languages followed in quick succession. The Japanese School was a relative latecomer in 1972. The Japanese course was expensive, about $1,400 for tuition, housing, and meals, as I recall. This was a lot of money in 1978, and I’m grateful to my parents for finding a way to pay it. (The same program is now eight weeks long and costs around $15,000.)
Students in Middlebury’s immersive language schools sign a pledge not to use English while on campus for the duration of the program. The pledge was honored by students in the other language schools, but only loosely in the Japanese school. Our instructors spoke a lot of English in the classroom, and students spoke English all the time outside of the classroom. There seemed to be few students, other than those in the upper level classes, who could hold a conversation in Japanese. I think the native-speaker instructors were influenced by their own experience of learning English in Japanese schools: For most of the postwar period, English classes from middle school to university were taught almost exclusively in Japanese. The study of English in Japan was much like learning Latin or Greek in Western countries. English was taught, not as a living language that people spoke in daily life, but as a set of texts to be parsed, decoded, and translated into Japanese. Many Japanese teachers of English could not, in fact, speak English themselves. Their pronunciation was often bizarre, such that a class might start with a few halting words in English:
Puriizu shitto daun (プリーズシットダウン; Please sit down). Yosshu…kyōkasho no 27 peeji o hiraitte…. (よっし、教科書の27ページを開いって; OK, open your textbooks to p. 27.)
I think that, at some preconscious level, our teachers at Middlebury did not truly expect their students to be able to speak Japanese, just as their own teachers did not expect them to become fluent in English.
Things have changed: My wife and I stopped in Middlebury some 30 years after my summer on the campus. I introduced myself to some faculty members, who introduced us to some students in the program. I spoke to them in Japanese, and they responded in halting but perfectly intelligible Japanese.
Itsu kara Nihongo wo benkyō shite iru’n desu ka? (いつから日本語を勉強しているのですか; How long have you been learning Japanese?)
Ni shūkan gurai desu. (２週間ぐらいです; About two weeks.)
I was floored. Japanese pedagogy has clearly improved since my time.
The night before the final exam that summer, I pulled my one-and-only all-nighter. Cramming is never a good way to learn subject matter, but I was trying to prove something to myself, that I could stay up all night for Japanese. I watched the sky lighten as the sun came up. Somehow or other, I managed to get a B in the course; the instructors were kind to me. I was awarded the 10 credits that put me over the top for graduation from Rutgers University and officially graduated from college that October.
In the spring of 1978, I had been accepted into Columbia University’s graduate program in history. I was going to study Japanese history. I was not awarded any financial support, so I would have to borrow to pay the tuition. By the end of the Middlebury Japanese course, as the sun rose that morning on the Middlebury campus, I knew full well that I was not ready for graduate study. For one thing, I was too young: I was turning 20 that October, and I was no prodigy. I told my parents that I was going to take time off from school and find a job. But my father had other ideas: he said that by taking time away from school, I would “lose momentum.” This cockeyed notion would quickly take on a momentum of its own. He said “Why don’t you take a half load and see how it goes?”
I found a room in a ratty apartment (literally: rats in the walls and in the rooms) on 111th Street, signed up for a repeat of intensive first year Japanese and a class in early and medieval Japanese history. I scraped by, got a pair of B’s in these classes, and withdrew from Columbia in December 1978. It took me several years to repay the $2,500 loan I had taken out to pay for the classes.
For all that, I was not ready to give up on Japanese.
…to be continued
