[ATOK 2008 Global Japanese IME With A Serial Keygen
Berry Spitsberg
Of course, you can spend the years of your life any way you like, but it seems a shame to buy a cookbook, go to the store for eggs, flour and a cake pan, come home and mix up a batter, put it in the oven, and then half an hour later yank open the oven and throw the whole thing out the window. In other words, either bake the cake or do not. There is no try. Pretty sure Yoda said that.
Hilarious as always Ken, but you forgot my personal number 1 reason for not learning Japanese, the confused and panicked looks on the faces of the locals as I speak English and their brains scramble to try and assemble the scraps of English they learnt decades ago under some teacher who was more interested in grammar than speaking English.
... which countries are these? Seriously man, I've lived all on almost every continent and I've never met a country as anti-English as Japan... except for France, but they've got a good reason, that 100 year war thingy. Actually, now that I think about it, even France, with its actively anti-English laws, isn't as bad as Japan, because the French just sneered in arrogance at my speaking English, they didn't actually start panicking and look like I should dial 119 for an ambulance. While the French score quite poorly at English on international tests they're actually not bad at communicating in English.
The Japanese on the other hand are god-awful at communicating in any language, including their own. You can have a whole conversation in Japanese consisting of one or two word sentences and monosyllabic grunts... its like trying to communicate with a teenager!
My point though is that I'd love to know which countries these are. If they're "the north pole", "the south pole", etc. then I might acknowledge your point, penguins are notorious for their elitist attitude and refusal to speak English, unlike their more civilised equitorial relatives, the parrots, mynahs, and so forth. However, in my experience from sweaty Brazil to frozen Russia I've never run across a country with as acute an English-phobia as Japan.
You should persevere and learn to understand, speak, read and write Japanese as far as possible, because otherwise it's a massive waste of a good opportunity, and of your time here; and because otherwise you'll become a tiresome cliche of that foreigner.
I think that foreigners who don't wish to learn Japanese are quite fortunate in Japan. When I first came in the 1980s, I was surprised that many TV programs were bilingual, that signs were in English and that there were four English newspapers. It made me very lazy about learning Japanese.
Japanese is a lot easier, more systematic, and suited to being an international language than English. The Kanji especially make Japanese easy non-European language to learn due to the systematic formation of the vocabulary from 1000 to 2000 building blocks, via agglutination. Learn 2000 English words and you may be able to converse at kindergarten. You'll need a thousand more to join primary school (at the above the level of Japanese learners) and you'll probably keep learning about one thousand words a year till your 40's if you are an educated native English speaker. Learn 2000 Kanji and blam, you can read a Japanese broadsheet newspaper. There are no tones, consonant clusters (try getting a Japanese person to say "clothes"), very few irregular verbs, no verb conjunctions, and completely transparent spelling (unlike ghoti/fish English). The difference between "wa" and "ga" is a bitch but not as arbitrary at the use of "the" (The Times, Newsweek, The Kings Head, Macdonalds). IME/ATOK make kanji input easy and Rikai.com and Firefox "Furigana injector" make reading them, with auto-placed "rubi" readings simple too. There are no relative pronouns, so making the most of a limited learner vocabulary is relatively easy - just put the adjectival clause in front of the noun. Google "Japanese as an international language" for more, and keep learning Japanese because, unlike most Japanese learners of English, you will get there.
Based on what? Your personal experience? Stories from friends? The thing you fail to mention in this "article" is that English is like a sport. Some people are born with the ability to pick it up quicker than others.
Not speaking Japanese is your ticket to an easi(er) ride as a kindergarten mother. There were 3 of us furriners. 2 didnt speak a word of Japanese, and then there was me. The other two got away with a lot. I didnt.
On the other hand now I am outside Japan you wouldnt believe how "cool" it is to be fluent in Japanese. Everyone is well impressed. I am enjoying my new found and temporary star-status because I give myself 6 months at the outside before I have lost the lot unless I can convince my husband that we need to speak it at home as he always promised we would. :-/
Nah, what I find is people you meet for the first time hang back because they assume they can't communicate with you, them not speaking English and you being a furriner. Then they find out you can speak Japanese (usually by hearing you talking to someone else, and that someone else's head not exploding from the effort of trying to speak English) and heave a huge sigh of relief. Then they start telling you their life story.
I work at an engineering/manufacturing company and one of the problems we often encounter is the poor use of written Japanese from Japanese. I'm a science major ( as you can probably tell from the standard of the English in my mails ) but I can at least write a set of instructions or specifications in clear, digestible English or Japanese if I have a native-speaking, literate proofreader. Japanese education does not pay anything like enough attention to how to write, or in some cases even speak and present, in a lucid, concise manner. The usual 'Japanese is very vague' myths are trotted by someone who has given me sheets of poorly written, vague garbage. Japanese isn't some magical code understood by those who share similar sensibilities. It's a language like any other which can be learned with effort, but many Japanese still buy in to the idea that it cannot be mastered by outsiders. If it is the vague, badly expressed Japanese have to put up with, many of our native-speaking Japanese translators haven't got a clue either.
It's funny that a bunch of gaijins living in Japan who won't/don't/can't learn Japanese always complain about the abysmal English ability of Japanese people. Of course it's going to take time. Is it worth it? That depends how much you want to understand the country and how deep you want your friendships to be, but I think knowledge is better than ignorance, don't you?
But who wants to be friends with a person who only wants to use you for free English lessons? I have found that it is much easier to talk to people when they know you can speak Japanese. Like Cleo says, often people really open up to foriegners in ways they wouldn't to other Japanese people - though as nandakandamanda says, perhaps that is only in the sticks.
I'd reason wtfjapan is successful in Japan is that because of his ability (or in this case lack of ability) means he can't be hired by a japanese firm, therefore saving his work/life balance and not being ko'd by having to work until 11pm every night.
I've become highly disenchanted with learning Japanese. I studied in university, studied abroad, and it has been my goal to ace the level 1 of the JLPT for some time now, but, I have a terrible confession: since coming to Japan, my Japanese has GOTTEN WORSE. Why? I don't even need it to work in Japan. As I teach English, I speak English all day. My boss is American, so we converse in English, and on the occasions where I go out with students, they... you guessed it, want to practice their English. I have gotten very good at living in Japan, but besides daily conversation, I have no time to put in serious study (besides waking up at 4 am), and there aren't any reasonably priced Japanese classes in my city. It's really frustrating. I don't want to bail on the whole thing, as I've already invested so much time, but Ken nailed it: it's so easy to quit when there's no reason to continue. Ah, well, I'll keep trying when I can, but it's a shame I have to stop working in Japan to improve my Japanese...
It's just better to be dumb, naive and stupid then to make the effort. I have a friend that is a astrophysicist that works for NASA. I used to wonder why would anyone bother spending half their lifetime looking at a bunch of stars searching for the origins of the universe lol. I can think of a lot better things how one can be spending their time doing. Yet I wonder how many people have actually talked to one. My friend put it to me this way.
Who has not felt a sense of awe while looking deep into the sky, lit with countless stars on a clear night? Who has not asked themselves if ours is the only planet that supports life? Who has not pondered the nature of the planets, stars, galaxies, and the Universe itself? I seek to to explain through Science everything that we observe in the Universe, from the comets and planets in our own solar system to distant galaxies which are far beyond what anyone can imagine. By studying the cosmos beyond our own planet, I can try to understand where we came from, where we are going, and how physics works under conditions which are impossible to recreate on Earth. In astronomy, the Universe is our laboratory! That is why I am a astrophysicist.
OK, that was a bit more of an answer then I was looking for but I had it coming lol. I could tell this is what he lived & breathed for and I respect that. In retrospect I didn't learn Japanese or continue to learn with the assumption of ever becoming a master of the language. I did it to challenge myself and try to push beyond my limitations of what I thought was possible. It helped me to become a better more attentive listener. In addition to being more discipline in my daily life as well.
So that sure doesn't sound like a waste of time to me! Learning Japanese while extremely difficult is not unattainable as is climbing Mount Everest. You believe in something enough and are willing to make the sacrifices. As well as put forth the effort one needs to get there it's possible. In closing I grew up as a stutterer and dyslexic to boot. English was a nightmare for me and yet I prevailed. Japanese in contrast is just like me reliving my childhood all over again. Actually I am kinda ok with that! :)
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