Japan Culture - No Language, No Meaning, Know Language, Know Meaning (Part 3)

(Please continue reading from Part 1 below if you have time)

If we take it that my pprc (see Part 2) level of language ability is a good starting point from which to start understanding the culture, well, then, I'd be very happy.

But let's take a look at what's missing from a person's understanding of Japan if they don't understand the 4 (body language was covered briefly in Part 2 so I'm leaving that out) basic parts of the language - speaking, listening, reading, writing.

From those 4, I'm dividing those into 2 respective groups "speaking/listening" and "reading/writing." This might seem obvious to do, but for people studying Japanese it really isn't. A guy or girl studying Japanese by listening to tapes might listen and comprehend but then talk with their own (nearly incomprehensible to Japanese people) English pronunciation. They might talk in dictionary talk (do we really say "I am going to the store" rather than "I'm goin totha store") or "anime-speak" (the weird, exaggerated and often rude way cartoon characters talk) without anyone to listen to them and correct it. A person might read the small easy portion of Japanese but not the larger more difficult portion (and yet not be able to write them - this involves remembering the order of pen strokes involved and so on). There are thousands of reasons to not divide these 4, but for sake of simplicity, we have the two groups of "speaking/listening" and "reading/writing." This is again going to be in 3 parts, the first two are easy and short, the 3rd is long:

1) If a person lacks all of these (both of these groups), I think it's hopeless to understand the culture (please see Part 1). Sorry to any lazy sociologists/anthropologists. As a note, having someone tell you what term "x" and term "y" mean in another language just doesn't cut it. For example, in a sociology textbook you might see - "giri" in Japanese refers to their social obligations to each other. It's entirely insufficient. Direct understanding of the language is necessary.

2) A person that can read and write Japanese but can't speak/listen to it. Well, plenty of bedroom students of Japanese might be able to relate to this (myself included), but it only presents problems in terms of flawless conversation. One might have to ask someone to repeat something a few times. One might not be understood by native speakers because of their awful pronunciation/accent. Obviously, being able to speak/listen to Japanese is essential to getting by in Japan. It's also obviously the easiest part of the language to learn.

For spoken/listening Japanese, you can almost just "pick it up" though that's an insanely lengthy process and full of pitholes. I met a cool Japanese guy many years ago before I studied Japanese and we were out in the cold and I asked him "this kinda temperature, what do you say in Japanese?" and he gave me the answer in Japanese. I expected it to mean "cold" but he basically said "it's unbelievably fucking cold." This is another big linguistic topic - how a word in one language truly meets up with a similar word in another language. A word may have bad connotations in one culture and good connotations in another, there are a million questions. So, ending that...

3) A person that can speak/listen to Japanese but can't read/write. This is big. Most people that come to Japan end up learning some conversation ability. They might even get to a level of being able to handle the day-to-day questions/answers and proclaim themselves fluent (not in pprc). I can't say all people, because I've met people here for near a decade that speak absolutely nothing. I don't look down on some of those people - they were just here for business. The others, those looking for a cultural experience by coming here, but getting stuck here because of a lack of job skills and talents and abilities, and yet still not learning the language of the country they live in, I do look down on, so sorry for them.

Now, to an English speaker, it does seem odd - why would reading/writing matter so much? The alphabet doesn't really have much to do with English except if you want to write down something. Even then, learning the 52 characters in the alphabet (yes upper and lower case, to a foreigner learning English could you tell them that 'e' and 'E' or 'q' and 'Q' are the same letter?) shouldn't take much time at all. But, it's very different in Japanese.

So what's missing? well if we forget about the basic syllable-way of writing Japanese, and focus on the ever prevalent and scary Kanji (maybe 5000 characters are in common use in Japan), I can give you a pretty good idea.

In the next part, (part 4), I'm going to use two words as examples. Every word is like this in Japanese, and once you see the examples, I think you'll understand more that pprc is essential to understanding Japanese Culture.