Complaints and More.
Sep. 15th, 2009 05:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19Okay, two complaints regarding Japanese study - just to get them out of my system so I can get on with the business of learning.
1) Pronunciation. Okay, I recognize that I cannot fault the Japanese language for having accented words - particularly given the extreme number of homonyms/homophones (spelled the same way in hiragana and a different way in kanji). There has to be some way to tell them apart other than context, I suppose, and English has more than its fair share of seriously weird words. Still, I resent the ridiculous emphasis that is placed on us - as foreigners - knowing the exact usage of accents (particularly this late in the game... if it's that important, why weren't we being taught about it in the beginning the way tonality is addressed in Chinese?). I will never speak Japanese in exactly the same way that a native person speaks Japanese. And why not? Because I'm not Japanese. Seriously, I don't believe that someone is going to think my Japanese is bad if I pronounce "Yokohama" with a slightly descending accent instead of a rising one. And if they do, they're an asshole. End of story.
2) Handwriting. My handwriting has always been bad. It's bad in English; it's bad in Japanese. I'm one of those people who has bad handwriting. I do my best to write legibly, but sometimes there's an overall sloppy look to my sentences. But bad handwriting does not equal incorrect. I mean, really, just because the ten (dot) on my 時 was a millimeter or so lower than you would like - that makes it incorrect? You do realize that there's nothing else that it could be mistaken for, right? And I've seen your handwriting, too, you know. It's not the best. I couldn't believe how you wrote the letter お. Man, I could hardly read it! I know you're being hard on us because we're foreigners, but there is a point where you're just being a stickler about it to be stickler. (And you arrived at that point.)
But that's the way it goes in language school. They're extra hard on you in order to enable you to be better in everyday life with people who are more than likely going to cut you some slack. I understand that, and I even appreciate it at the end of the day when I'm done rolling my eyes about it. And so, I'll put my complaints behind me and meet each new class with a smile. (Although, I do admit that I asked my teacher today if これ actually ceased to be a word with a falling intonation. I did it politely, though. After all, my use of irony is generally lost when I try to tell jokes in Japanese, best take advantage of it in class. She admitted that depending on where you were from, you might actually pronounce it that way. As you can imagine, I felt a considerable amount of vindication.)
...
Moving on... here's a collection of things that have struck my notice lately:
Al Franken is awesome.
Whoopi Goldberg is super awesome.
Also, this excerpt from a recent Feministing blog post cracked me up, because I am sick and wrong:
Repealing [proposition] 8 in 2012 has many advantages; four more years of elderly voters will be removed from the rolls...
Sick, but true.
...
And finally, Patrick Swayze and Jim Carroll?! Okay. [sigh] Who's next?
1) Pronunciation. Okay, I recognize that I cannot fault the Japanese language for having accented words - particularly given the extreme number of homonyms/homophones (spelled the same way in hiragana and a different way in kanji). There has to be some way to tell them apart other than context, I suppose, and English has more than its fair share of seriously weird words. Still, I resent the ridiculous emphasis that is placed on us - as foreigners - knowing the exact usage of accents (particularly this late in the game... if it's that important, why weren't we being taught about it in the beginning the way tonality is addressed in Chinese?). I will never speak Japanese in exactly the same way that a native person speaks Japanese. And why not? Because I'm not Japanese. Seriously, I don't believe that someone is going to think my Japanese is bad if I pronounce "Yokohama" with a slightly descending accent instead of a rising one. And if they do, they're an asshole. End of story.
2) Handwriting. My handwriting has always been bad. It's bad in English; it's bad in Japanese. I'm one of those people who has bad handwriting. I do my best to write legibly, but sometimes there's an overall sloppy look to my sentences. But bad handwriting does not equal incorrect. I mean, really, just because the ten (dot) on my 時 was a millimeter or so lower than you would like - that makes it incorrect? You do realize that there's nothing else that it could be mistaken for, right? And I've seen your handwriting, too, you know. It's not the best. I couldn't believe how you wrote the letter お. Man, I could hardly read it! I know you're being hard on us because we're foreigners, but there is a point where you're just being a stickler about it to be stickler. (And you arrived at that point.)
But that's the way it goes in language school. They're extra hard on you in order to enable you to be better in everyday life with people who are more than likely going to cut you some slack. I understand that, and I even appreciate it at the end of the day when I'm done rolling my eyes about it. And so, I'll put my complaints behind me and meet each new class with a smile. (Although, I do admit that I asked my teacher today if これ actually ceased to be a word with a falling intonation. I did it politely, though. After all, my use of irony is generally lost when I try to tell jokes in Japanese, best take advantage of it in class. She admitted that depending on where you were from, you might actually pronounce it that way. As you can imagine, I felt a considerable amount of vindication.)
...
Moving on... here's a collection of things that have struck my notice lately:
Al Franken is awesome.
Whoopi Goldberg is super awesome.
Also, this excerpt from a recent Feministing blog post cracked me up, because I am sick and wrong:
Repealing [proposition] 8 in 2012 has many advantages; four more years of elderly voters will be removed from the rolls...
Sick, but true.
...
And finally, Patrick Swayze and Jim Carroll?! Okay. [sigh] Who's next?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-09-15 06:32 pm (UTC)Also, one of my teachers at Japan Society this past year didn't correct people when they made mistakes - it drove me crazy. How are you supposed to learn?