Wednesday, July 21, 2004

7:56 PM | Why My Japanese is Bad

I often wonder how people, in the cusp of adulthood, manage to grasp the intricacies of second languages, when they already are way beyond the instinctive drives they once possessed as children (that golden age when we took to learning new tongues like duck takes to water).

 

You cannot teach an old dog new tricks, so they say. How much more language?

 

Which is perhaps why I sometimes find myself becoming grateful for having had a solid background of English gleaned from when I was a child (my elementary school teacher Ms. Bennie Vic V. Concepcion was thorough in her approach to the language). This is something I take for granted (and I shouldn't) in a world increasing demanding English to be the lingua franca for the way we live.

 

And yet, teaching as I do in a Dumaguete university, I know that there are still others who stumble through grammatical incomprehensibility: I still find the occasional student still struggling with the lows and highs of English speaking -- especially in terms of grammar, and increasingly in terms of vocabulary, too. I have been asked once, "Sir, what is a 'slave'?" Which does not lead me to wonder anymore why it is that I have been often accused of sporting a supposedly high-falutin diction -- an accusation which, I think, speaks more about my accuser than it does of me. (Here is a generation, after all, who thinks that World War II was all about the Vietnam War.)

 

And then I also see those Koreans, those Chinese, and now those Iranians invading our shores, their accent as thick as their determination to learn Americanese. The sheer effort they exert to learn the nuances of the Queen's tongue!

 

But what drives us to learn a language? And can "drive" -- one might call it "motivation" -- ever be enough?

 

In the book Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching edited by Sandra Lee McKay and Nancy H. Hornberger, Mary McGroarty writes: "Recent research using multiple indicators of attitude, including gender, age, language background, type of school attended, and local youth culture, has shown that these variables together shape attitudes, which in turn affect and are simultaneously influenced by ability in a language. Furthermore, it is not so much the type but the intensity of motivation that makes a difference in successful outcomes of second language study...." 

 

I totally get this notion -- articulating the why's, or why not's, of taking a second language to heart -- in the very personal level. Sometimes, when a stranger finds out that I have been to Japan for an extended period of time, the question that is ultimately asked of me is this: Can you speak Japanese?

 

I would always reply, in a guarded tone: "Well, conversational Japanese, yes. Ask me how I am today, and I can tell you: Genki deshoo." 

 

But then, after adding to that a few more vocabulary and a spattering of passable sentences, my Japanese dies an ungraceful death. Today, for example, I cannot understand what goes on in NHK (the Japanese cable channel) to save my life -- but I also have the feeling that given time to oil my tongue and my memory, a semblance of pseudo-gibberish Japanese will come out. "It never really goes away," an American friend told me once, "It's like riding a bike." Nevertheless, the ultimate truth of the matter is this: my command of Japanese is bad.

 

Why is my Japanese bad? This confounds many, since I have "maintained" this reputation of being a know-it-all, a study-wart. I go around, sometimes, to confound people with a passable command of colloquial French. "You are a multilingual?" people would ask me. I would shrug and say, "Oui" -- more out of bemusement, of course. When I went to Japan, I made it a point in my agenda to learn Nihonggo, because learning another language, I thought, would be… nice. I was already 22 then, well past the peak with which language-learning is easy to do. So I studied Japanese. In one session alone, I was able to learn a whole semester's worth of Nihonggo back in Silliman. There were indications for success. I was very motivated. And the momentum and the rigid schedule (classes took the whole morning, starting from 8:00 a.m., daily) made sure that it was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The conventional wisdom also went that it is so much easier to learn a language when you are immersed in the very culture of that language. I was in Japan, I thought; this would be a piece of cake. To be able to survive for a year there, after all, I needed to learn the language fast.

 

Then: After two terms of Nihonggo, I dropped out. Possessing a considerable command of the language by that time, I found that language can be something that can ebb away. And so it went.

 

My Japanese is bad.

 

Why? Because I found there was really no need to speak it, even given the fact that I spent almost a year in Tokyo, where I took up two intensive classes just to learn the language (under sensei Murano, who was ever patient in guiding a German, a Dutch, a Finn, a Thai, an Indonesian, and a Filipino into the intricacies of "bird-speak," as the class jestingly referred to Nihonggo, as well as the complex understanding of the kana -- the hiragana, the katakana, and the Chinese kanji).

 

Confounding that with the fact that there was total immersion in the culture: everyday I woke up to the "chatter of birds" as men in my dorm trooped to the shower to prepare for another school day. Outside, all the signs are invariably in Japanese. And again, everywhere there is the jabber of slant-eyed people saying hello, bidding goodbye, asking each one the puzzlements of weather. "Ohayo gozaimasu!" "Sumimasen!" "Honto, ne ... Muzukashi deshoo?" 

 

To no avail.

 

Sometimes I think the reason for this is the fact that my University -- the International Christian University in Tokyo -- was American. And every year, it "imported" foreign students like me (we were called OYRs -- or One-Year Regulars) to augment its population and to create an international atmosphere on campus. Of course, when the OYRs get together, the language of bonding and of understanding each other becomes English. Seldom did we speak in Nihonggo, except during exercises in class. Then again, even our Japanese classmates demanded we speak to them in English, perhaps to better their own faltering way with it. And while many of the classes being taught in the University were in Nihonggo, there was also an ample number of subjects being taught in English. Plus, the sprawling University is a community in itself, with a supermarket, libraries with Internet access, a post office, etc. English was spoken everywhere. Eventually you learn there was no need to learn a new language, even if that "new" language is the native tongue being spoken by everybody else around you.

 

And somewhere near the end of the second term, I realized that the initial resolve to learn Nihonggo was hollow. All I wanted to have in Japan was to have an extended vacation in the guise of "scholarship," never really to learn "language." I wrote in my diary from that period: "I'd rather be in Disneyland, or in Kichijoji shopping." 

 

I am talking about motivation here, and how motivation is really qualified by many other factors (McGroarty mentioned gender, age, language background, type of school attended, and local youth culture), including "intensity" of that motivation. It isn't really about "intrinsic" or "extrinsic" motivation, because I had both. (There was even "instrumental" motivation.) There was a perceived "want" within myself to learn Nihonggo, and I knew I could be "rewarded" with a better life in Japan if I learned the language. But both "motivations" came to naught. I had a good teacher, too. And I can very well say that my classmates were a fascinating bunch.

 

So what happened? I quote McGroarty again: "Instructional obstacles come about not because students have different types of motivation but because some students are relatively less motivated by any combination of integrative, instrumental, or other orientations. Having no clear purpose and no strongly felt reason to learn another language, such students are unlikely to expend the effort required."



Students such as me.

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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