One of Ours

The Japanese language is rather a complex animal because of its long history of being influenced by outside sources. Modern Japanese combines several writing systems, including hiragana (a syllable-based writing system used for Japanese words), katakana (a syllabary for foreign loan words and names), and Chinese kanji characters (which provide visual meaning). There are fundamentally two ways to read each kanji character: the on-yomi or the Chinese reading, based on what the reading for the character was when it was imported into Japan around the 4th century A.D., and the kun-yomi or Japanese reading, an original Japanese pronunciation assigned to the character. No system is perfect, of course, and some kanji have many more than two readings, and the end results it can be quite difficult to know exactly how to pronounce the characters you see. (Chinese people really hate this aspect of learning Japanese -- they can read the meaning of what's written easily, but don't know how to pronounce it out loud.) Sometimes confusion can reign when two words have the same pronunciation, such as the words for "private" and "public" (both of which are pronounced "shiritsu") -- quite confusing when you're asking someone if their child attends a private school or a public school.

Becoming bilingual in a language is fun because you learn so much about how your own brain works. Back in my SDSU days it would be interesting to analyze the process that goes on inside my mind as a new word or grammatical concept was learned, as it went from my short-terrm memory, through longer-term memory until that magic point where the word or concept was fully internalized, and could be called up and used without thought. Then there's what linguists call "interference," when the grammar or pronunciation rules of one language interfere with the operation of another language, sometimes with embarrassing results. We're learning new things about how language and the brain work, still: my third-grade son knows all his timestables back and forth when he's thinking in Japanese, but since he'll be attending an all-English school next year, he has to re-learn everything in English. So far this is proving incredibly difficult for him.

The Japanese are always pleased by foreigners taking an interest in their language and becoming fluent in Japanese, and many of the actors and comedians on Japanese TV are gaijin who have mastered Japanese enough to even be entertaining in the language. There's an unwritten rule that gaijin living in Japan will hate these people, usually because their Japanese is better than ours. Dave Specter, an American who came to Japan as a TV producer, is one such TV personality, despised by all Westerners living here (he actually dyes his black hair blonde to appear more "American" on TV). Thane Camus (pronounced "Sane Kamyu" in Japanese) is a super-cute "gaijin talent" (and grandson of French novelist Albert Camus) who does a show called World's Funniest English, in which Japanese are asked to tell stories in awful English while the exact translation of what they're saying appears on the TV. Appearing with him on the show are three bumbling men from Kenya who speak hilariously mistaken Japanese -- they've become so popular that they appear in TV commercials of their own these days. And then there's Wickie-san, who came to Japan from Sri Lanka and passed the entrance exam to Tokyo University, Japan's top-ranked university. His primary goal is to get Japanese people to learn that Sri Lanka is not part of Africa.