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Just some questions on the recent fansub debate, apart from the lighthearted mocking.
(1) We all know we can read faster than we can hear – we can make short work of a paragraph but it would take a lot more time to listen to someone read it. Therefore, we read a line of subbed text much quicker than we hear the Japanese language that accompanies it. “Accompany” is probably a safer word choice since we can’t exchange, “word for word” (morpheme for phoneme), English for Japanese – and vice versa. This brings up the question: how exactly do we come to gradually pick up some Japanese words when we are given an English translation? Obviously one may retort that, after we see and hear enough fansubs, making comparisons should be rather easy and that such ubiquitous words like personal pronouns – and the more infamous kawai [et al.] – are made standard weeaboo vocabulary. But that is not the actual, psychological mechanism at hand. It might be because we tend to imbue English grammar rules onto Japanese: Owen said you don’t always need the desu copula, whereas in Standard English (SE) the removal of the copula (zero copula) is taken as not just “informal SE” but more of a language variety, specifically Black English:
He is so fat.
He so fat.
Where are they now?
Where they now?
It’s also common practice in varieties of American English to simplify all conjugations of the “be” verb to just “be” or “is”.
He is cooking the fish.
He be cooking the fish.
Why are they all sad?
Why is they all sad?
In the event of applying English grammar onto Japanese, we can easily overlap language ideology, cultural coding and purely linguistic features. If a weeaboo always finishes his Japanese sentences with desu it is possible that he wishes to avoid what he feels as an English grammatical error, such a rule he assumes is present in another language, and doesn’t realize that (a) his avoidance of zero copula is more of an ideological factor (to avoid ridicule for poor use of the Foucaldian-discursive entity that is “Standard English”) and that (b) zero copula in Japanese [if that exists?] is not necessarily an ideological factor but one of cultural convenience. But then again I don’t know anything about socio-linguistics in Japanese, it’s a hypothetical situation.
(2) Is it really possible to learn Japanese through raws after having significant exposure to fansubs? Dunno! Due to the “informal” (ie. not taking classes) structure of language learning via anime, linguist Stephen D. Krashen calls this acquisition, which is a “subconscious process whereas learning is an active and conscious process involving the memorization of many formal linguistic rules.” He states that “learning cannot become acquisition and that fluency in a second or foreign language is due to what learners have acquired, not what they have learned.”1 Essentially, Krashen prefers subconscious acquisition over formalized learning procedures in the path to fluency in a second language (it is similar to how infants learn their own native tongues).
(3) This segways into the fact that watching anime alone gives no feedback. We might be tempted to say that listening to anime-Japanese is thus giving us a good glimpse into the culture, though there are many that would disagree; in fact, I suspect anime-Japanese is probably more of a register much like how in America there is legal speech as opposed to drunk-in-the-bar-speech (or news anchor speech). Listening alone, it will seem, does not even a good measure of feedback since, in real speech, feedback is often a product of or influenced by the speech, our input – feedback implicates, so to speak, feedto. We cannot really say that listening to Japanese is an auditory submersion past a very superficial level.
1 http://fredshannon.blogspot.com/2005/11/input-hypothesis.html
I recall something from the linguistics course I took last semester that supports what you’re saying. The groundwork for language learning is laid in infants through immersion in an environment in which a language or languages are used, but infants do not acquire basic native-level proficiency in languages they only hear on television and in recordings. This presumably applies to we anime-watchers; true acquisition probably can’t happen, at least to any great extent, via anime raws. Chomsky would be able to say much more on the subject than I would, though.
Well, natural language acquisition stops around puberty– the brain re-wires itself, so if a student doesn’t do some “learning,” the acquisition won’t happen. I heard plenty of Japanese before I took courses, and never picked up anything. After years of study, however, I can acquire vocabulary through shows sometimes.
And yeah. Stephen Pinker described a famous case study wherein a doctor told two deaf parents to put their hearing child in front of the TV. The child didn’t acquire any spoken language until it started interacting with other speakers. TV is one-directional.
Don’t you mean ‘quandary,’ Daniel?
Linguistics is not my field, although I love playing with words. I have been ‘addicted’ to anime for more than five years, though, but it was only when I enrolled in a course on Japanese language did I partly understand the nuances of the language.
>I heard plenty of Japanese before I took courses, and never picked up anything.
Exactly. I think Krashen is right. I read a lot of English material when I was still a child (arguably a lot more than most normal children), so I assume part of the reason of my fluency in English is my acquisition of it (in addition to ‘learning’ it properly, too).
I replied to your e-mail, btw, Daniel. :P
fuck. typo in the title is embarrassing.
Pontifus: as per [76], the blogosphere debate on “fansub authenticity” spawns more from an issue of authority and power rather than pragmatics. I really can’t talk much about the neuro-psychological processes of language since I’ve never read up in that area, though.
Chuchlann: Ah, Pinker. Reading “mentalese” (a chapter in one of his books) is standard fare in the communication program I’m in, and we’re also obliged to read snippets of sapir, whorf and lakoff. Essentially, points 2 and 3 are sort of in contradiction (though that doesn’t necessarily make sense): we can listen to the culture itself to be immersed in it, but it’s a false immersion since listening in such a respect is linear and one-directional. I guess the best bet would be to go live in Japan for a while!
Mike: I really like to try and figure out the rules of Japanese when watching anime. Like, I can’t figure out why, seemingly, two particles “na” and “no” and juxtaposed at the end up sentences….”blah blah blah na no“. It’s fairly easy to get the gist of wa, ga, ni, o (isn’t o an honorific too? o-bento, o-ni, o-chichiue), no, etc. But yeah, languages in which word ordering is more or less pointless is relatively harder to figure out than others, but that, of course, is from personal bias.
You might enjoy reading Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory, an account of a Mexican-American’s assimilation or Americanization. He ended up losing his Spanish language since he was reading advanced books at young ages (Nathanial Hawthorne in elementary school – I hated the scarlet letter). Dunno, I think you might be able to relate to him in some ways. And yeah, I read it…I’ll reply again later since I rarely go on gtalk.
From what I remember, “no” is one of a few female markers at the end of a sentence — similar to using “like” to soften a statement.
This I’m sure of: the “o” you’re talking about there is actually two different particles. There’s “o,” which is the honorific you’re noticing (analogous to “go,” it just depends on which word you’re adding it to). There’s also “wo,” almost always pronounced as “o,” which is a direct object marker. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “wo” in songs.
Although I don’t know what “ga” does. Is it a subject marker? Isn’t that what “wa” does? Does Japan discriminate between transitive and non-transitive verbs? In Geass, Lelouche said “ore wa…ore wa….ore ga zero.” That threw me off.
A segway is that goofy scooter a mall cop rides. A segue is a smooth transition from one topic to another.
“Ga” and “wa,” basically, serve the same function, yes. I was taught to think of “wa” as a topic marker, and “ga” as the basic subject marker. So “ga” marks the subject and is “simpler.” “Wa” points out that not only is the marked word the subject of the sentence, it’s also what we’re talking about, the topic. It’s weird, and kind-of still hit-or-miss with me. Use “ga” in like phrases, for example — pan ga suki desu, for example, rather than pan wa suki desu*, which one wouldn’t say.
Oh, I thought of this earlier today — the copula and its absence in Japan mark politeness and social position. To leave it off is impolite, and only something a person much “higher” in the social structure than the listener would do. Of course, to be informal without being rude, one uses “da” instead of “desu.”
anon: damn, when I heard people say “segue” I thought it was a metaphorical use of “segway”, like, to scoot to the next thing at hand. haha
chuchlann: hmmm, I don’t really get the ga/wa thing, and so the “ore wa…ore ga zero” still confuses me, so it’s probably some “deep” cultural thing I’ll never comprehend entirely.
That’s kinda funny, how zero copula in Japan is associated with high status, whereas in the US zero copula is associated with very low status.
For wa vs. ga (as well as other fine points of Japanese grammar), a relatively enlightening account can be found in Jay Rubin’s nice little book Making Sense of Japanese. I haven’t seen Geass, but basically, ore wa zero sounds like it would be a lot less emphatic and grandiose than ore ga zero.
na is the attributive form of the copula da. In modern Japanese, it mostly turns up after so-called nominal adjectives, e.g. ano hito wa kirei da “This person is beautiful” -> kirei na hito “A beautiful person”.
no is a pretty ubiquitous particle in Japanese, but one of its function is nominalization: it turns a verbal clause into something close to a noun, like gerund in English, e.g. Taberu no wa hitsuyou da “eating is necessary”, Asahayaku okiru no wa ii “waking up early in the morning is good”.
Combining the two, we get things like Mahoro’s famous line Ecchi na no wa ikenai to omoimasu “I think dirty things (literally, “that which is dirty”) are bad”. And then there’s an “explanatory” sentence marker na no da deriving from there: Naze konakatta? — Shigoto wa taihen na no da. “Why didn’t you come? Work has been pretty hard.” (literally “it is the fact that work has been hard”).
na no is the same thing as na no da with the copula omitted.
Note that omitting the da like this actually softens the sentence a lot, making it less assertive and very feminine. Both are informal of course.
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put more simply: linguistic rules need cultural spaces in which to function. People may mistakenly take one contingent rule as absolute, and thus fumble around in cross-cultural “rule slippage”.