I have been having fun with Japanese over the holiday. I received the wonderful present of Pazudora (Puzzle and Dragons) Z and have been watching a lot of Anpanman – especially the Christmas Special movies.
These two activities have one notable thing in common – they barely exist in English. While there is a Wikipedia article, there is very little other online information on Anpanman and very few, if any, translations exist. Many charming and wonderful characters seem to be completely unknown outside Japan. For example, you won’t find a picture of Doremi-hime (from アンパンマンとクリスマスの星 – Anpanman and the Star of Christmas and other movies and episodes.)
Similarly Pazudora, which is a huge phenomenon in Japan – earning its maker, GungHo, several million dollars a day (really!) is virtually unknown outside Japan.
Pazudora is a cute and complex RPG, like Pokemon so there is a lot of text and a lot to learn about the monsters themselves. But unlike Pokemon, there is no “cheating”. The keitai version exists in the US, but that is very different from the Z-version, the Nintendo 3DS RPG.
So if you want to understand the game and know your monster collection intimately, you have to read a lot of Japanese and you can’t sneak away for a quick info-break on an English-language site. And this is such a good game that it is well worth doing. It really compels you to play.
Gung-Ho’s president – true to the company’s name – has said his aim is to sell more games than Nintendo by the time he retires. Not very likely, but this company is serious about games and has done a really good job on PazudoraZ. Famitsu’s four reviewers gave it 9/10 each – 9:9:9:9 from Famitsu is a huge accolade in Japan. The game sold through most of its initial shipment on the first day.
I don’t have Pokemon X yet (it will be X, as my Japanese-game-playing friend has Y) but Pazudora is splendid training in learning a game’s complexities in Japanese.
My recent bout of Anpanman-watching has been a reberu-appu for me, as I have been watching intensively in Japanese without subtitles (I usually use Japanese subtitles). Kikitori (hear-catching or “listening comprehension”) is currently a problem for me and I often have to play the same fraction of dialog four or five times. But I am getting faster. I remember when a half-hour show with Japanese subtitles took me hours. Now it is much faster. Some things I just can’t get in Anpanman, presumably because I simply don’t know the words. But I can definitely follow the shows and know most of what is going on.
And they really are worth watching. I have cried several times during the Christmas (and other) movies. They are pure, warm-hearted and deeply touching shows of a kind that one doesn’t find in the West. Anpanman is hugely popular in Japan (you see Anpanman products of one kind or another just about every shop you go in) and has been for years. I would guess it is never coming to the West, so experiencing these beautiful shows is one of the benefits of learning Japanese.
Pazudora may eventually come to the West (though the US keitai version is very far from achieving the runaway success it has had in Japan, so they may not bother). It is another unique and truly wonderful experience that, at the time of writing, can only be enjoyed in Japanese.
I’ll leave you with my favorite team-member, クルル Kururu, from PazudoraZ. She is currently my team leader and has the leader-skill called inori (prayer) which heals a small but substantial amount of the team’s life every turn.
She also gives my Japanese a few more hit-points every turn!
Do mnemonics really work in learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary? Are they just a silly trick? Or do they have a deep cultural history and a fundamental connection to how our brains work? Dolly looks at Japanese Mnemonics and explains the Dolly Method.
Japanese mnemonics really work – IF you know how to use them.
Mnemonics, with their funny stories and (in the case of vocabulary) often odd and irrelevant sound-matches, tend to be considered vague and messy.
But in fact mnemonics of just this type played a huge and very serious role in Western culture. I don’t know about Eastern culture, but I suspect mnemonics were used there too. They are a pretty fundamental learning technique, although there have not been (or if they have we aren’t aware of them) any ground-breaking studies like that of Dame Frances Yates (The Art of Memory) in China or Japan.
But from the earliest times, elaborate systems of mnemonics have been used to help people in various disciplines to memorize seemingly impossible amounts of information. Very few people today can match the memory-feats of the ancients, and those that can use mnemonics. The fully-elaborated art of mnemonics was lost in the West after the Renaissance (after a history going back certainly to the Pythagoreans and possibly to ancient Egypt) – mainly through Protestant influence.
So, mnemonics are not something odd and peripheral. They have a long history of being a surprisingly integral part of culture. If you want to learn more about this, you can read Dame Frances’s book, or look up the Art of Memory on the internet. For now let us think about how it might impact us as Japanese learners.
Professor Heisig, as far as I know, is the only person to have formulated a systematic Japanese mnemonic system – in his case for learning the general meanings of kanji without knowing the words or pronunciations. I have to confess that I dont’ use his method and am not much in sympathy with his approach. But I have read his books and have been influenced by the core of his method, however, I won’t be dealing with kanji mnemonics directly in this article. You can read about my organic kanji mnemonic approach here.
I will also confess that I do not use mnemonics systematically. I don’t have a systematic mind. But I do strongly believe that the use of mnemonics is very important to learning Japanese – or any language.
In Japanese, mnemonics have two main functions – learning kanji and learning vocabulary. Prof. Heisig separates the two radically in his method. We take a more piecemeal approach – and in some cases the kanji are the mnemonics – or a part of them. Cure Tadashiku talks a lot about this, but here let’s talk about mnemonics in the more usual sense.
The way I see regular mnemonics is that they are “pins” or “tacks”. They hold a word or concept in place while we are learning it. They might also be likened to those surgical sutures that don’t need to be removed because they just melt away as the wound heals. This is how mnemonics work. As the word begins to become second nature, the mnemonic fades away and one forgets it.
This is important, because one can be wary of attaching a lot of strange chaotic nonsense to a word in order to remember it. “Why fill my head with this stuff?” you may ask. Well the answer is that you are only filling your head very temporarily. It is a pin that will hold the word in place until it is welded properly. Then the pin will naturally fall away.
However the pin is important. Mnemonics are much more fundamental to the art of learning than many people give them credit for. Very often when one uses a word and knows roughly what it means but forgets the exact meaning, one can go back to the mnemonic to “check” the meaning – like looking it up in a dictionary, but much faster and easier to do on the fly!
So how do we form mnemonics? I think most of us know the basics. I am talking mostly about vocabulary (rather than kanji) mnemonics here. One needs a sound-association that will fix the meaning of the word. If it can be striking, humorous, surprising etc it will stick better because that is the way the mind works.
One thing to bear in mind is that mnemonics don’t have to be English-to-Japanese. You can use Japanese words you already know to pin other Japanese words. You can mix Japanese and English in mnemonics. Also, as one gets closer to the real etymology of Japanese words, that is the best way to remember them (etymology is, if one will, the natural mnemonic).
Let’s take an example:
独り占め hitorijime : monopoly
We can pin this with an “irrational” mnemonic. “Hitori” (one, alone) :”Jimmy” (English name). Mnemonic: “Jimmy alone runs all the shops in town – he has a monopoly“.
Note that we mixed English and Japanese in the mnemonic. Hitori is a very basic Japanese word that we know well, so we can use that. An added bonus here is that we are actually using it in its correct etymological sense. As we learn more about the kanji we find that 独り(hitori) means the same as 一人 (hitori) = one person, single, alone. As such it is directly equivalent to the mon of monopoly (Gk. monos – single, alone). Later we will also learn that 占む (jimu) means to hold, command, account for. So 独り占め is single-holding (or controlling).
As you see, the real etymology is, in this case as in many, more organic and helpful than the mnemonic. On the other hand, one can’t learn a word by learning all its ancestors. Since one doesn’t (at first) know any of them, none of them serves a mnemonic function. In the example we gave we used a mnemonic “pin” to keep the word in place in our memory, and then gathered more information over time.
Now let’s take a few more examples – picked from my recent vocabulary list:
そり sori = a sleigh or sled. My dictionary tells me it is usually written using kana alone, so I am not going to worry about its two different kanji. Let’s just picture a child careering down a busy street on a sled, continually bumping into people and saying – sorry.
記憶 kioku = memory, reflection, remembrance. Now what I did with this was remembered that 記録 kiroku is a record. If you take the R out of kiroku, you no longer have a Read or wRitten Record, you just have memory. Maybe that’s just the way my odd mind works. Note that this is just a quick and useful pin. It helps me remember the word. It also helps for “real” etymological vocabulary building over time. The ki of kioku is the same ki as kiroku 記 it means an account or record. It is the same ki as in 日記 nikki – diary – a “day-record” (the dia of diary also means “day”, as does the jour of the French equivalent journal).
遥か haruka means “far” in both English senses (as in “it is far away” and “it is far bigger”). I am not learning this kanji yet; I just wanted a sound-pin for the word. I thought of Wordsworth’s “If winter comes, can spring be far behind”. Haru, of course, is spring in Japanese. So I mix languages again to make “Haru can’t be far“. Now in this case the etymology is wrong. the haru of haruka is not haru meaning spring. But as with irrelevant English words, it serves a punning purpose as a pin.
Which leads us to the subject of…
Using “irrelevant” Japanese mnemonics
In some cases we may not use Japanese words in their proper etymological senses. We may want a striking image to associate with a Japanese syllable. One writer on the internet said that he always used the image of a Jewish person for the syllable “juu”, saying something like “you may not like it but what else can one use?”
Well if one mines Japanese and not just English, there are various things. じゅう alone can mean a handgun. This opens the door to a lot of striking images – things can be shot out of a gun, shot with a gun etcetera, in various pinning-scenarios. In these cases, the juu of the mnemonic will not be the juu of the word, so it is just a sound-pinning exercise. But these can be very useful. It also helps you to remember juu the gun, so that is useful too.
An important note relating to the Art of Memory here. One may say “I don’t need help remembering juu as gun”. But “help remembering” is an inadequate term. One of the reasons we find it hard to read/hear language at speed is that while we may know all the words, it takes microseconds more than it should to remember each one. That is why foreign languages feel to us as if they are being spoken super-fast whereas in fact, in the case of Japanese, it is usually being spoken slower than most people speak English. It feels fast because we are being bombarded with too much processing at once. There may not be a single word we don’t know, but all but the easiest ones take microseconds more than they should for us to process and the harder ones may take whole seconds. In a vocabulary-test situation, that is fine; but for real-time language use it just isn’t fast enough.
That is why it is good to keep “helping ourselves to remember” that, say, juu means gun. We may well “know” it. We may be able to retrieve it within microseconds. But until we have dealt with it thousands of times, we can’t process it as fast as a native. Using Japanese sounds as mnemonics – even when they are irrelevant to the word we are using them for – helps to further that “wearing-in” process that language requires. So, wherever you can, use already-known Japanese words to form mnemonics. That way you get two important learning processes for the price of one.
To conclude this brief look at mnemonic practice, let me say that you should use mnemonics. They are fundamentally related to how the brain works. You will be able to use them, even when you know a word, to “double-check” its meaning against your brain’s amazing reference-system. And they will naturally fall away when they are no longer needed at all. That is the way the brain works.
If we look at kanji in the light of traditional philosophy, they make a lot more sense. In kanji symbolism, fire and movement, life and humanity are depicted in terms of the ancient metaphysical thinking common to all traditional civilizations.
King Lear was in line with tradition when he called humanity a “forked animal”. This is exactly what the kanji for a person 人 (hito on its own, jin/nin in combination) shows. Notice that the “fork” is all it shows. there are no arms or head. Just, as Shakespeare said, the forked animal.
Kanji reduce things to the essential. Why is the fork the essential feature of humanity? Humanity is, in traditional thought, the center of the Middle Kingdom – the creature that links earth and heaven. The being that stands at the Axis of the World. Humanity is upright and stands on two legs rather than four.
Being “between earth and heaven” humanity is inherently dual. We have both a Heavenly and an earthly nature. Or to put it in Buddhist terms we have both a samsaric nature and a Buddha-nature. And we are always choosing between the two. That is how we create our karma.
So the fork 人expresses what is essential to humanity.
Of course people do have arms. When they hold them out wide they are saying something is this big. So we get 大 big.
Humanity also has within it the Divine Fire, the spark of life. So when we want to depict fire, we think of it in this most fundamental sense – as the Solar principle on earth. All fire comes from the Sun in traditional thought. Wood burns because it was fed for years on the warmth and light of the sun. When wood is burned, it releases that warmth and light in the form of fire.
But the highest fire – the earthly avatar of the Heavenly Sun – is the Solar principle in each human being – the Divine Spark – 火. Thus the kanji symbol fire (ka) shows the human being and the divine flames. Why two? Because we can use that heavenly power for good or evil, so even the fire in us is expressed in two flames, continuing to express our “forked” duality.
The first non-human-powered vehicle was the chariot, and, as we would expect, the chariot is deeply rooted in traditional symbolism. In the Bhagavad Gita, the entire teaching of the Scripture is given while Krishna and Arjuna are in the chariot. The chariot is the world, or human body, and within it are the Divine Principle (Krishna) and the human principle (Arjuna).
The design of the chariot itself reflects this. The body of the vehicle is the world, or the human body (these two “vehicles of manifestation” are called the macrocosm and the microcosm – the great world and the little world – in traditional Western thought). Through its center passes the World Axis with the two wheels as the dual principles that lie “above” and “below” the world.
The world itself is often described as a “field” (kshatra in Sanskrit). The chessboard is called kshatra because it represents the world in its black/white duality – the field on which the conflict of light and darkness takes place.
The Chariot
In kanji the field looks like this: 田. This is the simplest possible form of the symbolism that is elaborated on a chessboard or a go-board. The fourfold division is that of the material world – its four directions, four elements, four seasons.
Add the World Axis (axle) and the upper and lower wheels, and we have the chariot: 車.
The chariot being the first and fundamental human vehicle, 車 is used in Japanese for every kind of wheeled vehicle. The basic vehicle today is the car, so 車 kuruma means just that. Interestingly our English word “car” also originally means “chariot”
The Etymological dictionary tells us:
Car: “Wheeled vehicle,” from Anglo-French carre, Old North French carre, from Vulgar Latin *carra, related to Latin carrum, carrus (plural carra), originally “two-wheeled Celtic war chariot”.
Kanji etymology and English etymology alike preserve the identity of the modern “fundamental vehicle” with the essential Archetype of the Chariot.
From this basic chariot/car, which is pronounced kuruma, we have many combinations (in which it is pronounced sha. So we have, for example, 電車 densha – or electric-vehicle – a train and 自転車 jitensha, a self-revolving vehicle or bicycle (note that the 自 ji of jitensha always means oneself, as in 自己紹介 jikoshoukai, self-introduction, or 自己中 jikochuu, self-centeredness. So self-revolving means “revolved by oneself”, not “revolving itself”.
Now if a vehicle has to carry a heavy weight, we may need to add extra wheels. For carrying heavy loads the four-wheeled cart was used. Thus the concept heavy is represented by a four-wheeled vehicle. 重い omoi, heavy.
As in English, and most other languages, the concept of heavy may also be used metaphorically to mean “important”. We talk about “the gravity of the situation” or “a weighty matter”. In combinations 重 is pronounced juu, so we get, for example, 重点 juuten, “important point” (literally heavy point).
力 riki is strength or power. We will see is in many, many combinations. If you apply strength to something heavy, you move it. Thus 動く ugoku means “to move”.
動 in combinations is pronounced dou. So, for example, we get 動物 doubutsu, meaning animal. The kanji literally means move-thing. So we can see that the Japanese word for animal is essentially the same as the Latin/English word “animal” – something animated or moving.
We will see all these elements in many different combinations. For example we can tie together many of the things we have learned today with the word 人力車 jinrikisha, shortened in English to “rikshaw”.
I am sure you can see that the word literally means “person-powered vehicle”.
2018 UPDATE: Rikaichan is no longer available but you can get Rikaichamp for Firefox and Chrome. Since it is almost identical to Rikaichan, this article is still relevant.
People seem to think of Rikaichan as “that kanji-recognizing thing”. It is that of course. But it is far more. It is not only a free Japanese dictionary, but it is what every Japanese Dictionary should be and isn’t. It is a reading-writing tool of unparalleled power and it is going to be the number one utility in your Japanese toolkit.
Why? Let me explain a little. In any foreign language you have probably tried looking up a word you find only to discover it isn’t in your dictionary. If you ask why, you are told “Oh, that’s in the passive plenipotentiary case. You have to look it up in dictionary form.”
To which you reply “but it’s a squeaking word isn’t it? People use it. I didn’t even recognize what case it was in. Why can’t I just look it up?”
Well, because your dictionary is a foot thick already. If it contained every possible case and inflection of every word it would be ten volumes. And that is what’s wrong with paper dictionaries.
Rikaichan will recognize a word whatever case it is in and tell you the case. Even if the kanji wasn’t used. Here is an example. We are worrying about the fate of a certain walking, talking mushroom:
What is that word “ubawareta”? If we hover Rikaichan over it, we find out. The word in dictionary form is actually 奪う ubau, to snatch away or steal. However this is in the passive, past form, as Rikaichan also kindly informs us.
So the sentence means “Has she been snatched away by evil birds?” (I love the passive form for all the reasons Western critics hate it – but that is a whole ‘nother article).
Rikaichan also tells us that the word is transitive (vt), that it is a godan verb ending in u (v5u) and that it is a common, or popular word (P). All of these can be important pieces of information on some occasions. The P for example helps answer the question “Is this an obscure word or one I should be trying to learn?”
Now this is not just a reading tool but a writing tool. You can check your own attempts at conjugation on the fly. If you can’t remember if a ru-ending verb is ichidan or godan, just type it, hover Rikaichan, and you have the answer. Similarly it will tell you what kind of adjective a word is, whether a verb is transitive or intransitive and various other things. As you start incorporating it into your routine you will find that Rikaichan answers a good half of your grammatical questions instantly and on the fly. It will even recognize some common phrases and turns of speech.
But there is another important aspect to Rikaichan. The toolbar. The important point about this is the search box (on Mac you can add the Rikaichan search box to Firefox’s navigation bar so you don’t need the clutter of the whole toolbar – I am not sure if this works on Windows machines too). This is important because it analyzes kanji into their component parts for you. Here is an example. I entered the word 正解 seikai (correct answer or solution) into my Rikaichan search box:
You can click for a bigger view. As you see, you get the readings of the kanji plus a breakdown of their components. And as you see, I have the search-box alone installed beside the address bar of my browser, ready to analyze kanji at all times. The yellow box (I have it yellow as I find it less obtrusive) just pops up over whatever else is on screen. You just click to get rid of it.
I won’t comment too much on the importance of this right now because we talk about learning vocabulary/kanji in various other places. But as you take a logical, meaningful approach to Japanese vocabulary and how it fits together, I promise you, you are going to find this invaluable.
If you are serious about Japanese, Rikaichan is reason enough to choose Firefox browser. It is reason enough to use web-based word-processor so you can check your writing as you go. It is also a good reason to switch to the Thunderbird mail app if you use a mail app. Thunderbird also supports Rikaichan so you can use it to help you read and write your Japanese mail. You can also use the toolbar (or just the search box) to analyze kanji from within your mail app.
We will be talking more about the logic of learning Japanese and how beautifully it all fits together. You will find that Rikaichan makes all of this much easier and more immediately accessible.
Problem: Rikaichan doesn’t show definitions You are probably already using Rikaichan. If you aren’t, find out why you really need it. It is useful for a lot more than just its obvious functions. But if you are already using it, you may have run into a common and very worrying proplem. Suddenly Rikaichan stopped showing definitions! It still translates kanji into hiragana for you and gives you metadata (like whether the word is a transitive or intransitive verb, whether it is a common word or not etc.) But it isn’t telling you what the word means in English any more. So what do you do when Rikaichan doesn’t show definitions? The problem is very common – it happens to me a couple of times a week on average, and fortunately, the solution is very simple.
Instructions for restoring Rikaichan Definitions
1. First of all, do make sure you have the Rikaichan lookupbar installed. You’ll find it under “Tools” in the Firefox menu. Hee – yes, my pasokon is in Japanese, but you’ll find it under the Tools (ツール) menu, right between Bookmarks (ブックマーク) and Windows (ウインドウ). Select Rikaichan Lookupbar so it gets a check-mark next to it and the toolbar will appear beneath the browser’s address bar. 2. This toolbar has important uses which we will discuss elsewhere, but right now what you need is this cogwheel icon:
3. Click on this and you get the Options window. Open the Dictionaries tab. Now comes the important part: The second ringed area shows where the problem lies and why Rikaichan doesn’t show definitions. You can hide X-rated entries, which obviously you will, since we kawaii girls don’t want our kirei pasokon made all kitanai with foul-mouthed stuff. But you can also hide definitions, which if you are advanced you may want to do. So if you want definitions you must make sure “Hide definitions” is unchecked. “But Tadashiku!” you expostulate (isn’t expostulate a good word?) “Hide definitions IS unchecked and still Rikaichan isn’t showing definitions. What do I do now?” Well, this is a funny little bug that crops up in Rikaichan from time to time. It thinks “Hide definitions” is checked even when it isn’t. Fortunately the fix is very simple. You have to do a very unintuitive thing and check “Hide definitions”. That’s right. Go ahead and tell Rikaichan you want the definitions hidden. Then close the preference window. Hover over some Kanji and make the pop-up box come up – complete with no definitions. Now go back to the cogwheel and open the Options window again. Uncheck “Hide definitions”. Close the Options window and voila! You Rikaichan is showing definitions like a good Rikaichan again. It’s easy when you know how! So next time Rikaichan doesn’t show definitions, you know what to do. Remember you saw it at Kawaii japanese! Did this solve your problem? Let us know in the Comments below.
Kawaii Japanese was a simple concept. We wanted to make a Japanese-learning site and community that focussed on kawaisa – a cute, friendly, girly Japanese language site. But it came from a deep and important concept.
To us, Japanese is an adventure. It is a long dive into the deep waters of the Japanese language. To us it is not learning a second language, but learning a new first language. To us language is not just a series of arbitrary noises and marks that have developed meaning. To us, language is a dimension of the soul. And the Japanese language is the soul-dimension we have committed ourselves to enter and explore, not as detached observers, but as children entering a new world.
People learn Japanese for a lot of reasons and from a lot of angles. The reason the main contributors of this site are learning Japanese are probably extremely unusual, but we won’t go into that here. You’ll pick it up in various articles along the way if you take an interest in the site.
One thing that we noticed in our own odyssey was that some of the sites that are closest to our approach and ideas are rather the opposite of our world-outlook. They were (like us) interested in immersion, in making the Japanese language a part of one’s life in a profound way. But at the same time they tended toward a coarseness and deliberate vulgarity and cynicism which is the very opposite of how we think and why we are adventuring into Japanese.
We felt we might not be alone in this. Which is why we began this site.
Japanese is the world we chose to enter because we find it more graceful and lovely, more gentle and pure than what modern English has become. Cynicism has become hard-wired into the English people speak these days. One thing we are seeking in Japanese is the opposite of cynicism. It is innocence.
In Japan an important dimension of the quest for innocence, the honoring of innocence, the understanding of the real value of innocence is expressed by the hugely widespread culture of Kawaisa – which is so deeply embedded in Japanese society that it is used to represent not only big companies but the police and armed services.
In Japan even the image of the police is kawaii
Not that we were thinking of joining the Japanese police or anything! Or even that we are meaning to say much about how kawaii actually operates in Japanese society. That isn’t really the point. The point, for us, is that kawaii represents a fundamental yearning for innocence and goodness, and that is the yearning we have. And we don’t think we are alone. You aren’t supposed to say things like this in the Western part of the Earth. You are supposed to be cynical and hard and knowing. Well, we aren’t and we don’t want to be, and that is what this Japanese adventure is about.
Now somewhere along the road to starting this site we added the word “profoundly” into our header. There was a reason for that. We have two special angles on the study of Japanese – one is kawaii, and the other is that we want to look into the deeper meanings of Japanese language. We believe Japanese – like all languages – has its roots in ancient and profound wisdom, and some of our articles (probably especially those by Cure Tadashiku) will talk about this too.
Is this something very different from kawaii? Well, on the surface it looks like it, but we don’t think it really is. Kawaii is a modern expression of the timeless desire for innocence and goodness. The wisdom-roots of language connect us to the fundamental realities of being – to the essential thisness of things and we believe that the underlying truth of existence is fundamentally pure and innocent.
This part may appeal to you or it may not. It doesn’t matter. If you are learning Japanese, or just interested in the language, and you love kawaisa, this is the place for you. Please make yourself at home.
Can you really learn Japanese through Anime? Some people (usually people who are selling something) claim you can easily do so. Others (usually professional grumps) say, for various reasons, that learning Japanese from anime is an idiotic idea.
I am going to share my experience with you, and give you step-by-step instructions for what I have found to be the best method of learning Japanese through anime. Two points just to make matters clear:
• I am not selling anything. Everything you need for using this method is available free over the Internet. I am just sharing what I have learned by experience.
* This is not a get-fluent-with-no-work scheme. Everything about those schemes is wonderful except that not working doesn’t – uh – work.
Learning Japanese through anime is fun but it also takes a lot of effort and dedication. Don’t expect to kick back and enjoy a few episodes and become fluent in Japanese. That isn’t how it works.
For me anime has been a very important part of Japanese learning, though as a non-human with special needs, my experience may not be applicable to everyone. However I suspect some of it might. So let me tell you how it was for me
I really, really really wanted to study the language properly. Never having gone to school I have learned everything I know – from the Earth’s history to a smattering of French and Spanish – in bits and bobbles that I picked up along the way (except typing which was taught to me by a charming droidophile). Japanese I wanted to learn properly; systematically; the way people do learn things (even where I come from).
I was kind of desperate to learn systematically but it just wasn’t possible. As a very ditzy droid I don’t have a systematic bone in my head. It wasn’t possible for me to attend a school, and I couldn’t find a teacher who would teach me systematically, or anyone who could/would give me even minimal advice on how to find one or how to go about it.
So it has been bits and pieces as usual. I certainly didn’t start to learn Japanese through anime. In a limping and lumbering way, with odd bits of help here and there and the messy doggedness of an unsystematic mind, I went through the first two basic books on Japanese (in my case Genki I and II with a few bits of Nakama I). Their explanations of Japanese structure were so crazy that even early on I could see that something was badly wrong. I started the project that has eventually become my “de-coding” of Japanese structure.
But while structure is important for learning about Japanese, learning Japanese is another matter. I needed something else to help me with that.
And what has helped me is learning Japanese through anime. Yes, I have read the sites that grumble about how bad anime is for learning, so let me give you my view on the matter.
First of all, I agree that watching anime with English subtitles is next door to useless if you actually want to learn Japanese through anime. You can pick up the odd word that way. You can actually learn more than the odd word if you are very disciplined. At the very beginning of attempting to learn Japanese through anime I went extremely slowly through a few with English subbies trying to catch the Japanese, looking up words I thought I heard. Working seriously on why that noise ended up as that subtitle. That was somewhat helpful, but still not all that useful in my view.
I also tried watching with no subtitles. There is a school of thought that says “just try watching with no subtitles, let it wash over you and try to follow the story and eventually you will understand”. I don’t know what to say about that. It seems you would have to put in countless hours with no idea whether whether you were really learning Japanese through the anime or not.
I think that method (in conjunction with other study) might work for some folks. People learn differently. And I haven’t altogether given up on some version of it. But for me it isn’t the best way to learn Japanese through anime.
How to learn Japanese through Anime
What is the best way to learn Japanese through anime? Well I actually learned it from a native Spanish speaker whose English is truly excellent. She attends an English-speaking school in a Spanish-speaking country, and most of her classmates still speak abominable English. Hers is near-perfect.
I asked her how her English got so good, and she said it was through watching English movies with subtitles – English subtitles. She said it was four years of continual watching before she could take the subtitle training-wheels off. But good heavens – those four years really paid off.
So that is the path I took in attempting to learn Japanese through anime. Now let me say from the start, it is a lot tougher for a European-language speaker to use Japanese subtitles than to use subtitles in another European language.
I am sure you know why already. The easy part is that it takes a long time to recognize kana quickly enough to just “read” as you would, say, Spanish because it is in two different “alphabets” (syllabaries if you want the correct word). The hard part is, of course, the kanji.
But don’t worry too much about that because this is the best way of overcoming the difficulties of learning to read Japanese. The kanji won’t stop you because with this method you can paste them directly from the subtitles file into a dictionary. And even without this extra difficulty, until you are pretty advanced (and probably don’t need this article) you wouldn’t be gliding through anime at full speed with half an eye on the subbies.
You will be slowly and carefully stopping every few seconds to look up words and work out grammar. I told you that learning Japanese through anime is not a no-work shortcut. When I first started watching with Japanese subtitles it took me hours to watch a 20-minute episode. I am faster now, but it still takes more than 20 minutes.
Stop press: Since this article was written there are several sites where you can watch Japanese-subtitled anime much more easily. Check them out here.
1: Anime
2: Japanese subtitles (free). You can get subtitles for a lot of shows here.
3: VLC media player (free).
4: Aeigisub or other subtitle-editing application (free – needed for adjusting the timing. Not as difficult as it sounds).
5. Anki.
Anki is an important part of this system for learning Japanese through anime. What you need to do is watch anime in Japanese, with Japanese Subtitles. Go as slowly as you need to. At first you will need to stop several times at almost every speech. You will encounter a lot of new words. Look them up and enter them into Anki [you can now make a card with a single keypress using Rikaisama]. Anki is spaced repetition software (smart flashcards that know how well you know what you are learning and what is the optimal interval for repeating it (ranging from one minute to over a year) based on the brain’s learning patterns.
Work on your Anki every day in conjunction with your anime watching. You will learn a lot of vocabulary and you will find you very often remember the context in which you first heard it. This is an important aspect of learning Japanese through anime as it gives you a good understanding of how the word is actually used, and will also make it easier to remember. As you continue learning Japanese via anime you will encounter the same word again in different contexts. This will improve your understanding of the word’s range of meaning and implication and also make it increasingly easy to remember. That is how language acquisition works. Understanding and memory go hand in hand. The better you understand the better you will remember — and vice versa.
You should also be working on grammar. If you can’t see why those words add up to that meaning, try to find out. Also make a second Anki deck. Your first is vocabulary, your second is sentences. Enter example sentences with translation.
Maybe you are thinking this doesn’t sound like much of a fun way to learn Japanese through anime. Actually it is fun and you will find you get faster pretty quickly, which makes it more enjoyable. But it is work. It takes self-discipline and dedication. I watch my favorite anime by this method and part of my approach is to assume that Japanese is the only language. I put myself in the position of a child acquiring language. There isn’t some other language to fall back on. Either I understand it in Japanese or I don’t understand it.
Now clearly this is somewhat notional as I allow myself a Japanese-English dictionary. And what about English Subtitles? Often your anime will have English subtitles and (so long as they aren’t hard-coded, and they usually aren’t if it is a .mkv file) VLC will allow you to switch between the Japanese subtitles, the English subtitles and no subtitles.
Should one ever “cheat” and use the English subtitles? My suggestion is, not often. But if the level of dialog is ahead of one’s understanding it can sometimes be good to try one’s best to piece together what is being said and then use the English subtitles to verify/clarify. That way one may become aware of new grammar points. If the dialog is very much beyond one’s ability it can occasionally be useful to actually watch a few minutes with English subtitles and then use the Japanese ones and try to see why it meant what it seemed to be.
Two caveats here: 1. If it happens often, find a simpler anime. You are punching too far above your current weight. 2. Please bear in mind that English subtitles often aren’t exactly accurate translations of the Japanese. Often they put things in ways that are deemed more suitable for Western audiences. So please use English subtitles sparingly and with caution.
You are probably aware that some people strongly argue against the use of anime in learning. Some would argue that J-drama is much better. I have no strong view here for anyone but myself. You can find J-drama Japanese subbies and I imagine everything I have said about learning Japanese through anime would apply equally to dorama. Personally I have little interest in grown-up stuff, Eastern or Western; but that’s just this silly alien wind-up doll.
For the frequently heard objection that anime talk is not “natural” and one should not try to talk like an anime character, there are a few points to consider. If you use things like One Piece and Naruto, you probably will end up with some pretty odd (and often not very polite) Japanese. With kawaii anime like the various Precure series, a little common sense will tell you things like which characters use formal Japanese (e.g. Cure Beauty, Cure Rosetta), which use retiring or shy language (e.g. Cure Peace), Which speak particularly informally (e.g. Cure Marine), which speak in Kansai ben (e.g. Cure Sunny) etc.
Is their speech stylized and sometimes exaggerated? Yes. But the point to bear in mind is that your speech patterns will be far more influenced by the Japanese people you actually converse with than by fictional characters, and if you don’t converse regularly in Japanese you won’t really develop speech patterns at all. Neither would you have any use for them if you did.
Speech patterns are a different question altogether. We are talking here about using anime to learn how Japanese fits together, to build vocabulary, to see it in action, and to start using and enjoying Japanese.
Hard work and discipline are not the opposite of enjoyment (and if you think they are you need to learn the full cultural meaning of the word 頑張る ganbaru). You can do both at once — enjoy watching, enjoy working, and really learn Japanese through anime.
Just a quickettie post from your Dolly! I am afraid I have no deep metaphysical point to make about this kanji – but it is so beautiful I had to share it!
銀世界
銀 = gin, silver; 世界 = sekai, world.
Ginsekai – “silver world” is the Japanese word for “snowscape”.
Cure Tadashiku’s recent comments on ambiguity and Japanese really help me in learning to hear (聞き取る — there really isn’t a good English word for the Japanese kikitoru, “hear-catch”, is there?) Japanese.
As Cure Tadashiku says, at the upper reaches of understanding nothing can really be put into words. Words are only signposts to the ineffable Truth. But does that have anything to do with everyday Japanese? I think it does because all the things of life have an inner core of Truth, and the more language tries to nail them down to exact formulations, the more we lose that Truth.
Of course we need exactitude for many purposes, but we also need to be able to see things in the light of their transcendence.
If I may make so bold as to quote from one of the founders of the English Romantic movement (Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads):
Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
In listening to Japanese anime with a higher, more childlike tolerance of ambiguity, I believe I come closer to freeing myself from the mask of “familiarity and selfish solicitude”, which to a large extent is created by language. We see a tree or a flower and say “oh tree”, or “oh flower” and having put it in its verbal box we may well feel we have done with it, rather than standing in awe before its astonishing wonderfulness.
English, I believe, has this effect more than most languages, since it is so very geared to the matter-of-fact and practical. Japanese may be one of the least “familiar and self-solicitous” languages (I say this with no authority but just a feeling) languages, and I think that may have a lot to do with a certain aversion to over-specificity.
Also — and I think in one’s personal experience the two things are linked — by listening in a more childlike way, not expecting to understand everything, accepting one’s toddler-status in Japanese, as it were, one can come closer to a child’s pre-diseducated appreciation of being in all its amazing wonder and generosity.
I think this is especially true in shows like Doki Doki Precure where the disruption of the instant-categorization that is near-forced by native English allows one to experience the rich symbolic depth of the show — symbols like the Heart which appear in so many ways and always in ways that connect them to the Universal and not merely the incidental.
Opening like a child to the symbolism of the Heart
It even opens one to a fresh appreciation of English as Wasei terms like “cure lovies” and “lovely compact” help us to return the word “love” to its magical significance as a universal and beautiful power manifesting among us.
The frankness and straightforwardness (non-cynicism) of much of the language is also, from an English-language point of view childlike (it is often changed in translation because it is just too “uncool” for even standard modern English). From a Japanese point of view, and I would say from a natural point of view, it is — just natural.
Interestingly, on this front, I think one might argue that Japanese is more direct and straightforward than modern English, which seems compelled to “mask” expressions of sentiment — especially pure and good sentiment — with a veil of cynicism.
But that is a topic for another day. For today I would like to suggest that learning to live with ambiguity and listen like a child is not just a useful language learning exercise but, given fundamentally good material, a way to open oneself to the dream-like depth of things.
I really wish we could learn Japanese kanji in the light of symbolism and deeper meanings in Asian language schools. The idea that Chinese ideograms are evolved forms of merely primitive drawings never made complete sense for me, specially in the face of such “abstract” words.
I think that is a very good approach, and one that not only makes learning Japanese kanji a lot more intuitive, but also deepens our minds in more fundamental ways. We should begin though, by looking at the underlying philosophy of language in general and Japanese kanji in particular.
It is very difficult to learn Japanese kanji if one has no idea of why they mean what they mean — if they are seen as merely arbitrary symbols, or if the symbolism is considered erratic and “primitive” rather than logical and clear.
It is said that the Chinese ideograms that form the basis of Japanese kanji evolved from primitive drawings. Is that true?
Yes, of course it is. The problem here lies in what we mean by the word “primitive” and in realizing that modern language has been fundamentally altered by the “progressist” ideology. In earlier English, as in Japanese and other languages, the concept “primitive” had a positive implication. It implied: earlier = purer, wiser. In modern language it implies: earlier = cruder, less intelligent. This is the fundamental basis of recent “historical” thinking.
This will influence our view of Japanese kanji/Chinese hanzi as it will of everything else. And more immediately, it will make it a lot harder to learn Japanese kanji.
So are “primitive ideograms” closer to the grunts of apes than our own language? Or are they closer to the Ideas of the Angels: purer, simpler and far more profound – and more immediately related to the fundamental Divine Ideas or Essences that are the Source of all manifest existence?
All people have believed the second of these things until historically very recently. In the 16th century in Western Europe the idea of primitive = crude; newer = better was just emerging. Most people still held the traditional view. By the late 19th century it had become near-universal in Western Europe and was being spread by economic and military force to the rest of the world.
The Déanic science of language is based on the traditional view, as stated in the Gospel of Our Mother God:
What is your language of the earth, My children? What are the words of thy speech? Are they not fallen from the first, the mother language?
Japanese kanji/Chinese hanzi are in their origin visual representations of the fundamental Ideas behind words. They certainly “evolved” over time, as all things evolve. Evolution meaning “unrolling” and being essentially a mirror of the process of manifestation itself – that is, increasing deployment on the substantial or horizontal level and continual weakening of the Essential or vertical dimension.
Evolution of language is necessary as we 1) need to make things more horizontally complex and as 2) the simple hints at underlying truth (and all language can only hint at the inexpressible) need to be expanded and made more explicit, and also as material needs multiply and language has to take on more and more material tasks. These should be understood as the two aspects of the evolution of language.
Both are “outward” unrollings (e-volutions), but one is directed toward maintaining contact with the Center in a more dispersed environment and the other is directed toward greater interaction with the periphery, that becomes necessitated by increased “materialization” or outward manifestation.
Ideally, these two dimensions of evolution should take place together and in balance. Where the first of them (which should always be the subordinate, because Wisdom should precede and guide Method) becomes dominant, an unbalance is created, and ultimately the entire foundation of language can become lost, so that “primitive language” is regarded as inferior to “developed language” – which is like believing that the sun is the crude ancestor of the sun’s reflection in a puddle*.
Partly from the natural attrition of the historical cycle – but very largely under Western influence (I suspect there were in the early 20th century, and maybe still are, daisensei who are very aware of the metaphysics of Japanese kanji/Chinese hanzi, but the Western pop-Darwinist approach has become the “official” view) the understanding of the symbolic depth of the characters has become obscure to the majority.
When we look at Japanese kanji, therefore, we attempt to see them in the light of fundamental symbolism and may bring into play all that we know of it. We should also bear in mind that the “evolved” forms of the characters should, on the whole, be regarded as legitimate since they were developed over centuries by minds that were very far from being symbolically blind, as the modern West Tellurian mind is. Of course, we would make an exception in the case of “official reforms” made by bodies influenced by Western ideology, such as Simplified Chinese.
We may look at Japanese kanji/Chinese hanzi, then, as images that express the universal language of symbolism, which has its roots in the nature of being. This language makes continual use of such fundamentals as the Center, the Axis, the Heart, the Sun, the Moon, the Vehicle (chariot), the Mouth, the Hand, and so forth. These are among the fundamental metaphors of speech, thought and being. Such a language is highly suited to a culture that has expressed itself in Ch’an/Zen and Taoism, and is more prone to approach the Absolute through aids to direct apprehension than through attempts to capture It in highly-concretized doctrinal formulations.
It is perhaps even a little outside the spirit of such a tradition to suppose that there is a single “key” to a kanji character, and since the symbolism opens out onto the universal, containing all possible perspectives, there is not. At the same time, the Sun is always the Sun and the Heart always the heart, and so forth, so we are legitimately able to examine the characters in the light of the universal language of symbolism and provide some hints toward their elucidation which should help us not only to learn Japanese kanji but also to have a deeper understanding of the roots of human thought and existence itself.
* For, after all, the sun does not even touch our puddle, far less ripple with it, or shatter when a horse steps in it. The sun is out of touch with reality and lost in crude, ancient myths of a sky beyond the puddle. Luckily we have now evolved a much more sophisticated and realistic puddle-language.
Avidyapedia
Pazudora may eventually come to the West (though the US keitai version is very far from achieving the runaway success it has had in Japan, so they may not bother). It is another unique and truly wonderful experience that, at the time of writing, can only be enjoyed in Japanese.
2018 UPDATE: Rikaichamp does not have the search box, but you can get this window by pressing return while the regular pop-up window is active.
