i want to talk to you about how i
learned
japanese this is steve kaufman again
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so you know how did it come about that i
learned japanese japanese
ended up being very influential
in my life my social life my
professional career and yet
you know back in 1968 i was sent to hong
kong
by the canadian government to learn
mandarin chinese
so how did i end up with japanese being
such a dominant language
in my life so i thought i would go over
that and go over with you some of the
sort of
things that helped me learn japanese
and more than any book or anything as i
sort of reflect back on it now it was my
attitude
and of course the amount of time that i
was prepared to spend on
learning japanese so
68 i go to hong kong i spent a year
learning chinese
and then the idea was that i would be
working in the
canadian high commission in hong kong
using my chinese
unfortunately there developed a sort of
a
conflict a personality conflict or
whatever
with my immediate boss at the high
commission
and the idea was that canada would open
up
a an embassy in beijing and i would be
working for this person
it would be a very isolated posting
he and i didn't get along so i announced
to the canadian trade commissioner
service that i refused
to go to beijing to work
under this person in an isolated post
life would be held for
two and a half years i said on the other
hand since the government had
paid for me essentially to learn chinese
which i had done in
in uh you know quick time in in
a year whereas normally two years was
sort of the allotted time to learn
chinese
i said i will if you assign me to japan
i will learn japanese
on my own won't cost you a penny and you
will have
at least got some return on your
investment
which looking back on it is is kind of
um almost a foolhardy thing for me to do
but i was not prepared to go and spend
two years
in an isolated post with someone with
whom i had
very strong personality conflicts and in
their wisdom the trade commissioner
service
agreed so i then started buying
books in hong kong on japanese
and i still remember that one of the
first things i learned
was how does how you how you say
how do you do when you meet someone for
the first time and the expression was
all right i learned that i sort of
memorized it
i have never used that expression nobody
uses
nobody uses that expression a completely
useless
expression it's an indication that much
of what you get
in beginner books may not be all that
useful you have to
be prepared to you don't necessarily
eliminate it but you learn it and forget
it you don't worry about it anything
that's thrown at me
at any stage in my learning it's not
really important to me whether i
am able to hang on to it in time i'll
figure out whether i need it
or whether i don't now in the case of
omini kakarite taihenko and hisonjimas
not something that i ever needed
so while in hong kong because i had
friends amongst the various
other diplomats who were studying
chinese i had very good friends
amongst the people at the japanese
consulate
and one of those people was very fluent
in chinese and
he wanted to learn english so we would
meet for lunch
twice a week at a very famous
dim sum place in hong kong the look
hotel and tuesday we would speak english
and
thursday we would speak japanese i don't
know what i was able to say
whatever i was able to find in my book i
would trot it out
it wasn't much of a conversation but it
was part of
starting to experience things japanese
so then in i guess january of 71
we moved to japan and i went to a school
right under the tokyo tower called the
nitoguri
nihongo gakko japanese school nito guri
sensei
was a very charismatic man and his
message was
kokoro to kokoro heart to heart
and we would sit around in this
classroom
five or six of us and we would all try
to mumble something in japanese
and i did that for a month and then i
realized that this was largely a waste
of my time
so i quit that and i
started doing a lot of reading i let
i read a lot in in this series by
naganuma which i mentioned before which
is all hiragana
because since i had the characters from
chinese i had to get used to the kana
and even though compared to chinese
characters
hiragana is easy to learn there's only
whatever it is 50 symbols
never underestimate how difficult it is
to get used to a new writing system
even though theoretically you know what
the symbols represent
before your brain gets used to absorbing
you know
messages information with that writing
system takes a long long time so i read
lots and i listened to lots and
continued to scour the bookstores for
reading material
wherever possible with cassette tapes
much more difficult
at that time to find such material but
whatever i could find i
consumed i was lucky enough that
at the canadian embassy where i was
working i had an assistant
commercial officer as they were known
these are locally engaged
staff who worked with the trade
commissioners who had the contacts who
would accompany you to visits
and his name was nick yazaki and he was
extremely long-winded
and extremely patient and he would speak
to me and he would say everything four
or five times and i would
listen to him and i would imitate his
the way he droned on and repeated things
but
when you're learning a language if you
are lucky enough to have someone to talk
to
who is a you know long of wind and
repeats things
that's extremely helpful and with nick
we would go and visit
you know potential you know contacts
people who wanted to buy
canadian products uh first two years i
was promoting
food products in the second two years of
the four years i was promoting forest
products
and we would visit with japanese
contacts and um
i would kind of hang in there but you
know and i try to say something and i
pretend that i understood it and i think
this was the other attitude that i had
it never bothered me that i for the
longest time didn't understand a hundred
percent
i understand 30 40 50 but i'd be in
there nodding
part of the deal after the meeting i'd
asked nick what exactly did they say
i maybe i said something that was
totally irrelevant it never really
bothered me
i was in a japanese environment i was
being exposed to the language i was
picking up on things
and but it does take a long time and i
can remember that even after years of
living in japan
the only television programs that i
could understand were baseball
and sumo because there's you know
the dialogue is relatively limited
you're seeing what's happening
so that was kind of what i would watch
it took me
a long time before i could understand
you know
drama you know soap operas or sword
movies or slash movies or any of that
stuff
uh it just takes a long time but i was
in a hurry i
certainly didn't want to write any exam
in japanese
i just wanted to use it to the extent
that i could use it
and and where my japanese really took
off was when i
left the embassy and i started working
on my own so now i didn't have a nick
yazaki
i had to basically you know handle
these relationships by myself
and there were times and i had japanese
people working with me
and we'd be in the car driving around
the kansai
for hours in traffic and just talking
talking talking talking about lumber i'm
talking about
and of course the japanese web business
is quite fascinating
and i had to learn about how they cut
the trees the logs and how they cut for
different grade
for different grain for different
qualities the different
you know idiosyncrasies of wood that
they didn't like or did like
and we could talk forever about wood
mostly we just talked about wood
but we talked for hours and i also had a
customer but we didn't only talk but i
had a customer
when i was working for a major again
canadian forest products export company
i had a customer in nagoya we were also
selling newsprint
and the chunichi shimbun in nagoya which
is the major newsprint in the
newspaper in aguero they had a
purchasing manager
and i had to go and and be nice to him
so that they would continue buying our
paper
and i would go down there once a month
and we would sit in a japanese
restaurant sit on the floor
and consume a bottle of whiskey and
discuss
philosophy so i had to be up on subjects
related to philosophy
we didn't talk about the price of
newsprint we didn't talk about anything
related to
business we talked about philosophy
which was a lot of fun
and i mean i can't remember all the
different things but my basic attitude
was one of just
you know roll with the punches um
and and i would go and find readers with
glossaries
and and for the longest time when i saw
a chinese character i would pronounce it
to myself in chinese and
very often not know how that was
pronounced in japanese i i they were
like
i would hear it and i knew what it meant
but i didn't necessarily relate
that character to any particular
pronunciation
so i would read in hiragana pronounce it
in chinese continue reading in hiragana
and acquire this vocabulary now this has
all be
become much easier today because we have
text-to-speech
we can look up words and dictionaries we
can
we have like that link we have furigana
the little hiragana guys on top of the
characters it's just
so much easier it's unbelievably much
easier even though
you know link is not perfect because the
word splitting
algorithm doesn't quite work as well as
we would like and we're looking at ways
to make it better but
it's still so much easier to learn today
than it was back in those days
so uh and and i should say amongst the
various sources that i would listen to
when i got into my car
in tokyo in august when it was like 36
degrees and the sun has been
beating down on my car and i get in
there and the steering wheel is just
like scalding hot and i would put on my
showa no kiroku the history of the showa
era which i must have listened to
20 30 times so it's all i think
my immersion in japanese was one of
i wanted to explore i wanted to
experience the language
i'd say what i thought i was able to say
sometimes you get it wrong
didn't bother me i listened to what
people were saying to me
and basically relied on my brain to
gradually
start saying more and more things
correctly
i never really focused in on the grammar
grammar rules
rules about you know when to use which
polite form
none of that i just basically allowed
the language to come to me
and trusted that my brain would pick up
on the patterns of the language
and today my japanese is as it is
it's not perfect uh i don't i haven't
tried to
zoom in on any particular you know
aspects of either polite language or
pitch accent or any of these other
things i communicate
i understand i'm happy it serves my
purposes
and i think people uh are quite
comfortable communicating with me in
japanese
and you can watch two of my videos in
japanese here just to give you
a bit of the flavor of my japanese as it
is right now which reminds me i just
wanted to say one more thing
learning other languages and having an
absence from japanese
has improved my japanese in other words
the fact of learning other languages and
particularly the 10 languages i've
learned since the age of 60 including
russian including
you know korean ukrainian and now
struggling with arabic and persian all
of that
is good for the brain and actually
improves my japanese
although if i haven't spoken for a while
i'm initially quite rusty
but then ultimately i become better so
there you have it uh a brief discussion
of how i learned japanese
i hope that's helpful