how to succeed in Japanese pronunciation
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
My "intensive" Japanese course is coming to its end. It was me and a room full of twenty-somethings that made me feel like a dumb old man unable to learn. But I did learn.
Tonight I attended a goodbye for Lee and family, who are heading back to Australia (and, as he put it, "to spend a month on the beach in Thailand"). Also present were some of my Japanese colleagues from the job I had when I first arrived in the city three years ago. And I was able to speak with them about a few simple things, something that had to be done through a bilingual intermediary when I first got here. It felt good, and it's clear that I've been learning "useful" Japanese.
I'd like to pass one of the most useful things I've learned on to anyone else (especially Canadians) currently tackling the Japanese language. This morning we had a pronunciation test, and while practicing for that it occurred to me that I was not going to be able to read aloud the four-part test passage using the inflection that we'd been studying.
It's not that I hadn't picked up a few queues on how emphasis works. Emphasis in Japanese is subtle and surprisingly simple, with only two distinct flavours of pronunciation. It's either a stressed syllable or it's not. And the distinction is a matter of tone, not stress like in English, or a matter of voiced versus unvoiced sounds. It's all so subtle, in fact, that I had a hard time hearing it all in class, and was at first frustrated because I just wasn't getting.
And everyone else in the class was getting it.
Prior to today's test, the insights that I had were these.
- this is my first serious foray into another language, so I should recognize that I'm carrying over a lot of pronunciation baggage from English (my French and German "skills" are far too basic to consider in this)
- what's more, all but two of my classmates were learning their third or fourth language, and had much more experience to bring to bear on getting their Japanese right -- and in all fairness the two others who were learning their second language had pronunciation that was if anything worse than mine
- Canadian English is a dialect with a lot of sing-song tone and inflection
- I still don't get how emphasis works in the Japanese language
- I have a lot of experience with urgent communications, and that had taught me how to be clear (in English)
So I gamed the test. At the end, my teacher was unable to keep the surprise from her voice when she told me that I'd done very well. I thanked her, but did not tell her what I'd done.
Which was to simply forget everything that they'd tried to teach me about which syllable in any given phrase has a raised tone. I just read the entire passage in as flat a tone as I could, with measured speed to keep every syllable at the same meter and every word clear. It was like reading an emergency communication, just like in my job as an incident manager.
And it worked. Gone were my Canadian tendencies to stress certain syllables, or to raise tone towards the end of sentence clauses. Gone were all of the frustrating attempts to modify tone in ways that were unnatural to my (aging, calcified) brain. I just read through it like I was new to human speech.
I volunteered to go first, and a few of my classmates seemed to pick up on what I was doing because I heard the same thing being done by one of the Koreans (whose pronunciation is usually incomoprehensible to me) and by the Brazilian.