Japanese for Finishers

There are so many books for beginners, so many courses teaching basic grammar, but so few of both to help those nearing fluency to get there. And, believe me, you want to get there. Reading an exotic tongue in translation just does not hack it. When I was in graduate school, I had to create a special course for myself utilizing a tutor and side-by-side translations with (here was the reason for the tutor) explanations for Japanese. The books used were Tenseijingo. Because graduate level work is supposed to be analytical and learning skills such as reading counts for zilch, most students of Japanese (and, I would bet students of all tongues exotic with respect to English) never learn to read well, which, if you ask me, means they wasted years of study and tens of thousands of dollars. If schools do not help here, students must find readers for self-study. Since I have not been in a university for 30 years and am not involved with teaching Japanese, I do not know what if anything is available today for advanced students. All I can say is that my own books -- the ones I have written and published with over 8,000 haiku and senryu translations would have been one of the best readers I could have had back then. These books have the original, like Blyth's and the romanization and have something more, a gloss, which helps for tricky vocabulary, not to mention explanations which often (not always) try to pick up on things which might give most so-and-so readers of Japanese trouble. One of the books Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! was used in a comp. lit or Japanese lit course at CUNY and another (Cherry Blossom Epiphany) might be next spring but, to my knowledge, no one yet has introduced them to advanced students of Japanese to improve their reading skills. I would like to hear if anyone is using them in that way, or considering it. If anyone is using them, I would like to know which subject works better (sea cucumbers, cherry blossoms, flies, new year topics or sex). Also, I wonder what other advanced teaching aids are out there. Are there any readers interesting enough to be read over and over? Are there any really good cartoon books with notes for the difficult Japanese and abundant furigana? (when I mean good, i do not mean the juvenile anime that is, in my opinion over-rated and over-read). I do not expect this topic to take off quickly. . .

I'm not sure what "quickly" means in this setting.

I've been "fiddling around" trying to learn Japanese on my own for over 10 years, and inevitably living my life seems to get in the way. I'm still a miserable hack. I think only immersion and/or full-time study are the ways to gain significant skill much less actual fluency.

In any case I note that the number of volumes published on all facets of learning Japanese have really ramped up over the past decade. Now, when I go to a Borders or Barnes & Noble, or any other bookstore that has yet to be crushed by them, I find a stunning volume of books, frequently newly published.

You'll have to be the judge yourself, but I find a number of them quite advanced and so I assume they are intended for the advanced student. In this same way it seems also that the art-form now called "graphic novels" also has it's swelling ranks of loyalists. I would have to imagine that some of this would include the Japanese, and so figure there are "good cartoon books". Whether they would feature significant furigana--probably not since they would be directed toward native speakers.

But I do think it's a burgeoning field. Though "Rise Ye, Sea Slugs" certainly looks interesting to *me*, I find younger students of Japanese, and all other matters are almost completely dumbfounded by poetry of any form. I'm fond of the cynical reduction that poetry is going the way of ventriloquism and juggling. It's mere presence harkens of a bygone era, regardless of content. It is seen, by defintion, antique. And to approach it casually, even when not in translation, it to short change it. I feel one has to really lock-on, focus and *dig* to claim what poetry has to offer. Younger folks come in all configurations, but my general encounters indicate poetry--as a tool for developing language skills, presents a student with another layer of difficulty.

Of course as a Westerner I find that the Japanese mindset, psyche, cultural references--all kinds of stuff intersect their long and glorious history with poetry. But I'm not sure the last generation or two of Japanese youth would agree. Sometimes I attempt to start a conversation on such topics with the sizeable Japanese youth attending school here (Southern California), and can get as much conversational activity out of poetry as I can geriatric medicine. I'm not sure they sea them as vastly different subject matter.

I find UnitedStatesian youth even more confounded by the topic.

-- Gerry

Re "quickly" -- i have a forum called books in english with japanese in them somewhere and i think it got no response in the half-year it has sat there. on the whole, the japanese culture group (unlike the chinese one) is a bit light for my taste -- and i must seem heavy to most of them. I think I may see if I can start a group IN japanese (unless it is already there and i missed it).

I don't and can't get to bookstores now. Maybe i would see bks good for a bright and literate nonjapanese wishing to improve already advanced skills while being treated to good food for thought and wordplay. I just don't know. My guess is that the market would be very small, but every such person is a valuable cultural resource, for very few people become good readers of an exotic tongue (there are plenty of japanese translators of english who never had time to learn english well and vice versa, i would bet) and my feeling is that the reason people tend to stop improving is because they do not find attractive enough reading material.

Though my books have 8000 poems in them, i am not sure if they should be considered as books of poetry or rather essays about themes with poetry woven in. I confess to hating musicals. The only exception was a play by Inoue Hisashi because it was all ad jingles and creating those jingles the work of the protagonist (also, Inoue borrowed some ideas from my anti-nihonjinron bks which he liked, but even if that was not true i would have liked it) and hence completely natural. So i can well imagine people not willing to look at my books because of all those poems. From a teaching/learning standpoint, however, hypershort poetry can be very convenient. I would love to hear of someone making flash cards with a ku on each!

What you found re younger students of Japanese is probably true for most usanian students. I was told the students at the above-mentioned university did find my book"too much" because they are just too busy or too slow to read big and fairly difficult books. I do not think big books must be read all at once, but most people seem to think that way. I have been asked to put together something shorter for pedagogical purposes. But, note, these were not students of advanced japanese per se. No one has tested my books on such students so far. My most recent, Octopussy, Dry Liver & Blue Spots OR The Woman Without a Hole is full of sexy material -- 1,300 dirty senryu -- which would DEFINITELY hold the students' attention. Unfortunately, it might bring the teacher who allowed it into the classroom unwanted attention, as well, so it will have to be introduced by word of mouth from below, from places like Librarything.

Re Japanese youth, i think many were vaccinated against haiku by being made to study overly subtle stuff when too young and bored silly , as i would have been -- as far as most modern poetry goes, i don;t care for it myself

ps Come on, use Usanian!

In retrospect, I should have titled this Topic "How to become a fluent reader in Japanese."

My observation from for 20 years correcting translations is that few English speakers are fluent readers of Japanese and vice versa. One certainly does not become a fluent reader from advanced courses or the type of books generally considered advanced readers. Even if you did not know the world of translation, if you look at how many books are read in university seminars of literature in romance languages vs those for Japanese you might notice that. By "finishing Japanese," I guess what I mean is getting to the level that you read quickly and seldom need to look in the dictionary.

How to get there? I was so eager to let advanced students know of the existence of my books because I suffered and so much would have liked to have had them when I was in graduate school and upset to find people in their rush to do proper graduate school type research that they had no time to study to become fluent and, worse, no good way for people who wanted to do that to do so (I made a special course but had to trade time proofing an English master's thesis to get it!). As I was saying, I was so eager to mention the bks, I neglected to mention an intermediate step, a way to learn enough Chinese characters quickly that you will not need to waste time looking them up all the time. It is something anyone without a phenomenally good memory might take note of.

First buy rubber bands of as many colors as possible. Then buy or make over a thousand cards. Then start writing them using a thick pen or thin marker. Kanji on top and pronunciation on the bottom and meaning on the reverse (possibly some other things). You could have pronunciation on top and kanji at the bottom, or you could have kanji and pronunciation on opposite sides and the meaning below on either side. I cannot recall, which worked best for me as it has been over 30 years, now, but all must be the same style. The rubber bands are what matters.

Depending on your memory and the complexity of the characters, make a bunch of cards at a time. I think I found about 5 best. By best, I mean that I would have a fighting chance at recalling the first card when I tested myself after finishing the fifth. Each time you test yourself, you put the cards into different piles, or decks which are kept apart and recognizable by the color of the rubber bands. In my case, I think green meant no need to look again for weeks for the character was mastered. Red meant add to the most recently made pile, or see again in 5 minutes. If in 5 minutes, I got it right, then I would put it in with the orange rubberbands and see it again in half an hour. If that, too went well, I might give it a purple band and see it again before sleep or a yellow one for the next morning, depending on how strong that memory was, or even put it in the green deck.

Obviously, you work out the colors and the times. You might have it 5 min. half-hour, hour, day, week or break it down even further. What matters is that by repeatedly seeing what needs to be seen repeatedly it really does get remembered. I did it one summer and jumped from first-year reading to third year at G'twn and once again to jump straight to graduate school level a year later. It takes a few weeks of all day work. I did it mostly under a tree in a park.

I know this must seem an odd way to learn, but making lists or using memory cards in the conventional way does not work. Most students of Japanese or Chinese do not become fluent readers because they start forgetting as fast as they are learning. So please try this and tell others about it. We need more people who are really fluent in exotic tongues.

I'm a bit confused here. Why just not pick up a book and start reading? A few hundred pages in (yes that is a few hours, but we're talking weeks to months, not years) you will be MUCH better at reading.

I say this from personal experience. I began learning Japanese about six years ago. I concentrated on reading right away (kanji study from day one for instance) because I knew I'd have practically no chance to converse, but books are everywhere. About 3 years back I finished my first book -- the nearly 1000-page Shounen H. Somewhere around page 250 things clicked and EVERYTHING about Japanese got much easier.

I'm still slow at reading Japanese, especially because I don't have gobs of time to read now. (I have managed to find two reliable skype-pals so I can converse in Japanese several hours a week. Takes time from reading, but worth it I think.) But I still keep a book "cooking" because there is no better way to acquire vocabulary in context.

Anyway, I hope this is at least semi helpful.

Well, poetry..... (lol)

I will admit I do not really "get" Japanese poetry. One of my skype friends has a degree in Japanese literature, and she and I have been trading poems for months. Each of us has some difficulty with the poems the other lady finds familiar and beautiful, and we have been explaining back and forth and greatly enjoying it. She showed me a few tanka from Manyoushuu that were very enjoyable and (with her help) understandable. I was also taken with two more recent poems: Ame ni mo makezu by Miyazawa Kenji and a light verse of Tanigawa Shuntarou's. We had very delightful conversations comparing these to (respectively) "If" by Rudyard Kipling and various verses of Ogden Nash and John Ciardi.

So if the measure of Japanese fluency is truly understanding the traditional verse-forms... ok, I flunk. (so far).

But I figure it took me around a dozen years to be truly literate in English. I don't expect to take less than that for Japanese!

I agree that picking up a book and reading is the best way to gain reading fluency. The late British orientalist Arthur Whaley taught himself full reading fluency in both Chinese and Japanese by simply grabbing books off the shelf in the language and being shown how to use a Chinese/Japanese dictionary! He never had a formal or informal lesson in either language.

Those who don't "get" Japanese poetry might try approaching it through UCD English professor Gary Snyder's English poetry. He lived and worked in a Zen monastery for years and is fully fluent in Japanese and has a deep love and understanding of Japanese poetry. He worked with a Japanese poet on translations and his late wife, Carole Koda, was Japanese.

Yeah Im not so good with the language of Japanese I Love Japanese Poetry though its really great!

ShiraCsama,

I agree that nothing beats reading for study, so long as it is reading for study -- by which I mean, research involving reading is usually too rushed to let the words as words sink in -- and favor a good side-by-side translation. However, I found the method explained above allowed me to jump a couple years of classes and into grad school with a jpse major though I had not even minored in it, and I wanted to share it for people who can use it. My dream, though, are books starting in one language and slowly morphing into another -- it would be easier with cognate languages, but a War And Peace length novel might take one from English to JApanese . ..

Apaloosaman, I doubt that Waley only did it with a dictionary for Japanese. He had models of translation by others as well. But, he was so exceptionally sensitive, a true genius, that even if that were his method it would not necessarily recommend it to others.

Snyder is a great man and a good poet. But there is not one style of Japanese poetry that reading Snyder will teach you. Japanese poetry has many styles. If someone does not get it, it may be they are not reading their desired type. Not all types have been translated. If you seek complex humor, for example, you will want to wait for my next book, Mad In Translation, which will fully introduce the genre of kyouka, or "mad poetry" for the first time in English. If you would go deeply into Basho by reading Ueda's Basho and his interpretors. If you would read haikai/haiku on the ultimate thing by hundreds of poets famous and not so, you might read my Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! (1000 haiku on sea cucumbers), etc..

Come to think about it, there is one style found in Japanese poetry and only Japanese poetry, as far as I know. It is found in all Japanese poetic forms. Can you guess what it is? It is long chains of modification that only end with the subject that comes last, or near to last. To duplicate it in English would require an endless chain of hyphens.

Sorry to get off-subject, but I was led there . . . Once you have memorized a large enough vocabulary so as not to have to spend much time with the dictionary, I would also recommend comics for self study. Personally, I found 4-koma, or 4-frame humor, much quite sick, a favorite study tool (and I got them into the Japan Times for a while 15 or 20 years ago).

Pardon my half-year absence! But I see, I was not missed for no comments follow mine.

Mad In Translation --– a thousand years of kyôka, comic japanese poetry in the classic waka mode.

will be out in weeks.

I thought I would write it in months but the more I read the more I became capable of reading and one discovery followed another until . . . another 740pp bk --- that is 3 in five years, proof, i guess that i am a fool.

My biggest question re the EFFECT of the book is whether bilingual readers will gain what i gained over the course of the year by reading it. I will be asking that of friends who translate and if anyone reading this is fluent in Japanese, I will be curious to learn how this book affects your reading of waka and kyoka.