Japanese "facts" for people who don't care about learning Japanese.

      Most people don't have any interest in learning Japanese which I completely understand (sometimes I wish I wasn't interested in it either haha) but I figure I would make an attempt to explain some of the neat features that Japanese has.  I might also clear up some common language misconceptions in the process.

1.  Japanese is not a tonal language.  You are thinking of Chinese.  A tonal language is one where the majority of sounds in the language have multiple tones and by changing the tones you can  completely change the meaning of the word.  Japanese and Chinese are almost as different from each other as Japanese and English are in terms of both grammar and sound. 



2.  Japanese pronunciation is arguably the easiest of any major language in the world.  It is also one of the first neat features about the language.  Take a look at the following chart (you should be able click the image to enlarge it):

      This chart is written in one of the Japanese "alphabets" (Japanese has 3 "alphabets" but we will get to that in a moment) with the corresponding English equivalent.  Notice anything unusual?

      Well for starters this represents essentially all of the possible sounds (technically called "mora's" in Japanese) possible in the entire language.  English only has 26 letters in its alphabet so you might be thinking  "So what?".    What you have to understand is that each letter of the English alphabet represents essentially the smallest measurable unit of sound possible but that these consonants and vowels can be arranged in all kinds of different ways to create tons of different syllables and sounds..  In Japanese there is only one lone consonant sound in the entire language (the "n" sound)!  As you can see the simplest letter of the Japanese alphabet is in fact either a vowel or what would basically be considered an entire syllable in English and they are ALL vowel ending!   So what you have to realize is that to a Japanese person there is no lone "K" sound.  There is ONLY the "Ka, Ki, Ku, Ke, or Ko" sounds.  Also, if the Japanese "Ka" character is written it is pronounced "Ka" no matter where it is in a word.  Other characters don't have an effect on the character's pronunciation around them like they do in English.

      Furthermore, Japanese is generally supposed to be spoken with "mora timing" which means  you are supposed to give the exact same timing for every "letter"..   So what this all basically means is that Japanese is spoken as a near endless stream of "perfect" consonant+vowel syllables (or more technically mora's). 


3.  Reading Japanese really is as hard as it is claimed to be but probably for a different reason than you think.   The Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State considers Japanese to be the most difficult language in it's 63 language high intensity full immersion language programs specifically due to the difficulty of the reading/writing system.  So why is that?  The answer is simple:  Kanji.

      If you read the above I mentioned that Japanese has essentially three "alphabets".  Two of the alphabets are exactly the same in terms of the sounds they represent.   English has this same feature with upper and lower case letters although the uses are a bit different.   One "case" of the Japanese alphabet is used for grammar points within a sentence and some Japanese words where as the other "case" is used primarily for foreign words that have been put into Japanese (for example if they want to write McDonald's using just Japanese they can do so using only Japanese characters). 

      But the real devil is Kanji which is used in sentences in combination with the other alphabets.  Kanji are the crazy looking characters that Japan and China both use. Example:

      So how do Kanji work?  Well each Kanji by itself has a general idea or meaning behind it and many Kanji by themselves are in fact single words on their own.  However, Kanji can also be combined with other Kanji to form new words and in fact the vast majority of the words in Japanese and Chinese are combinations of Kanji.  So naturally the big problem is that there are thousands of Kanji that you need to know right?  Yes this is correct and this is the most often cited "crazy" thing about Kanji.  Unfortunately that isn't the hardest part.

       Japanese Kanji have a devilish surprise that when you first learn about it really can be the breaking point for saying "screw this, I'm learning another language".  After nearly 3 years of study I still  have to sit back and just laugh at it sometimes.  So what is the surprise?  Answer:  Almost all  of the several thousand common Japanese Kanji have multiple pronunciations with essentially no rules as to how they are used. 

     In Chinese when you learn a character and the pronunciation that is how that character is going to be pronounced no matter where you see it with rare exception.  If you see a new word in Chinese that is made of individual characters you already know then congrats, you'll most likely be able to pronounce it. 

      In Japanese....no such luck.  Let me show the insanity that is Japanese: 

The following is the Kanji for tree:

Simple right?  Heck it even sort of looks like a tree.  This Kanji on its own is simply red as "Ki".   So then you are walking down the street and you see a sign that has this same Kanji beside the Kanji for "leaf".   Now instead of being pronounced "Ki" it is pronounced "Ko".   But then you read a little more on the sign and the same tree Kanji pops up again, this time right beside the Kanji for "line".  The tree Kanji is now pronounced "Mo".  But then the next word you see it in is pronounced "Gi".  The next?  "Boku".  The word after that?  "Moku".  Or how about "Bi"?   Yes, all of the above are the possible pronunciations that the single Kanji for "tree" can have just based on the word that it happens to be in.  Even better is that there are hundreds of completely different Kanji that can also have those pronunciations as well. 

So what does this mean?  Answer:  You have to learn almost every combination of Kanji as even if you know every single Kanji and every possible pronunciation that every single Kanji can have you will still just be guessing at the pronunciation for any new combination you encounter even if it contains characters you already "know".  

So the next time you tell someone the myth that "English is hard, because we have words like 'read' and 'red" that can be pronounced the same" please know that it is just a huge myth.  Japanese Kanji is the read/red problem multiplied by a factor of 100.  

Ok now that we've got the syllable type speech and have covered the writing system let's see it in action.  The following is a very old Japanese lullaby with Japanese subtitles.  For each of the simplest "alphabet" characters, with the exception of the vowels and the solo "n", you'll be able to see and hear how there is no other lone constant sound that exists in the entire language.  It is all just perfectly spaced mora's (aka basically syllables) one after another as that is as simple as the sounds can get in Japanese.  The only other thing to notice is that there are a few Kanji in the video but the "alphabet" has been written above them in smaller characters.  There are a few times when it looks like multiple characters light up for just one sound but this is for special mora timing (for example if there needs to be a one mora timing space a certain character is written smaller than usual before the next character but I don't feel like explaining all of the details regarding that right now haha). 

 


4.  Japanese sentence structure and word order.  Japanese verbs come last and in fact the only thing necessary to make a "correct" Japanese sentence is a verb.  To a native English speaker this makes most Japanese sentences completely "backwards" to us.  As an example here is a sentence in Japanese (just written in English phonetics, and with spaces to make it easier as real Japanese has no spaces) plus the English translation in literal word for word order as it matches up to the Japanese words above it.  After that I provided a slightly more natural translation.  I've numbered each word/phrase as some single "words" in Japanese would correspond to a phrase in English. 

Japanese:  1-watashi 2-wa 3-kuruma 4-de 5-mise 6-ni 7-ikimashita

English:  1-Me/I 2-as for 3-car 4-by way of 5-store 6-to 7-went

Or more natural:  As for me I went to the store by way of car.  (Aka: I used the car to go to the store)

So as you can see you have to get your brain thinking in a nearly completely different order to understand Japanese. 


5.   Politeness levels.   This is one of the other very unique features of Japanese.  Japanese speech changes depending on your relative position to the person whom with you are speaking with.  Nouns can completely change, prefixes can be added, and verbs are conjugated differently..  There are also many different levels of politeness.

      For example if I'm talking to my friends and want to say I don't understand something I can simply say  "Wakaranai".  However, if I say "Wakaranai" to my teacher when she asks me a question, or to a person that I just met, I've just been rude.  To these people I would need to change to the polite form of "don't understand" which is "Wakarimasen".   Or if I'm talking about someone's mother I would use a different noun for the word "mother" than if I was talking about my own mother.  Or if you want to really insult someone in Japanese all you have to do is drop down to the most impolite form of the word "you" of which there are at least 4 that I can think of right off the top of my head.


6.  Japanese slang is awesome but for a very good reason.......there is tons of it.   Why?  The Japanese verb. With English slang is mainly comprised from the creative use of existing words but this is something many other languages do including Japanese.  The Japanese verb is very powerful as a large part of the information in the Japanese language information is conveyed through its verb conjugations.  Japanese sentences often don't even bother to include a subject, and in fact are quite famous for it, as the verb is often powerful enough to deliver the context and "direction" of something without explicitly having to state who or what.

      Because of this every verb in Japanese has all kinds of crazy slang conjugations that can be made!  So not only can you use "normal" slang through creative use of Japanese nouns you can also instantly "slang up" any sentence you want by conjugating the verb into whatever verb "tail" has been made popular at the time..  This video does a better job at explaining things so just watch:

 

 

      So yeah that was six different ways to "don't understand".


7.  Men and women speak differently.  I'm not talking about voice pitch either.  In Japanese there are actual words and sentence endings that are exclusive to each sex.  This is something you actually have to be careful of when learning the language as learning exclusively from women will have you sounding like a woman regardless if your voice is as deep as James Earl Jones. 


      Well I think that should be enough for now.......if you even made it this far haha. 















































      

   

Tokyo Hooters, Japanese Birthdays and the Religion of Food.

      Yesterday was my buddy Tetsuya's birthday (he's the guy dancing in the video) and he wanted to try out the new Hooters restaurant.  It is the first Hooters restaurant in Japan so I was interested to see how the concept would translate.  The surprise is that it is almost identical to Hooters back in the states, with the exception that most of the staff and customers are Japanese.  The menu items, signs, and even the customs were just like home, and most weren't even translated fully to Japanese, if translated at all.  The food also tasted exactly the same (meaning that it was mediocre). 

      Well almost everything was the same.......except the price.  Look at this:

      Yeah that is 680 yen for a Coors Light, which is $8.10 USD.......for freaking single bottle of Coors lol.  That is expensive even by Tokyo's standards. The food items didn't have that big of a price hike compared to the American versions, but it was still probably 30% more or so based on my memory. 

      And this leads me into the main point of the today's post.....Japan's real religion, which is without a doubt food.  I go to school with people from all around the world and I think most are in agreement that Japan's obsession with food far surpasses that of their own country.  I would guess that nearly half of the television programs on TV, at any time of the day, regardless of the channel, involve something to do with food, or the production of food. 

     So what this means if that you are going out with a group of Japanese people for a special occasion involving food bring two things:  1.  An empty stomach and 2.  A fat wallet.   Don't expect to just pick your own little menu item to keep to yourself (both the food and the check).  You are part of the group, so you eat and pay as a group.  We basically sat at the table for 3hrs or so, with everyone just constantly ordering food as they saw fit.  Everything got put in the middle, and everyone just ate whatever they wanted. 

    But here is the crazy thing.  After 3hrs of Hooters I plopped down my roughly $80 portion of the check (it was a little over $300 split between 4 people, as the birthday boy obviously didn't have to pay) and wondered where we were going next.  The answer?  ANOTHER RESTAURANT.  No not a bar or some some hang out location that just happened to serve food either.  It was an even fancier location (not exactly hard to do compared to Hooters, but still)where we broke out the bottles of wine and champagne while we received some simply amazing chicken and vegetable dishes of all sorts, that were once again brought out on an almost continuous basis.  That was another $40 between everyone as a few more people showed up to split the bill.  After that?  Karaoke of course.  In Japan you usually just pay a set price for the time you want a booth, usually around $20-30, and for that you get unlimited drinks while you blast away in your own private booth with your friends.   And then to top off the night we left the karaoke place and climbed into an extremely small little bar in the Golden Gai district and just sipped on a few beers until the early mornings hours. 

      Good times. 









    

So just how big is Tokyo really?

The answer:  Big, so big in fact that it is fairly impossible to grasp the size of the city even when you live in the center of it.  I've done a little research and come up with a few little comparisons to help try to put the size of this place into perspective for people back from where I am from. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that the official definition of a city becomes useless when talking about mega-cities like Tokyo.  The official boundaries mean very little when the density beyond the official boundaries are higher than even the densest definition of a city like Atlanta, GA, for example. 

By the strictest and most dense definition of Tokyo the city has "only" around 8.8 million people at a density of 14,000 people per square kilometer. Atlanta, GA at it's most strict and dense definition has 550,000 people at a density of "only" 1,500 people per square kilometer.  I say "only" in quotations because no one I know of back home would ever call central Atlanta a "low density" area.  It is definitely a major city by most people's standards back in the States.

But here is where things get crazy.  If we take the densest definition of Atlanta and apply it to Tokyo to form the boundaries of the city then Tokyo's size swells to nearly 40 MILLION PEOPLE.   In fact some of the more "official" rankings show the Tokyo metro area to have around 32-36 million and at those levels the density is still MUCH higher than Atlanta.

To really drive the point home though we must compare it to New York City.  Using the definition of New York to achieve a population of 20.4 million people requires stretching the metro area to a size of 4,500 square miles but at this definition the density drops to "only" 1,800 people per square kilometer.  Tokyo on the other hand using a metro definition of 35million people covers 5,200 square miles at a density of 2,600 people per square kilometer.  That is nearly a 45% greater density covering an additional 700 square miles!  Technically New York has some even larger boundary definitions that make it the largest metro area in the world just by pure land area definition but at those figures the density level drops so low that it only hurts New York's case.

Here is what it looks like in satellite form.  Keep in mind that although the frame might be slightly difference between two photos that the scale is the same, as you can check for yourself. 

First up is Atlanta.  What you are basically looking for is the "greyness" of the image to show you the amount of urban build up.  As you can see Atlanta is basically all green except for a few little "core" areas.

Now Tokyo at the same scale:

Mind blowing isn't it?  Tokyo's scale of urban build up can't fit inside a usable image to show a comparison between the two as if I zoomed out to show the entire scope of the city the Atlanta image would show essentially nothing but solid green. 

Want another image to think about?

At around the 37 million people mark Tokyo has a land area roughly the size of Mobile, Washington and Clarke county combined, which is simply massive for a single city, but at the same time incredibly small when you realize this:  The population for the ENTIRE STATE of California is also 37 million people.   So depending on the definition the metropolis of the CITY of Tokyo has more people than one of the largest and most populated STATES in America.

But now let me break it down to a single train station, as if you come to Japan this is where you can actually start to these these numbers at work.

First up is Tokyo's rail network, the most impressive in the world with approximately 120 different commuter rail lines and 1,500-1,800 stations, depending on your definition of where the network ends and begins:

The largest station by passenger use is Shinjuku station, the busiest train station in the world by a massive margin and possibly the busiest place in the world on any given day..

How busy?  Every day the AVERAGE number of passengers is 3.6 million.  No that isn't a typo.  Not per year, not per month, nor per week.  Per DAY.   And get this, the station isn't even open all day.  It closes for  4hrs every night.

If you want to do the math that is 180,000 passengers per hour!  That means every hour Shinjuku station processes almost twice as many people as the capacity of Alabama or Auburn's football stadium.

Visual reference for everyone.

 

The above two images every hour for 20hrs per day, 365 days a year. 

For reference Atlanta International Airport, which is the busiest airport in the entire world, only handles 240,000 passengers per DAY which is amount of people Shinjuku station processes in 80 minutes.

So maybe "big" isn't quite the right word for this place.

Introduction.

   I've been living in the center of Tokyo for nearly 5 months now I figured I would finally start posting things in a central area instead of all around the internet.  In case you have come across this blog randomly, and aren't one of my friends and family, I figured I would do a brief introduction to give you some perspective as to where my thoughts and opinions are coming from.

   I'm a 27 year old male who was born and raised for the majority of his life in Southwest Alabama, primarily on a 17acre patch of land that has been in our family for over 100 years.  My entire county only had 18,000 people if that tells you anything.  Besides Alabama, I spent two years of my elementary school life in Anchorage, Alaska when one of my parents was transferred there for work. 

   At 20 years old I got extremely lucky and landed a position with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an non-agent entry level employee.  After several years I worked my way up to a Technical Information Specialist and during this time I acquired my bachelor's degree in executive business administration.

  Approximately 3 years ago I took a brief trip to Tokyo after finding a cheap round trip ticket online.  I found Tokyo to be completely mind blowing so a few months after returning to America I decided to give self studying Japanese a shot, thinking that I would give up after a week or two.  I kept plugging at it day after day and the more I studied the more I wanted to give living in Tokyo a shot. 

  So, like a complete crazy person, I saved up a lot of money (I was single with no kids, living in an extremely cheap part of the country, and getting paid very well at the time) and decided to quit my job with the FBI , under a recommendation for rehire if I ever decided I wanted to go back, and move here.  I didn't want to come here and have to find a job right away, so I enrolled at the ISI Language School in Takadanobaba in order to acquire a long term student VISA.   Shortly after that I acquired my own apartment in the Kagurazaka area which is where I am today.   

  A lot of this blog will focus on the subject of language learning, as it is something I am highly interested in, as well as my take on the craziness that is Tokyo.  If you are expecting a stereotypical Southern's point of view on things you might even be a little bit surprised, with the exception of my very strong Southern accent that is haha. 


Enjoy,

Brock