Translation Exercise: 「ご主人は、私よ」

「ご主人は、私よ」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"I'm my own master!"

Even among the younger generation, there are still many people who use the word "master" (shujin) to mean "husband." I often hear of people who say they don't call their own husband "master" but end up using the term for other people's husbands (goshujin). 

The female historian Yamazaki Akiko told me that when she is asked "And what about your master? (Goshujin ha?)" she answers, "I am the master of myself." A firm and sound reply.

I recently heard this from a newlywed friend: "When a new friend asks me something like, 'How is your goshujin today?' and I answer, 'I'm my own master!' they say, 'Oh, you're right!'"

This friend has a husband who is still a student. In their household, she is the "breadwinner." The meaning of the word "master" rings all the more true in her mock-rebellious reply when asked this kind of question by someone who knows this background information.

The following words have been heard in the mouths of my single friends.

"You have to be careful when hanging out with a married woman."

That is, it seems that when meeting with someone who does not earn their own money, whether it's for dinner or a short trip, one must take care to note that person's personal limits.*

"Going out with someone who works is fine, but I end up hesitating when it comes to people who use their 'master's' money. It's partly because of the so-called 'housewife money sense'. So what I always do is have them decide ahead of time, and then just go off of that."

I wonder what these married women would think to know that they're being seen this way by their own friends.

*「自分自身の稼ぎを暮らしていない人とつき合うとき、[略]　どれくらいのランクがその人の許容範囲なのか気を遣うのだそうだ。」

"Why Do Girls Talk Like This?"

It seems like whenever you people complain about modern speech patterns or vocabulary, they're complaining about the way girls talk. I'm not sure why that is, although I think I do recall reading an article about how girls are the trendsetters for language. They start (or at least spread) the 'fads' that become normal fixtures of a generation's language (before the trends change again).

Before I go any further, let me Google that.

Here it is - Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns, from the New York Times.

That said, it does sound pretty crazy. Or as my co-worker says, "That's cray cray!"

Going to Iwaki, Fukushima

I've recently found out where I'll be working in Japan: Iwaki city, in the infamous Fukushima Prefecture. Iwaki is around 30 miles from the nuclear plant affected by last year's tsunami.

From the information I can find on Iwaki's site, the radiation levels aren't elevated higher than normal background radiation. But what think you? If you're a current resident of Japan, what are the kinds of things have you been hearing about the area? Would you live there or visit there yourself? If you're outside of Japan, could you see yourself moving to Fukushima prefecture?

I've made up my mind to accept, but I'll be doing more research in the meantime. If you know of any credible sources, send them my way!

ディスる and subs2srs

ディスる
On Sundays I watch the show on the top of the variety feed, whatever it is. If I didn't I'd end up watching the same shows every week. Sometimes it isn't very interesting, since it's all entertainment and the main object is to either shock you or get a laugh out of you. But sometimes you learn some interesting things. For example, I learned the word ディスる while watching スクール革命. It comes from the English "diss", of course. Now I can talk about people dissing other people in Japanese. Although does anyone use "diss" in English that often nowadays?

subs2srs

I came across this on /r/languagelearning.

"subs2srs allows you to create import files for Anki or other Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) based on your favorite foreign language movies and TV shows to aid in the language learning process.
This utility will parse through subtitle files, extract the dialog and timing information and then use that information to generate audio clips, snapshots and video clips for each line of dialog."

 Although you can do the same kind of thing on LWT, this is less time-intensive. If you have both the English and Japanese subtitles, they can be matched and processed at the same time into one card. Pretty cool!

Japanese Lenition

Ugh, insomnia. I have to wake up at 7, brain! Go to sleep!

But I guess now is the time to look up a bit more of this very interesting lenition stuff I initially saw in a post on reddit: Why do /k/ and /g/ go to /i/ in Japanese? For example, /kak + ta/ (stem write + past) -> kaita. What is the motivation for turning a velar into a vowel? 

According to Wiki lenition is "a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin lenis = weak)." So it's similar to what happens in American English, with all those ɾ's getting up in the t's circumference without regard to lexicography. 


I remember thinking up something kind of like this (and by that I mean not really anything like this at all) when I learned passive conjugations. I didn't think about one kind of verb taking  られる　and the others taking あれる; I just stuck あれる on the end of any "plain" verb and imagined the う in between eroding away. So たべる＋あれる＝たべるあれる⇒たべられる and かく＋あれる＝かくあれる⇒かかれる. Actually now that I write that out it seems a lot more complicated than just remembering る⇒られる、う⇒あれる. 


Anyway, the top comment by limetom is very enlightening, so now I'm looking through the preview of the book they cited ("A History of the Japanese Language" by Bjarke Frellesvig) on Google. Yeah! Making can't-sleep-time into learn-something-time is the greaɾest!

I Don't Know What to Do with Myself - Careers

Well, now that a new Mayan calendar has been discovered and we know that the world won't end in 2012, my brain must turn once again to careers, as it periodically does, this time without the relief that knowing I will die and be spared the usually everlasting hunt for my niche. Because I have no idea what my niche is. I have an ideal of it, I think (does that make sense?) but there is a wide gulf in between that and its realization, and I lack the tools. I must have left them somewhere, or lost them.

Part of it is my way of thinking. I always feel like I'm playing catch-up and I'm way behind the eight-ball. My victories don't seem like much - they seem late and insubstantial, so the distance I have yet to travel seems even wider than it is.

I've often thought about working with languages in the government - like becoming a language specialist, translating and etc. But I really wanted to learn Japanese, which isn't that high on the list of "languages the government wants you to learn." I'm a little late to the party (see what I mean) because I only have two languages, English is my L1, I am not quite fluent (maybe a 2+ to 3) in my L2, and my L2 isn't a high need language. And then what else do I need? I have to have some kind of political knowledge, a large amount of cultural knowledge, and probably familiarity of a technical field of some kind. But which? And how? What kind of opportunities should I seek out? What would be best? How can I ensure that I'm closer to being ready in 4 or 5 years, once I've paid off my foolish student loans and practiced my languages a bit more?  I guess these are the kinds of things that people who haven't found their niche think about a lot.

*insert wilhelm scream*

 Have you ever thought about being a linguist with the FBI? Or are you one? What kind of background do you have? What kind of skills do you think you need? There's a dozen or so articles (mostly older) about FBI linguists here that answer some questions.

Return to Translation Exercise: 「すぐ、女は幸せにされてしまうから」

"Hey, there hasn't been a translation exercise in a long while. She's probably doing them but not posting them."

No... No... I've just... I've just been not doing them at all...

your reaction

I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! 

ごめんなさい！

 I'll start again! LIKE RIGHT NOW!

 「すぐ、女は幸せにされてしまうから」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"Women are made happy."

I heard these words more than ten years ago at a colloquium I headed. The theme was "My Issues as a Woman." The notes from that discussion were published afterward in the book "The Housewife and The Woman."

25 housewives looking deeply into themselves, delving into their problems. It was a painful, earnest kind of discussion. Truths spilled out like sighs, but among them all this utterance is one of the few that I cannot forget.  The words did not have to be pressed free - they rushed out, and the speaker seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she had said something important. 

One often hears that women are constantly deceived about the things happening right before their eyes; that women are easily pigeon-holed into the mold cast by this common idea of "a Woman's Happiness"; that women are always made happy by someone, instead of making their own lives with their own hands. The sentiment has ample occasion to be said.

During the discussion, I was often struck by the perceptive self-reflections amongst the women's innocent revelations:

"It's so easy since I had a kid. I guess because I don't have time to think about myself anymore."

"I'm alone with my child all day everyday -- I can only speak baby-talk now."

The self-portraits that the women drew with their words that day were not painted in the brightest colors, but I would like to believe that this self-reflection is the starting point for something more. 

Intonation and Foreign Accents

I came across this video on Reddit the other day (it was posted by the user Arrow2Face).

The narrator is Chinese. He is definitely speaking in Chinese-accented non-American English, but I, being an uninformed American, was unsure whether it's British or Australian English. Some commentators on the comment thread believe it's Australian. So I guess you'd call it Chinese-accented Australian English? Chinese-accented Australian-accented English?

Anyway, I honestly don't think his pronunciation is that bad. He says something like /ɑndə/ or /ɑnə/ for 'and', and he definitely has a kind of stereotypical Chinese accent when it comes to vowels, but I can understand the words he uses if I listen closely. No, his pronunciation isn't what makes this announcer so difficult to understand. It's his intonation. As others in the thread say, it's almost like he's reading blindly from a phonetic script. His intonation is all over the place, muddling up my native perception of word boundaries. The intonation is what makes this narration so strange. It doesn't even sound like your catch-all Chinese accent anymore. Some of my favorite comments are

"Some times he nails it. Other times he's just a wee bit off. This guy is like the uncanny valley of voiceovers. "

 and

" its like scandinavian cockney"

 and the following thread, which you can click to see more clearly

What made me so interested in the affect of intonation in this video is that I'm currently working on my Japanese intonation while reading aloud. Let me tell you, pitch accent is difficult work. When in doubt, just stay flat! is my suggestion to you, as suggested to me by Mr. Masamune. How do you pronounce 不潔（ふけつ）ではないです? The accent is on the で, so it's something like fuketsudeha naidesu, not fuketsudeha naidesu, as I pronounced it originally. Although to my ears it sounds like fuketsudeha naidesu, as if the accent is rising to meet the high accent. Or something. Because flat accents aren't really flat? Or... I might have messed it all up again. Damn my native intonation, slipping insidiously into my foreign language just as my hard t's and k's do! For all I know, when I speak in Japanese I'm only a little better than Mr. Knife announcer.

You can use this dictionary to look up the pitch accents of words you don't know or are unsure of. A number next to the entry will tell you which syllable has the high pitch. 0 is flat pitch, and on. (Read the description for this numbering system here in Japanese here, in section 4.) Not all words in the dictionary have pitch information.

HOWEVER -- pitch accent of a word can change based on the pitch accent of surrounding words (so, when you put the words together into a sentence). So the best thing to do is listen and learn. Don't sweat intonation TOO much. Practice it, but don't let it get you speak-shy (that's like pee-shy, except with speaking, I guess). If you care too much about intonation you'll end up saying nothing at all, and what's the point of that?

This site, Shiawase, has some more information and interesting links.  There's also the wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent.
 

Japanese Subtitles + Learning With Texts = Productive Drama Watching (?)

Hey fellow Japanese drama watchers who are also studying Japanese. Wouldn't you like to watch Japanese dramas and study at the same time? Sure, you can delude yourself into believing that simply enjoying what you can and glazing over what you can't understand is helpful, but we'll get nowhere like that! Then again, pausing every time an unknown word comes on so you can notate and decode it kills the fun of drama-watching. Kills it dead. Like, with a rock... or something. Like, with a stone...

Yeah! Kung Pow reference!

Well, if you get some Japanese subtitles (or better yet, the script) and put it into Learning With Texts, you can simply follow along as you go. With regular subtitles, you have to pause and look up kanji. Boring! With subtitles+LWT, you'll get minimal pausing time! The word is right there, and with a click you can get its definition and save it for later perusal. (Imagine the previous paragraph in an infomercial guy voice.)

Yeah! Learning!

You can get Japanese subs here. You can get Japanese dramas using something like Keyhole TV or whatever floats your boat.