of thousands of people who arrive in Japan each year go through an experience that is the equivalent of suddenly being struck deaf and dumb. They go from being literate—even brilliant—in their own culture to not being able to speak, understand, read, or write the language of their host country, and to being equally ignorant of the nonverbal language of Japan as well.
If this situation continues for any length of time, the experience results in a trauma known as culture shock—which in extreme cases can cause serious mental and physical damage; sometimes even death.
Short-time visitors to Japan are not likely to suffer significant health problems because of their sudden inability to interact with the culture surrounding them. But there is perhaps no more frustrating feeling than not being able to communicate with other people when we want to or need to. Where visiting businesspeople are concerned, the handicap of not being able to communicate directly with their Japanese counterparts, even on the most basic level, has far more serious implications.
At a recent dinner in Tokyo with the president of an American company and his Japanese guests, the frustration of the foreign visitor was evident for all to see. Finally, he said in utter exasperation: “God! If I only knew survival Japanese!” That is what this book is all about.
Most people use fewer than 1,000 words of their own native language in going about their daily affairs. It is not so much how many words one knows but what those words are and how they are used. This is particularly true in the case of a second, foreign language. With a vocabulary of only 300 Japanese words you can communicate several thousand ideas— not only enough to survive but also to enjoy yourself at the same time.
Many Americans in particular seem to have a foreign language phobia. Some have extreme difficulty in pronouncing a single foreign word correctly. This fear might be the result of cultural conditioning stemming from a deep-rooted feeling that speaking a foreign language is un-American; that it is a black mark that cannot be erased.
Most Americans are now intellectually sophisticated enough to know this fear of foreign languages is invalid, and to recognize the social as well as economic benefits of being multi-lingual and multi-cultural. But they are still handicapped by the emotional residue of generations of trying to get away from any hint of foreignness.
Survival Japanese provides you with words, phrases and expressions commonly used in the modern Japanese society, both in Romanized Japanese and in Japanese characters, together with a thorough note on pronunciation. I hope this book helps you suppress the emotional reaction to the language and make the first step to communication with the Japanese in Japanese.
How to Use This Book
Despite the forbidding appearance of Japanese when it is written in the Chinese ideograms known as Kanji or “Chinese characters,” the language is made up of precise syllables that are in fact quite easy to pronounce (people who are not familiar with the language confuse the difficulty of getting several words out in a smooth flow with a phonetic complexity that does not exist).
Unlike Chinese, Japanese is pronounced in a straightforward manner without complicating tones. The only variations in Japanese are double consonants and long vowels that require a slight change in pronunciation. The grammatical structure of Japanese differs from Chinese as well as English, but that does not make it more difficult to learn. Looking at the order of the subject, verb, and object in a Japanese sentence, saying it is “backward” and complaining that it doesn’t make sense is foolish. Of course it makes sense.
Japanese is a very flexible language. You can switch the order of words and phrases around to a surprising degree, even leave things out and it not only makes sense but is acceptable in ordinary conversation. This can be a problem to those who want everything to follow one precise rule and regard this characteristic of the language as a serious complication. But looked at another way, it makes the language easier to use.
There are three distinct levels of Japanese that might be called honorofic, formal and informal. These levels are different enough that they are practically dialects within themselves. It may be very difficult to become fluent in each of these levels because it is almost like learning separate vocabularies. But being able to communicate effectively in formal Japanese is enough for the average foreigner to at least build a footbridge across the language gap.
Survival Japanese is standard Japanese. I make only a few references to grammar. In the early stages of any language study it often serves only to complicate things. The secret to language learning is to mimic the way native speakers use it, without any thought of its structure. After a while the grammar becomes imprinted on your mind, and making up correctly structured sentences becomes automatic.
This learning process is based on nothing more mysterious than repeating the words and sentences out loud, always out loud—a process that imprints the sound on the ear and memory, and just as important if not more so, trains the mouth and tongue to mechanically produce the necessary syllables in a smooth flow.
One of the prime reasons why so many students fail to learn how to speak foreign languages is that they don’t speak them enough. You cannot learn a language by looking at it. The whole Japanese language is based on six key sounds which are the building blocks of two sets of syllables. These syllables never change, so once you learn how to pronounce them, you can pronounce any word in the Japanese language. These six sounds and their pronunciations, as written in Roman letters with hiragana characters in the brackets, are a (あ), i (い), u (う), e (え), o (お), and n (ん), which is a moraic nasal whose sound is determined by the sound that follows it.
Notes on Pronunciation
Japanese uses haku “beat” or more technically, mora, rather than the syllable, as a unit of sounds. Haku and syllable are two different units; a Japanese syllable may contain the second half of a long vowel (e.g. kī), a moraic nasal (e.g. kin) or the first half of a double consonant (e.g. kit.to), in which case there are two haku or two beats within the syllable. So from now on, let’s replace the word “syllable” with haku or “beat.”
There are 101 basic one-haku or one-beat sounds called “moraic sounds,” which make up the Japanese language. The following table shows those moraic sounds with hiragana and katakana characters written underneath each of them.
Vowels
| a | Similar to the first phase of the diphthong i [ai] in “bite.” Do not use a [ah] in “Bart” or a [á] in “bat.” |
| i | Similar to but slightly shorter than ea [ii] in “beat.” Do not use i [í] in “bit.” |
| u | Similar to oo [uu] in “boot,” but the Japanese u is pronounced without rounding the lips. |
| e | Similar to e [é] in “bet.” |
| o | Similar to the first phase of the diphthong oa [ou] in “boat” in American English. Do not use oa [oo] in “board.” |
In standard Japanese, the i and the u are silent or, more technically, voiceless in some words. So, for example, desu (です), which is equivalent to “to be,” may sound like dess and its past tense deshita (でした) like deshta. However, it is not that the Japanese leave out these vowels; in fact they can still hear the difference between such pairs as aki (あき) “fall/autumn” and aku (あく) “evil.” Therefore, it is best that you always pronounce the i and the u clearly until you are certain when they become voiceless.
Long vowels
In Japanese, short vowels (e.g. i) and long vowels (e.g. ii) are used contrastively to differentiate the meaning of words. For example, ojisan (おじさん) means “uncle” while ojiisan (おじい さん) means “grandfather.” Long vowels are more or less twice as long as short vowels, and it is important to learn to pronounce vowels with the right length.
A long vowel may be indicated in Romanized Japanese by a line above the letter. In Survival Japanese, however, a phonetic second letter is added after the vowel as a pronunciation aid, as ā, ī, ū, ē and ō.