From Chapter 4: Gaijin Bloopers

Potential Pitfalls for the Non-native speaker of Japanese
Anyone who has learned a foreign language usually has an amusing anecdote (if not a horror story) to tell about language mistakes. In the interest of promoting Japanese language education, and in the spirit of good clean fun, let's take a closer look at some of the bloopers that have already been made.

Part I: A reasonably serious look by Karen Sandness
After several years of teaching Japanese at college level, I've begun to form hypotheses concerning the predictable patterns which can be detected in errors made by students of Japanese. These patterns suggest that some types of errors are the result of underlying attitudes or misconceptions.

One attitude which seems to be present in some students at a very deep, subconscious level is "If It's Good Enough For English, It's Good Enough For Japanese." These students take English as the norm and have difficulty recognizing distinctions that do not occur in English. In a first-year class, this usually manifests first as problems in pronunciation. Virtually all beginners have some trouble with pronunciation, but the IIGEFEIGEFJ learner remains oblivious to such basic distinctions as su versus tsu, or long vowels versus short vowels, and continues to have pronunciation problems long after his or her classmates have moved on to having problems with the distinction between -tara and -eba. Such a student might say, Boku no shumi wa sun desu . . . ( "My hobby is pickpocketing") when actually his hobby is fishing (tsuri).

The students whose IIGEFEIGEFJ attitude extends to grammar are even more creative with their bloopers. They may do just fine in drill sessions, but when turned loose, they come out with utterances such as Watashi ikimashita e koen kino. I sometimes get the impression that deep down, they believe that English word order is divinely ordained and that the Japanese would use it if they were just more enlightened.

Next is the "This Language Makes No Sense Anyway" group. They at least realize that Japanese does not operate as English does, but they perceive Japanese grammar as being completely random in nature. They select particles as much to maintain the rhythm of the sentence as to serve any grammatical function. This leads to such whimsical statements as Sumisu-san wa hanbaga ga tabemashita (sounds like a hamburger ate Smith-san) and Taitei enpitsu ni kakimasu (illustration on the right).

TLMNSA types believe that all Japanese verbs and adjectives are irregular. When writing, they evidently flip coins to decide whether they will spell a given -te form with -te or -tte. In the midst of a drill on adjective or verb forms, they call out wild guesses, particularly if the previous line of the drill has just presented an analogous form:

Instructor: Takai desu ka.
Reasonably alert student: Iie, takaku nai desu.
Instructor: Nagai desu ka.
TLMNSA student: Iie, nagaiku desu.
Instructor: Iie, chigaimasu.
TLMNSA student: Nagai nai deshita?
Instructor: Iie.
TLMNSA student: Nagaikatta arimasen no deshita?

You get the idea. The final manifestation of the TLMNSA syndrome is the agonized look of foreboding that comes over the student's face whenever he or she is expected to comprehend the spoken language. The student's mind is so filled with thoughts of "I'll never understand this. This makes no sense. Why does she talk so fast?" that Japanese is completely shut out.

I first observed the Dictionary Dependence phenomenon several years ago when I asked my students to prepare a description of their roommates. One young man announced Boku no rumumeto wa ana o akeru desu which, if anything, means "My roommate opens holes." When I asked him what he was trying to say, he gave me a snide look and explained, as if to someone who was not very bright, "My roommate is a bore."

In another instance, a student hurriedly leafed through her pocket dictionary and came up with the statement Hawai wa Nihon yori shimeru desu. She thought she was saying, "Hawaii is closer than Japan," but she had picked out the verb "close" as in "close the door," rather than the adjective "close" as in "nearby."

The best way to avoid Dictionary Dependence bloopers is never to use a Japanese word gleaned from a dictionary unless you have either looked it up again in the Japanese-English section to determine its nuances or asked a Japanese person whether this is in fact the word you are looking for.

Finally, there is the Good Enough attitude. This sometimes appears in returned exchange students who have learned a slangy, overly informal, and error-ridden variety of Japanese. Their pronunciation, intonation, and self-confidence in speaking are enviable, but too many of them are immune to further polishing. They try to coast through their college Japanese courses, and when the instructor points out grammatical errors or nonstandard usage, they shrug the advice off, evidently figuring that their Japanese was "Good Enough" for surviving and even thriving in Japan, so why work so hard? These students rarely make further progress.

Another variety of "Good Enough" can be observed among long-term foreign residents of Japan who after ten or more years in the country know an amount of Japanese comparable to the first page or two of a tourists' phrasebook. They are fond of telling newcomers that it is not necessary to learn more than a few words of Japanese—that will be "Good Enough" for meeting daily needs. The "Good Enough" types do not realize (or mind) that they are limiting the range of their experience.

Even the most humble and diligent learners, however, are capable of committing typical gaijin errors that no native speaker would ever make. Just as a Japanese speaking English may have trouble with the difference between he and she and may use the wrong article before a noun—mistakes which would be surprising coming from a native speaker—English speakers venturing into Japanese come up with errors unknown among Japanese people.

Perhaps the most common of these is the superfluous no. Some students put no at the end of everything that describes a noun. Thus he or she says not only Kodomo no toki and byoki no toki (correct usage), but also chiisai no toki, Nihon ni kita no toki, and wakaranai no toki. These people are over-exercising their powers of analogy. Both kodomo no toki and byoki no toki are indeed correct since kodomo and byoki are nouns, but no is not necessary between a verb or adjective and the noun it describes. (I suspect that informal uses of no such as Itsu Nihon ni irashita no? or Kore wa wakaranai no? might be the cause of some of this confusion.) The correct forms of the above are chiisai toki, Nihon ni kita toki, and wakaranai toki.

Another common mistake is not conjugating one's adjectives, i.e., saying takai nai instead of takaku nai, takai ni narimashita instead of takaku narimashita, and takai deshita instead of takakatta desu. While this is admittedly easier than remembering the correct forms, it's just not the way things are done in Japanese.

Of course, each individual learner has his or her own peculiarities, and each year at least one of my students comes up with a mistake I had never imagined anyone would make. Whatever your level of proficiency is right now, whatever your most frequent errors are, you can improve. In fact, you must keep moving forward if you do not want to start slipping back.