Year: 2004

Ray mentioned that after starting Pimsleur Cantonese he quickly had occasion to use it after a Cantonese Mass when a woman started speaking to him in it.

I just had a similar unexpected experience.

One of the few flaws of the Pimsleur sets is that they don’t come with a vocabulary list, and sometimes I’m not 100% sure I’ve heard the word correctly on the CDs. Thus, whenever I’m working a Pimsleur set, I go out and buy a cheap-o phrasebook/dictionary to look up the spellings of words for confirmation. (Dover has a really good line of $4 phrasebook/dictionaries).

Tonight I went to the bookstore to get an inexpensive Japanese phrasebook/dictionary, and I couldn’t resist buying a few additional language books (e.g., a Japanese grammar, an Indonesian phrasebook, a Filipino [Tagalog] phrasebook). When I got to the checkout counter, a big, Hawaiian-shirted, Hawaiian-looking salesperson named Max looked at the books I was buying and asked if I was going to be traveling in Southeast Asia.

I said: “Naw, I’m just learning their languages.”

At which point he asked–in Japanese–if I understood Japanese.

I replied that I understand a little Japanese, and I apparently said it fluidly enough that his eyes got a little big (his surprise probably magnified by my customary cowboy attire) and he said, continuing in Japanese, that I was quite good.

I replied that I was not very good (the customary thing to say when given such a compliment in Japanese), and then added, switching to English, that I’m just starting out. He said, in English, that he was still impressed.

After paying for the books, we switched back to Japanese and I thanked him politely and we bade each other farewell.

So there you have it: proof of the effectiveness of the Pimsleur Method! Just 24 hours after starting to study Japanese and after only two half-hour lessons I successfully held my first unplanned, real-world conversation in the language. Yee-haw!

Given my previous post, you’ve no doubt encountered the word “skosh,” meaning “a little bit.” As in:

PERSON 1: Do you want some ketchup for your hotdog?

PERSON 2: Just a skosh.

You may never have encountered the word in writing, but you likely know it in its spoken form skosh.

What you probably don’t know is its origin: It’s Japanese.

In my previous post, I gave you what you needed to decode several Japanese words. One of them was skoshi, which is a popular contraction of sukoshi, which means “a little bit,” and that is where we get “skosh” (however you spell it).

That takes care of the word skosh. But what about ketchup?

It turns out, ketchup isn’t either an English word or a Japanese word. It’s a Malay word–that is, a word from Malaysia.

In Malaysia they make a sauce for food that is called kechap, and this sauce is remarkably similar to what we in the West call ketchup (not completely similar; it’s somewhat different from ketchup). That’s where the name comes from.

So what do I want on my hotdog (in a low-carb bun)?

Just a skosh of ketchup.

Was in the bookstore today and couldn’t resist picking up a starter pack for Pimsleur Japanese. Had been thinking about getting one since I’ve been going to the Mitsuwa Market lately to get Japanese low-carb noodles and have had a need to ask basic questions of salespeople who aren’t always totally fluent in English.

As soon as I got back to my pickup, I eagerly popped the first lesson into my CD player and heard the following conversation (NOTE: all spellings are phoenetic, and there are other ways to say the same things):

MAN: Sumima-sen, Aygo ga wakarimas ka?

WOMAN: Iyeh, wakarimas-sen. Nihonggo ga wakarimas ka?

MAN: Hai, skoshi wakarimas.

WOMAN: Anata wa Amerikajin dess ka?

MAN: Hai, watashi wa Amerikajin dess.

The CD then started to teach me what I needed to understand this conversation, starting with sumima-sen. I knew immediately what this would mean: “Excuse me.” That’s the first thing you get taught in every Pimsleur langauge course, for a very good reason: You’ll need it a lot!–both to start conversations with people and to apologize for the mistakes that you (as a beginner) will make at first.

You keep learning for the next twenty or so minutes, and then they play the conversation that you heard at the beginning over again. Suddenly, you realize that you understand everything being said in the conversation. Translated, it’s:

MAN: Excuse me, do you understand English?

WOMAN: No, I don’t understand it. Do you understand Japanese?

MAN: Yes, I understand a little.

WOMAN: Are you an American?

MAN: Yes, I am an American.

Of course, I’d know what it says even without the lesson. Every Pimsleur set starts with the same conversation adapated to whatever language you’re learning. So far, I’ve been through this same conversation in (modern) Hebrew, (modern) Greek, (Syrian) Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe one or two others. Whenever I start a new Pimsleur course, I have a nostalgic “I’m home” and “Here we go again” feeling because of the initial conversation.

It’s a handy little conversation to know. The things that get said are things that you’ll need to know how to say and understand in the new language.

The genius of Pimsleur language courses is that they tell you want you most need to know first and start you directly on how to speak conversationally, without memorizing lots of grammar and paradigms first. How many other language programs do you know that will have you understanding complete, if short, conversations like this one in less than thirty minutes?

I’m looking forward to trying my hand at Pimsleur Japanese. Every language has its own genius, and Japanese will be interesting. Unlike some Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese), it does not have an extensive tonal system. The main tone we have in English is raising our voice at the end of a sentence to form a question, but in Chinese virtually every word has a normal, high, rising, falling, or dipsy-doodle tone that functions basically like an extra consonant in the word and completely changes its meaning. It’s part of what gives Chinese English-speakers their musical accent, but it’s so hard for English-speakers to master that when I first started studying Mandarin I had trouble distinguishing individual words out of the stream of sound and tone. Fortunately, Japanese is like English in that it rarely uses tones. That will make it easier.

Another thing that will make it easier is that Japanese (like Chinese) is not a heavily inflected language. That means that the words don’t change their forms as often as in some languages (like Latin, which has a bugbear system of inflection for nouns, or Arabic, which has a bugbear system of inflection for verbs). Japanese is a low-inflection language so, for example, it doesn’t normally distinguish singular nouns from plural nouns. For example, the word jidosha can mean either “car” or “cars.” Thus there are no plural endings to memorize.

Also–as in Latin–there are no articles (a, an, the) to memorize, so jidosha can mean “car,” “a car,” “the car,” “cars,” “some cars,” “the cars.”

The bugbear for Japanese will be its word order. Japanese is what linguists call a “head-last” language, where as English is a “head-first” language. This concept is a little hard to explain (it has to do with where you put the most grammatically important part of a phrase), but the upshot is that the word order in Japanese often will be backwards of what English word order will be. Other times, it will seem pretty scrambled from an English perspective.

But that’s part of the fun! I’m trying, over the course of time, to try learning one of every major kind of language. Studying Mandarin, for example, helped give me some exposure to a tonal language. Studying Japanese will help give me some exposure to a head-last language. Ultimately, I want to get around to aggultinating languages like Swahili or some of the American Indian languages, which have monster huge verbs that can encode all of the information of a whole sentence in just the verb. (Klingon is another agglutinating language.)

Isn’t it cool how God designed the human faculty for language?

Fortunately, in Pimsleur, you don’t need to know or learn all the grammar I just described. You get the grammar you need by osmosis from conversation–the same way you did when you learned English as a baby (or whatever you learned as a baby)–without having to study a grammar book.

In the end, it’s pretty simple. In fact, I bet that you can use just the information from the Japanese and English conversations above to figure out what the title of the post means. Here’s a clue in case you need more help (the stuff in parentheses represent what the untranslatable particles ga, ka, and wa mean):

MAN: Excuse me, English (<--subject) understand (question)?

WOMAN: No, understand not. Japanese (<--subject) understand (question)?

MAN: Yes, a little understand.

WOMAN: You (predicate–>) American are (question)?

MAN: Yes, I (predicate–>) American am.

Armed with this knowledge, can you translate the title of this post?

IRONIC NOTE: After I left the bookstore, I discovered that the main kind of Japanese low-carb noodles are now available at the ordinary Vons grocery store across the street from me. Sheesh! Well, it won’t dampen my interest in Japanese. Languages are cool, and there’s still all those other Japanese low-carb products to get at Mitsuwa.