flemmings | (no subject)

My Japanese class was cancelled for lack of enrollment. Well, fine; this is an incentive to continue and extend my self-study past its current 'use it or lose it' stage. To which end I pulled from the shelf the book I bought twenty years ago, A Japanese Reader, the one that defeated me twenty years ago. Flipped through the beginning chapters, which drill you in hiragana and katakana, and the elementary level entries, but my eye was caught by the vocabulary notes for the last one of those.

I know standards have declined since 1962, but somehow 'marines' wouldn't have struck me as a piece of elementary vocabulary. Especially when it's a non-intuitive 陸戦隊 (land warfare troops) otherwise known as the Army in my book. Investigation proves it to be the short form of 海軍陸戦隊-- sea-army (ie navy) land war troops-- which is a) descriptive and b) has that feel of 'a word invented to translate some foreign word' ie the Marines. Maybe the Marines were more in people's minds in 1962 or maybe, as I suspect, Roy Andrew Miller served in the Occupation, not that one can prove it from his wiki entry.

(The last entry in the intermediate section throws you without preliminary into 啓蒙主義の影響-- the influence of the Enlightenment. No wonder I fled from Miller in despair.)

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Wow.

Oh dear. I see now the foolishness of any textbook that tries to move you up from hiragana and katakana to business newspapers and The Makioka Sisters or whichever overly difficult novel that is, within the space of 200-ish pages, but I remember how I despaired over that book.

Oh good. I'm not alone then. Agreed, if I'd taken my prof's advice and worked my slow way through the thing after 3rd year Japanese (fairly mickey mouse at my uni-- we hadn't finished the Touyou kanji even) I'd probably have made more progress than I did. But in the absence of a Wordtank, ohhh what blood-stained sweat and tears that would have been. (In the event I happily sweated blood and tears over a popular history of Ooka Echizen instead, which is the difference between duty study and trying to understand something you want to know.)

Aw, I hate it when classes get cancelled for lack of enrolment. My friend took German in her polytechnic and was about one of two people to pass because she worked very hard on it. And then it was closed because the rest who failed just said 'fuck it' and left. Good luck!

Thanks. It was a fourth year Japanese course through Continuing Education, and I just wanted to see how badly my Japanese had deteriorated and if listening and talking for 2.5 hours a week would make a difference. So now I must do my listening and talking on my own. Which wouldn't be hard if I had any discipline, but I don't.

Oh, all the best then!

I just think most people need exponentially more text to get anything worthwhile out of a book like that, because there's SO much vocabulary to learn when you're dealing with any genre or subject, and a scattershot "Here's two pages on archaeology, here's two pages on economics" isn't going to amount to much.

And it's a disadvantage to the people who would happily take on a whole book of economics or archaeology or Ooka Echizen but don't care about 90% of the readings.

It could be maybe argued that at least you get exposed to various kinds of vocab, things you might not read on your own. Granted it's nowhere near indepth enough, but it's a start. My own school was heavy on the newspaper articles and shakai mondai stuff, which I'd never have touched if left to my own devices, and didn't touch once I'd left school. So my efforts to learn vocab for the JLPT was always doomed to failure because I no longer saw those terms in any kind of context that would reinforce them.