How I Learned Japanese
I want to talk to about how I learned Japanese. This is Steve Kaufman again, if you enjoy my videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. So, you know, how did it come about that I learned Japanese? Japanese ended up being very influential in my life, my social life, my professional career.
Uh, and yet, you know, back in 1968, I was sent to Hong Kong by the Canadian government to learn Mandarin Chinese. So I, how did I end up with Japanese being such a dominant language in my life? So I thought I'd go over that and go over with you some of the sort of things that helped me learn Japanese and more than any book or anything as I sort of reflect back on it now, it was my attitude.
Uh, and of course the amount of time that I was prepared to spend on learning Japanese. So 68, I go to Hong Kong. I spent a year learning Chinese. Um, and then the idea was that I would be working in the, uh, Canadian High Commission in Hong Kong using my Chinese. Unfortunately there developed a sort of a conflict of,
personality conflict or whatever, with my immediate boss at the High Commission. And the idea was that, uh, Canada would open up a, an embassy in Beijing and I would be working for this person. Uh, it would be a very isolated posting. He and I didn't get along. So I announced to the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service that I refused to go to Beijing to work
under this person in an isolated post, life would be hell for two and a half years. I said on the other hand, since the government had paid for me, essentially to learn Chinese, which I had done in, in, uh, you know, quick time in a year, whereas normally two years was sort of the allotted time to learn Chinese.
I said, I will, if you assign me to Japan, I will learn Japanese on my own. Won't cost you a penny and you will have at least gotten some return on your investment. Looking back on it is, is kind of, um, almost a foolhardy thing for me to do, but I was not to go and spend two years in an isolated post with someone with whom I had very strong personality conflicts and in their wisdom the Trade Commissioner Service agreed.
So I then started buying books in Hong Kong on Japanese. And, uh, I still remember that one of the first things I learned was, uh, how does, how you, how you say, "how do you do?" When you meet someone for the first time. And the expression was ... I learned that I sort of memorized it. I have never used that expression.
Nobody uses, nobody uses that expression, a completely useless expression. It's an indication that much of what you get in beginner books may not be all that useful. You have to be prepared to... you don't necessarily eliminate it, but you learn it and forget it. And you don't worry about it. Anything that's thrown at me at any stage in my learning.
It's not really important to me, whether I am able to hang on to it. In time, I'll figure it out, whether I need it or whether, I don't know, in the case of ... not something that I ever needed. So while in Hong Kong, because I had friends amongst the various other diplomats who were studying Chinese, I had very good friends amongst the, uh, people at the Japanese consulate,
and one of those people was very fluent in Chinese. And, uh, he wanted to learn English. So we would meet for lunch twice a week at a very famous, uh, dim sum place in Hong Kong. The, uh, ... Hotel and, uh, Tuesday we would speak English and Thursday we would speak Japanese. I don't know what I was able to say, whatever I was able to find in my book, I would try it out.
It wasn't much of a conversation. But it was part of starting to experience things Japanese. So then in, uh, I guess January of '71, we moved to Japan and I went to a school right under the Tokyo tower called the ..., uh, ... Japanese school. Nitoguri Sensei was a very charismatic man.
And his message was ... heart to heart. And we would sit around in this classroom, five or six of us, and we would all try to mumble something in Japanese. And I did that for a month. And then I realized that this was largely a waste of my time. So I quit that. And I started doing a lot of reading. I let a, I read a lot in, in this series by Naganuma, which I've mentioned before, which is all Hiragana.
Because since I had the characters from Chinese, I had to get used to the kanna, and even though compared to Chinese characters, Hiragana is easy to learn, there's only whatever it is, 50 symbols. Never underestimate how difficult it is to get used to a new writing system, even though theoretically, you know what the symbols represent, before your brain gets used to absorbing, you know, messages, information with that writing system takes a long, long time.
So I read lots and I listened to lots and continued to scour the bookstores for reading material, wherever possible with cassette tapes, much more difficult at that time to find such material, but whatever I could find I consumed. I was lucky enough that, uh, at the Canadian Embassy where I was working, I had an assistant commercial, uh, officer, as they were known, these sort of locally engaged staff who worked with the trade commissioners, who had the contacts, who would accompany you to visits.
And his name was ... and he was extremely long-winded, and extremely patient and he would speak to me and he would say everything four or five times, and I would listen to him and I would imitate his, the way he droned on and repeated things. But when you're learning a language, if you are lucky enough to have someone to talk to who is, uh, you know, long of wind and repeats things, that's extremely helpful.
And with Nik, we would go and visit, uh, you know, potential, uh, you know, contacts, people who wanted to buy Canadian products. Uh, first two years I was promoting food products in the second two years of the four years, I was promoting forest products and we would visit with Japanese contacts and, um, I would kind of hang in there, but, you know, and I try to say something and I pretend that I understood it.
And I think this was the other attitude that I had. It never bothered me that I, for the longest time, didn't understand a hundred percent. I understand 30%, 40%, 50%, but I'd be in there nodding part of the deal after the meeting, I'd asked Nik, like, what exactly did they say? I, maybe I said something that was totally irrelevant.
It never really bothered me. Uh, I was in a Japanese environment. I was being exposed to the language I was picking up on things. And, but it does take a long time. And I can remember that even after years of living in Japan, the only television programs that I could understand where baseball and Sumo, because there's, you know, the dialogue is relatively limited, uh, you seeing what's happening.
And so that was kind of what I would watch. It took me a long time before I could understand, you know, uh, drama, you know, soap operas or sword movies or slash movies or any of that stuff. Uh, it just takes a long time, but I was in a hurry. I certainly didn't want to write any exam in Japanese. I just wanted to use it to the extent that I could use it.
And, and where my Japanese really took off was when I, uh, left the embassy and I started working on my own. So now I didn't have a Nikyazaki. I had to basically, you know, handle these relationships by myself. And, uh, there were times and I had Japanese people working with me and we'd be in the car, driving around the countryside for hours in traffic.
And just talking, talking, talking, talking about lumber, talking about, and of course the Japanese way of business is quite fascinating. And I had to learn about how they cut the trees, the logs, and how they cut for different grade for different grain, for different qualities, the different, uh, you know, idiosyncrasies of wood that they didn't like or did like.
And we could talk forever about wood. Mostly we just talked about wood, but we talked for hours and I also had a customer, but we didn't only talk wood, I had a customer when I was working for a major, again, Canadian forest products, export company. I had a customer in Nagoya. We were also selling newsprint and the Chunichi Shimbun in Nagoya, which is the major newsprint...newspaper in Nagoya,
and they had a purchasing manager and I had to go and be nice to him so that they would continue buying our paper. And I would go down there once a month and yeah, and we would sit in a Japanese restaurant and sit on the floor and, uh, consume a bottle of whiskey and discuss philosophy. So I had to be up on subjects related to philosophy.
We didn't talk about the price of newpaper, we didn't talk about anything related to business. We talked about philosophy, which was a lot of fun. And, uh, I mean, I can't remember all the different things, but my, my basic attitude was one of just, you know, roll with the punches. Um, and I would go in and find readers with glossaries and, and for the longest time, when I saw Chinese character, I would pronounce it
to myself in Chinese. And um very often not know how that was pronounced in Japanese. I, there were like, I would hear it and I knew what it meant, but I didn't necessarily relate that character to any particular pronunciation. So I would read in Hiragana and pronounce it in Chinese, continue reading in Hiragana,
and acquire this vocabulary. Now this has all been, become much easier today because, because we have text to speech, we can look up words in dictionaries. We can, uh, we have, like at LingQ we have furigana, the little guys on top of the character. So much easier. It's unbelievably much easier, even though, you know, ta LingQ it's not perfect because the word-splitting algorithm doesn't quite work as well as we would like. And we're looking at ways to make it better, but it's still so much easier to learn today than it was back in those days. So, uh, and, and I should say amongst the various sources that I would listen to, and I got into my car and Tokyo in August when it was like 36 degrees and the sun has been beating down on my car and I get in there and the steering wheel is just like, scalding hot then I would put on my ... the history of the Shōwa era, which I must have listened to 20, 30 times.
So it's all I think my immersion in Japanese was one of, I wanted to explore, I wanted to experience the language. I'd say what I thought I was able to say, sometimes get it wrong. It didn't bother me. I listened to what people were saying to me. And basically relied on my brain to gradually start saying more and more things correctly.
I never really focused in on the grammar, grammar rules, rules about when to use which polite form, none of that. I just basically allowed the language to come to me and trusted that my brain would pick up on the patterns of the language. And today my Japanese is, as it is, it's not perfect. Uh, I don't, I haven't tried to zoom in on any particular aspects of either polite language or pitch accent or any of these other things I communicate.
I understand. I'm happy. It serves my purposes. And I think people, uh, are quite comfortable communicating with me in Japanese. And you can watch two of my videos in Japanese here, just to give you a bit of the flavor of my Japanese as it is right now, which reminds me, I just wanted to say one more thing, learning other languages and having an absence from Japanese has improved my Japanese.
In other words, the fact of learning other languages and particularly the 10 languages I've learned since the age of 60, including Russian and including, you know, Korean, Ukrainian, and now struggling with Arabic and Persian. All of that is good for the brain and actually improves my Japanese.
Although if I haven't spoken it for awhile, I'm initially quite rusty, but then ultimately I become better. So there you have it, uh, a brief discussion about how I learned Japanese. I hope that's helpful.
