JAPAN I

Growing up in Hong Kong, I have been exposed to Japanese culture since when I was young. As one of the entertainment powerhouse in East Asia, Japanese animation, TV series and music is exported to Hong Kong and the whole of East Asia. While not able to speak the language, most Hong Kongers can say a phrase or two. I have been “learning” the Japanese language way before I had the chance to go on exchange. Not in school or classes, but only from television. I had been watching Japanese television programs online for years and suddenly I realised that I could hold an everyday conversation in Japanese.
My mother tongue, Cantonese, is a Sinitic(Chinese) language, which belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Japanese, on the other hand, is a member of the Japonic language family. Grammatically speaking, it is totally different. For instance, there are no tenses, plural, cases and articles in Chinese languages. Japanese does have a past tense, continuous tense but not a future tense. The structure of the sentences is totally different, too. If you want to say “I do not want to go there”, literally you say “I-not-want-go-there” in Cantonese. In Japanese, it will be “I-there-to-go-want-not”. In this case, you would only know if the person meant positive or negative at the very end of the sentence. These differences were very confusing for me. Nonetheless, over the years I got used to it.
On the other hand, there are also things that I found easy. From 600 AD on, Japan had been importing Chinese culture, not limited to vocabularies and the writing system, but also philosophical and social ideas, literature, crafts, architecture and more. Combined with the vernacular culture it developed into its distinct stream of culture over the next millennium. Having said that, a lot of words are mutual in the Chinese and Japanese language. Even the writing in Kanji (Chinese characters) is the same. People from
Hong Kong or other Chinese language origins can somehow guess the meaning to a certain extent by reading (but not by listening). Moreover, a lot of modern words in Japanese are direct vocal adaptations of English words. When I cannot think of a word, I try to pronounce either the Chinese or the English word I know in the Japanese way, a few times it works, but more often it gets everybody confused. My Japanese friends sometimes tell me that the wording I use is “Sophisticated” and “Difficult”. Apparently, quite a few
everyday Chinese words when used in Japanese are considered literary or sometimes archaic.
So I could somehow speak the language before I went on the exchange, but the longer I stay in Japan, the more I find myself not knowing the essence of the language. The truly distinctive feature in the Japanese language lies in its sociolinguistics. Japanese is a language that not only has the polite form in every expression but even has several different levels of politeness. The same sentence you speak will be different depending on whether you are talking to your friend, your elder schoolmates, your teacher/
your boss or your client in a business situation. It is not only the way you say it but the verb, the structure of the sentence will be different that even Japanese themselves get it wrong all the time. However, what I really think is difficult is the subtle nuances in these choices of politeness combined with the tone of the speaker will give clues to distance or the relationship between the speaker and the target. A student can be using the most casual form to adress his/her classmate but can show that they are not close enough so that the speaker is refraining from stepping into the personal comfort zone of the target, Yet you hear sons talk to their parents and wives talk to husband in the polite form, which shows that they have a close relationship. In Japanese, there are many ways to call oneself. For an adult male, there are four common ways to address yourselves, depending on the situation, the target, and how you want to be thought of. There are no exact rules on when to use what, I call myself "Boku" and my classmate will call himself "Ore" in a
casual situation. Both of us are correct but there is a slight difference in the self-image that we want the other to perceive. The Japanese people grow up with these subtle nuances, whereas a foreigner does not have a clue to start. Until I get these right, I am still an outsider of the Japanese language

Chui Chun SS 19