Culture Day!

Today is Culture Day in Japan. I asked many students what they would do for culture day and they answered with the hallmarks of Japanese culture, the modern division: “I’ll play golf,” one man said. “I’m going to see a movie,” said another. “I’ll do laundry.” What else? Shopping. Sleeping.

Me? I’ll mix it up. I’ll go to the gym and maybe to a museum. But first, I’ll write.

Going Native

“Who sounds most like a native speaker?” a student, Mayumi asks me.

She is asking about the Japanese teachers. And I think, ahhh, this is a question that I would not answer in the confines of The Kaisha school. I think also that perhaps I would not be answering this question at all if I were not me.

Why not?

See, students pay the same amount of money whether they study with a native speaker or with a Japanese teacher. If I wreck their confidence in the Japanese teachers, I will wreck their confidence in the school and the school might lose money. Guess what. I don't give a flying rat's ass about the money. But: If the school loses money, my manager and head teacher get stressed out and they take it out on everyone and my job gets that much harder. Do I answer and potentially make my life harder?

Also, if I appear to be bad mouthing another teacher, then I look, at the very least, disloyal. Disloyalty is somewhat frowned upon (not just in Japan, really, but everywhere). I am not loyal to The Kaisha in the way that the Japanese are loyal to their companies. Here, company loyalty goes far, far beyond reason. That's fine. But I'm not from here. I am not loyal to a company or to job. I am loyal, but I am loyal to myself. I am loyal, but I am loyal to the truth.

Because of my own personal (and probably somewhat delusional) ideas about loyalty and truth, I think the student deserves an honest answer. Well, she deserves as honest an answer as I can give anyway.

She notices my hesitancy and says that she has already asked another teacher, another native speaker/foreign teacher, the same question. He had replied with a very straightforward answer, naming names and saying things like, “She makes many mistakes when she speaks.”

It’s the truth. The teacher of whom they were speaking is a very high-level speaker. She recently had an astronomical score on a test designed to measure speaking, listening and reading abilities in English. She actually scored higher than many native speakers would. But it’s true, she makes many mistakes when she speaks. Why? She is not a native speaker.

I explained the difference between grammar and syntax. Grammar, I told Mayumi, are rules. Syntax are how we use the rules. A sentence can be perfectly grammatically correct, but a native speaker would never say it. That kind of thing falls under the category of syntax. I said that Japanese teachers are very good at grammar. They know the rules and they use them to the best of their abilities. Native speakers may know the grammar, but they know the syntax. They know it in their souls from a lifetime spent speaking the language. That is the difference. You can be a really good teacher without knowing the syntax. But are you a native speaker of English? No. You can be a really good native speaker of English and be a really bad teacher, of course. But I try to learn as much from a bad teacher as from a good one.

Anyway, Mayumi's question was about who, of the Japanese teachers, sound like native English speakers. I outlined the hierarchy as I see it and according to her criteria. And I stressed the qualification to that hierarchy: Language is more than grammar. Sounding like a native speaker is more than knowing the rules of grammar, I explained. I did not say that some of the highest-ranking teachers on my list actually know the least amount of grammar. Some of the lowest-ranking teachers on my list know grammar to the extent that they are honorary members of the English grammar police. Do they sound like native speakers? One of them does. One of them doesn't. (The one that does, does because of reasons other than grammar knowledge.)

Later, as I thought about the conversation, I also thought: Native speakers break the rules all the time and get away with it. We get a pass for our mistakes for many reasons. For example, one of the Japanese teachers spent his teenage years in another country. His behaviors and body language, his timing when he speaks, his intonation, they are all indicative of a native speaker of English. (One of the new teachers, after meeting him, asked me, “Is he from Japan?” It is not the first time I’ve heard that question.) Does the Japanese teacher make mistakes when he speaks? Yes, he does. Does he get a pass? Yes, he does. Why? Because all the other cues point to his being a native speaker of English. If he makes typical grammatical mistakes that Japanese students make, half the time I don’t even hear them because the evidence is overwhelmingly biased in favor of his not having made them in the first place.

Language is more than grammar. Language is also behavior. It's also timing. It's also pronunciation and intonation. It's also culture.

Culture Much?

Today as I said, is Culture Day in Japan.

Today I decided to celebrate Japanese culture. However, I opted out of modern Japanese culture (golfing, shopping, sleeping) and instead I opted for a bit more tradition. Today I went to Ueno, to the Tokyo National Museum, where the Hokusai exhibit recently opened. Hokusai, as you might know, is famous for his woodblock prints. The most famous in America are, I think, the run of depictions of Mt. Fuji typically called “Thirty-six views of Mt. Fuji.” Those were on display. (There are, incidentally, forty-nine (?) woodblock prints in the series called thirty-six views. I find that very humorous in a Douglas Adams-y kind of way--which is also very humorous in a Hokusai kind of way.) The famous forty-nine views of the thirty-six views were on display along with over four hundred and fifty other Hokusai prints. Put four hundred and fifty Hokusai prints in a national museum on Culture Day in a city with over twelve million inhabitants and you will draw some crazy number of people, let me tell you. Anyway, the prints were stunning. Hokusai had an incredible sensitivity to color and his sense of humor was a joy. His compositions were masterful.

Did I buy the book? Yeah, you bet I did.

After that, I rode the train home and had a sashimi dinner and a nap. And that was my Culture Day.

And you? How did you celebrate culture today?

S’bux and some TV? Congratulations! That is also Japanese culture.