Essential Japanese Vocabulary. Akira Miura

      Foreword

      As most adult learners can attest, classroom study is by itself rarely enough to gain true proficiency in a second language. Time spent outside the classroom using the language in the real world is crucial to the process of trial and error that allows one gradually, sometimes unconsciously, to adjust one’s knowledge of the language to match more and more closely the knowledge of native speakers. The valuable feedback one gets in this process of trial and error can come at the cost of some pain, but pain that can be relieved with laughter. This is illustrated by the experience of an American having lived a short time in Japan who, unable to bear any longer the constant staring he was subjected to in public, burst out on a crowded train, “Jirojiro miru na. Watashi datte ninjin da yo,” intending to say, “Stop staring! I’m a human too,” but in the process mixing up ningen “human” with ninjin “carrot.”

      Japanese language teachers are often asked what it is about Japanese that poses the greatest difficulty for native English speakers. Various characteristics of Japanese are typically given in answer to this question. Its grammar is, at least at first glance, quite different from English, putting verbs last in a sentence rather than immediately after the subject, conjugating verbs into long, sometimes complex forms, and marking nouns with particles that distinguish subtly different shades of meaning. Its writing system is a tedious one, requiring long years of schooling even for native speakers to master. And it is a language sensitive to fine nuances of interpersonal relationships that do not always match the social intuitions of native English speakers.

      One hears less often, though, about the challenge posed by vocabulary—that is, just plain words—in learning Japanese. We tend to think of words as atomic units that express inherently simple ideas and to assume that all one needs to do is memorize these, leaving the difficult work of arranging them into meaningful sentences to the rules of grammar. But experience shows that, in getting one’s meaning across in a second language, insufficient grasp of vocabulary is actually a greater obstacle than insufficient control of grammar. Even if the grammar—the word order, for example—isn’t perfect, one’s meaning can usually be understood if key vocabulary items are recognizable but not the other way around. Research in second-language acquisition shows that control of vocabulary is in fact a fairly reliable predictor of one’s overall level of proficiency in a language: the more words one knows, the more likely one is to be proficient in other areas of the language, including grammar. These results bear out the observation made by Akira Miura in his preface to this volume that, from his experience, errors of vocabulary are as prevalent among the overall errors made by English speakers learning Japanese as are those of grammar.

      What is it about vocabulary that poses such a challenge? Apart from issues of pronunciation that led our American friend astray in the story related earlier, at least two basic reasons can be given. The first is the tendency to assume incorrectly that words in a second language cover the same range of meanings as corresponding words in our native language. If we think of meaning as a kind of space that words divide up into distinct chunks, different languages tend to divide up this space in different ways. To take liquid H₂O as an example, the English word “water” occupies a meaning space that in Japanese is divided in two, depending on the temperature of the water, as expressed by the distinct words mizu “cold water” and yu “hot water.” It is therefore an oxymoron in Japanese to say *atsui mizu “hot mizu.” Similarly, Japanese has two verbs covering the meaning space of English help, one (tetsudau) referring to help given by doing the same thing as the person helped, the other (tasukeru) referring to help given by doing something different from the person helped. Helping someone wash dishes, for example, would be expressed by tetsudau, but helping a person in financial distress by lending him money would call for tasukeru. This explains