Monday 18 June 2007

Pic of the day: This is how I feel when I start learning some new language. It usually fades pretty quickly though. Ironically, this is from a Japanese cartoon (anime), called Lovely Complex. I don't understand a word of it, but then again it is in the Kansai dialect (Osaka). Even if I understood Japanese, I might have had a hard time.

Ordered Japanese course

Actually I am pretty sure I did this on Sunday, but I did not write it down in my LiveJournal until today. Anywa, it is not like Flavus Data (Norwegian) has people working on Sundays. Or at least that's what I thought.

Generally this is a nice thing about Internet shopping, it is usually automated so you can shop on Sundays when you don't have to work. Then on Monday they find the goods, pack them and send them off.

Anyway, the course I ordered is in English, but with a Norwegian booklet and inspirational video about learning languages in general. It promises to teach 15 000 common Japanese words in a natural setting, using fun and effective methods. Actually even 1500 words would probably be quite useful, since every major language has a number of very commonly used words that show up in pretty much every little conversation.

I do know a few Japanese words already, but unfortunately these are not necessarily the most common ones. (Also I usually don't know how to write them, even in English transcription, but that is not very importan if I only plan to use it to watch anime and listen to Japanese pop.) The words I know are mostly about love and related topics like the wind and the sky. I may be able to ask a temple priestess to go out with me, but this is not a situation you are likely to find yourself in very often. Hopefully this course will give me a broader perspective. Although it may take many years to learn it all, if I ever do.

Hopefully this will fare better than the Spanish course from Linguaphone, which I bought before the coming of the Internet. I think it went to the garbage heap when I moved, along with other cassettes. In any event, the only part I remember from it is "una cervesa por favor". Then again this is enough for most Norwegians, they just don't buy expensive courses for it.

Actually I also have a Finnish course, again from Linguaphone and using cassettes. (I don't have a cassette player any longer.) I don't remember much of that either, but it did play another important role in my life. Finnish is not closely related to Norwegian, like English is. With English you can get away with translating word for word much of the time. People may laugh at an adult that speaks like this: "I has my cookie. You eated your." But they understand what you mean. Not so with Finnish, or Japanese. They are so utterly alien that you cannot simply translate word for word, because many of the words - the thoughts they represent - just don't exist in that other language. And not just words: Finnish has for instance no grammatical genders.

I was never able to converse in Finnish, but I learned things about the nature of language and human thought that I have benefited from ever since. Then again ... I assume young Finns learn English at school these days, but how many of them have the same "revelation"?

Unimaginable as it may seem, Japanese is actually even more alien than Finnish. When I was young, this would have been contested. At the time it was thought that the different "language families" were completely separate, apart from the occasional loan word or even grammatical invention. (Articles, such as "a" and "the", came from Egypt and made its way here through Greece and Rome, according to my Language History teacher. He was quite the language geek, so that was probably the truth at the time. I have no idea whether it is still considered true.)

Today we know a lot more about how closely related we all are. According to a preview of an article I have yet to read, we all descend from a bunch of people in East Africa around 75 000 years ago. An article in The Economist (of all places) a year or two ago claimed that "Adam", our last common male ancestor, may have lived as recently as 65-60 000 years ago. A comparison of languages now seems to imply that a common language lie behind all those spoken today. This makes sense, because the first glimmer of human intellect as we know it arises around the same time. It seems unlikely that they all invented language separately. It may even have been the invention of language that made us human in the modern sense. If so, why should I not take a keen interest in them? After all, in a manner of speaking I still try to become human. It is just that I have upped my standards of what that means.