Japanese LyricsClick for Romaji
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English TranslationHover Over Green Areas for Translation Notes
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Sunday, March 23, 2014
Frozen 「Ari no Mama De」: When "You Let it Go" You Can Be "As You Are"
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Trigun Translation Trip-up
As is usual practice on this blog, sentences marked with an asterisk (*) are incorrect for the language in which they are typed.
For some reason when I was younger I really liked the show Trigun. I thought it was fascinating and compelling, so I decided to watch it again to see if it still held up. As with many things some of the magic fades once you're older, but I did come across a surprisingly basic translation mistake that illustrates some interesting points of Japanese grammar. It comes at the end of episode 3. A group of bandits is robbing a bank while the entire town looks on in fear. After a show of courage on the part of certain characters, everyone in town pulls out a gun and stands up to the bandits. Unwilling to admit defeat, the bandit leader plays his trump card by revealing that his gun's barrel splits into many smaller barrels that point in many directions. Oh, snap—now he can mow down everyone in front of him, which is basically the entire town. Luckily, Frank Marlin, the main minor character of this episode, sneaks up behind the leader and delivers a witty one-liner that sends the bandits packing. Let's see what he says.
What?! "I can't shoot you in the back."?! Sure, just stroll up behind the bandit, make him think he's dead meat, then tell him he's safe and can go ahead and slaughter the townsfolk because you have qualms with shooting people from behind. That'll send him running for sure. Someone really should have caught that. The dub version renders this line as "Shootin' from behind's just not my style.", which sounds niftier and removes the-finger-pointed-at-head-not-at-back problem but still makes no sense in context. Luckily this moment in the show passes so quickly that the mistake is not fatal. Still, how did this happen?
The tranlator also might not have understood that the English definition provided is not necessarily correct for every sense or usage of the English word. Like many other Japanese position/direction words, ushiro typically refers to a particular part of the space around the object but can also refer to a part of the object itself. Ushiro can mean the space behind an object or the back part/side of the object. Although because of that property it can refer to the body part known in English as the back, it typically doesn't, and and there's a word that refers exclusively to the back as a body part rather than a position metaphor (背中 [senaka]). Here are the example sentences in my electronic dictionary (広辞苑 [koujien] 2008)that were given for the senaka meaning.
The "show your back to the enemy" example is open to a back-side-of-your-body interpretation, so it's not very convincing in my mind. The pillar example comes from 枕草子(Makura no soushi, a.k.a. The Pillow Book), which was written by a court lady of the Empress Teishi in the late 10th and early 11th century. According to this, the rest of the sentence says that the subject was sitting, so in that example ushiro seems indisputably to mean back as in the body part. Given the context there could be some sort of politeness thing going on where ushiro is used as a more polite way of referring to the person's back (just as bottom in English is a more polite way of referring to someone's butt), but in any case, suffice it to say that it is minimally plausible that ushiro in our Trigun clip meant back in the body-part sense. That is, as long as you don't pay attention to the particles.
For example, 探す (sagasu), which means search or look for, can take the location for the direct object (just as English does in "search the trunk") or the lost item (which English does with a certain verb but not with search: "I seek my phone" vs. "search for my phone"). What particles do you use when you use both the location and the lost item in the sentence ("search the trunk for my phone")? I don't know—I've never encountered it and my dictionaries' examples don't resolve the question. The way I would work around that problem is to make the the item the topic and the trunk the direct object and then cross my fingers.
Another example is the word 手伝う (tetsudau), which means help. In English the person you help is the direct object, and you use the preposition with to indicate the thing you're helping with. In Japanese the thing you help out with is the direct object, while the person you help is sometimes the indirect object but typically something else altogether.
So which particles does utsu use? In translating "ushiro niwa utenee na" as "I can't shoot you in the back", the translator must have thought that Japanese followed English usage (shoot [person/animal/plant] in the [bodypart]) and believed that in that particular sentence the "you" was dropped because it was understood from context while the body part that would be shot was specified. In fact, Japanese does follow English usage somewhat, but instead of treating life-forms differently from objects ("shot someone in the foot" vs. "shot the doorknob" vs. *"shot the door in the knob") Japanese treats them all the same. The thing you shoot is the direct object, and if it's a life-form's bodypart you mark it possessive in a pattern similar to sentence 4 in the tetsudau chart. When the particle ni is used with utsu it marks the direction of the shooting. To test this understanding, which I gleaned from a combination of English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, I searched Japanese google on a topic that was sure to have lots of results—zombies! I tried various Japanese renditions of "shoot the zombie in the head" with quotation marks to search the exact phrase. *"頭にゾンビを撃つ" (*atama ni zonbi wo utsu) and *"ゾンビを頭に撃つ" (*zonbi wo atama ni utsu) both had no results, but "ゾンビの頭を撃つ" (zonbi no atama wo utsu) did have some results. Other searches, such as "に撃つ" and ”人に撃つ” (hito ni utsu) confirm that ni marks a direction when used with utsu. This table sums up how particles work with utsu.
On that note I'll leave you with this video.
For some reason when I was younger I really liked the show Trigun. I thought it was fascinating and compelling, so I decided to watch it again to see if it still held up. As with many things some of the magic fades once you're older, but I did come across a surprisingly basic translation mistake that illustrates some interesting points of Japanese grammar. It comes at the end of episode 3. A group of bandits is robbing a bank while the entire town looks on in fear. After a show of courage on the part of certain characters, everyone in town pulls out a gun and stands up to the bandits. Unwilling to admit defeat, the bandit leader plays his trump card by revealing that his gun's barrel splits into many smaller barrels that point in many directions. Oh, snap—now he can mow down everyone in front of him, which is basically the entire town. Luckily, Frank Marlin, the main minor character of this episode, sneaks up behind the leader and delivers a witty one-liner that sends the bandits packing. Let's see what he says.
DialogueClick for Romaji
Bad Guy: てめえら、勝ったと思ってるだろう。甘いんだよ。切り札は最後まで取っておくもんだなあ。
Frank Marlon：チェックメートだ。後ろには撃てねえなあ |
Omitted Words and Context
Something that often makes Japanese difficult to figure out is that it favors omitting things from the sentence that can be understood from context. Japanese is especially fond of dropping the verb's arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object), particularly the subject. In fact, it this is often a reason that non-native speakers' Japanese sounds foreign and unnatural: We use the pronouns we learned when we first started studying Japanese way too often. You see, even if you don't specify the arguments of the verb in the sentence, the arguments are always there as "null (i.e. nonvocalized but understood) pronouns". For more about this idea and how it affects Japanese grammar and sentence interpretation, see Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You. The basic idea, though, is that even when a verb/sentence does not appear to have a subject (or direct object etc.), it still does and the subject does not have to be the same as the previous verb/sentence's subject. You are supposed to determine the subject from the context. Sometimes this gets really hard because you aren't sure if it's I or we or he or whatever. Most student's assume that if the subject is dropped it's I, but it can just as easily be you or anything else. This is problem number one: the translator appears to have assumed that the subject of うてねえ(utenee) was I (the speaker, Frank Marlon) rather than you (the bandit).Words Have Multiple Meanings
Problem number 2 is that the translator might not have understood that the word 後ろ(ushiro) has multiple English meanings. Ushiro is often glossed as meaning back because it is the opposite of 前(mae), front/forward. However, the opposite of front/forward can just as easily be considered to be behind. If the translator had considered the definition "behind", maybe would not have decided that Frank Marlon was talking about shooting the bandit in the back. Hopefully, though, he would not have made the mistake of thinking that Marlon was talking about shooting the bandit in the behind, which brings me to my next point.The tranlator also might not have understood that the English definition provided is not necessarily correct for every sense or usage of the English word. Like many other Japanese position/direction words, ushiro typically refers to a particular part of the space around the object but can also refer to a part of the object itself. Ushiro can mean the space behind an object or the back part/side of the object. Although because of that property it can refer to the body part known in English as the back, it typically doesn't, and and there's a word that refers exclusively to the back as a body part rather than a position metaphor (背中 [senaka]). Here are the example sentences in my electronic dictionary (広辞苑 [koujien] 2008)that were given for the senaka meaning.
| Japanese | English Translation (Mine) |
| 敵に後ろをみせる teki ni ushiro wo miseru | [to] show your back to the enemy |
| ひさしの柱に後ろをあてて hisashi no hashira ni ushiro wo atete | [with his] back against the eave's pillar |
Particle Mistakes
Problem number 3 is that the translator must not have known what particles (sort of like prepositions) the verb utsu (shoot) uses. That problem is not always the result of ignorance of the Japanese language: Dictionaries often do not provide the information clearly, and because Japanese favors dropping words that can be understood from context, you can hear and read a word dozens of times without ever encountering all the proper particles. Some Japanese verbs take totally different particles from what you would assume based on English.For example, 探す (sagasu), which means search or look for, can take the location for the direct object (just as English does in "search the trunk") or the lost item (which English does with a certain verb but not with search: "I seek my phone" vs. "search for my phone"). What particles do you use when you use both the location and the lost item in the sentence ("search the trunk for my phone")? I don't know—I've never encountered it and my dictionaries' examples don't resolve the question. The way I would work around that problem is to make the the item the topic and the trunk the direct object and then cross my fingers.
Another example is the word 手伝う (tetsudau), which means help. In English the person you help is the direct object, and you use the preposition with to indicate the thing you're helping with. In Japanese the thing you help out with is the direct object, while the person you help is sometimes the indirect object but typically something else altogether.
| Japanese Examples (Sentences I made up) | English Translations (mine) |
| 1. 妹を手伝った。 imouto wo tetsudatta. | I helped my sister. |
| 2. 妹の手伝いをした。(possibly preferred over 1) imouto no tetsudai wo shita. | I helped my sister. |
| 3. 妹に宿題を手伝った。(uncommon I think) imouto ni shukudai wo tetsudatta. | I helped my sister with her homework. |
| 4. 妹の宿題を手伝った。(possibly preferred over 3) imouto no shukudai wo tetsudatta. | I helped my sister with her homework. |
| 5. 妹が宿題をするのを手伝った。 imouto ga shukudai wo suru no wo tetsudatta. | I helped my sister do her homework. |
| Japanese Examples (Sentences I made up) | English Translations (mine) |
| ゾンビを撃った。 zonbi wo utta. | [subject] shot the zombie. |
| 2. ゾンビに撃った。 zonbi ni utta. | [subject] shot at the zombie. |
| 3.ゾンビの頭を撃った。 zonbi no atama wo utta. | I shot the zombie's head. I shot the zombie in the head. |
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Naruto and the "Believe it!" Controversy
As a self-styled grammar ninja, I think it's about time I post about both grammar and ninjas. Okay, you caught me—it's only tangentially about ninjas and mostly about grammar. I'm going to use the power of grammar (it's a lot like the heart of the cards) to clear up an age-old controversy among anime fans and, with any luck, illustrate some deficiencies in the state of Japanese language instruction. Anime can be exceptionally educational, even when it's not meant to be.
It's fairly common in anime for characters to be given idiosyncratic speech (sometimes just an overused word but other times a general pattern or style of speech) to create an impression of uniqueness and to facilitate characterization. Naruto, the protagonist/main character of the Naruto shows, was given a catch phrase of sorts (it's much more in the vane of an overused word/phrase): He would very often end his sentences with or say「だってばよ」(da tteba yo).
The phrase was evidently not well understood among the fansub community (I also did not understand it when I first encountered it) and remains a mystery to most anime fans and fansubbers today, as evidenced by the discussions here, here, and here. Many if not all fansubs avoided the problem by simply tacking「だってばよ」onto the English translation of Naruto's lines whenever it occured, rendering it "dattebayo". Now, that kind of thing is not unusual: Japanese titles and forms of address (chan, san, sama, dono, O-nii-chan etc.) are often left untranslated (Funimation's dub of Ouran High School Host Club went so far as to make them part of the English dialogue). Leaving bits of Japanese in the subtitles/translation is in many ways a lazy translation decision (possibly even a poor or incorrect one), but it has been heartily embraced among many anime fans. I think it's because it gives a sense of connection to and understanding of Japanese culture and because the knowledge can be reincorporated into various geek subcultures. Regardless, "dattebayo" took on cult status among fans, and a fansubbing group even adopted the phrase as its name ([infamous?] Dattebayo Fansubs).
When the dubbed version of Naruto was released in America, all hell broke loose. In the course of its English adaptation, Viz Media chose to translate "dattebayo" as "Believe it!". A nerd rage fest erupted among fans, who complained that Viz was making the show too kiddy and lame, and that "Believe it!" was stupid, annoying, and otherwise lame. Fans also adamantly insisted that "Believe it!" is not what "dattebayo" means (Don't ask me where their confidence came from). You can query the internet to get a taste of the various reactions. "Believe it!" became a became a standard/default criticism of the show. It was kind of a big deal—it eventually became a meme. I bet that even now, years later, it would not be very difficult to start a flame war over it.
My problem with the verbal tic explanation is that to me a verbal tic is something that is involuntary or compulsive, not merely something that someone says more than others. However, Tv Tropes uses verbal tic as terminology for idiosyncratic speech phenomena and lists dattebayo" as an example. Since you can't argue with a tautological definition and in order to avoid sophistry, I'll just say that "dattebayo" is just as voluntary as the rest of Naruto's speech and leave it at that. The grammar discussion will dispel the other myths.
"Dattebayo" is not one word but three (da, tteba, and yo), though I'll analyze it by morpheme. The morphemes are da, tte, ba, and yo.
Da:Da is the "informal"/"plain" form of "desu", which means "be" (Japanese has slightly different verb forms for different levels of formality/politeness). Japanese verbs don't exhibit person (1st, 2nd, 3rd person), so they don't change no matter what the subject is. Japanese also generally doesn't mark the future tense, so "present tense" verbs can also be future tense. Thus da can mean is, are, am, and "will be".
Tte:Tte is a contraction that has undergone at least partial grammaticalization. Tte is probably a contraction of to and some form of iu (say/speak/tell/call), though there are some other possibilities. For our purposes, the Japanese word to is translated as "that" or changes the translation of iuu. It's not clear whether tte is a contraction of "to iuu" or "to itte" or "to ie", but it clearly displays special grammatical properties of each of them and of its own: For instance, tte can be used as a replacement for to in many contexts, it can end a sentence, it can be used in front of a noun without no or any verbal connector, it can be used with no as if it were a verb, and it can mark the topic of the sentence. Because of those wacky properties, tte has many correct "literal" translations, but in "dattebayo" it only means say/tell. Here are some example sentences from「どんなときどう使う日本語表現文型辞曲」(When and How to Use It: A Dictionary of Japanese Expressions and Sentence Patterns)to illustrate some of those grammatically special usages of tte. As usual, the English translations are mine.
This playlist contains several clips with various uses of tte. If you'd like to read the dialogue as well as listen click the Youtube icon in the player. That will take you to the playlist on Youtube, where the dialogue is transcribed in the description.
Ba:Ba is a bound morpheme (i.e. not a word in isolation) that means if and usually only attaches to a certain verb form (referred to as base 4 in some books). It's one of at least four ways to express if. Normally iu in ba form would be "ieba", which is one of the reasons it's possible that tte is a contraction of "to ie". Since tte can be used interchangeably with to, "tteba" it could also be a contraction of "to ieba" (say "to ieba" several times quickly and without articulating the vowels very clearly) or of "tte ieba".
From a non-native speaker's pesrpective, the difference in sound and form between "tteba" and "to ieba" is fairly large and is probably why the fansub community didn't widely recognize it (though of course a deficiency in Japanese instruction played a large part). The fact that tte is not generally classified as a verb further obscures the equivalence.
Yo: When used at the end of a sentence yo conveys emphasis and/or strong emotion. Although it is often explained as being equivalent to an exclamation point, that is not the full story. In spoken English, the emphasis yo conveys can be reflected in tone of voice and/or in word emphasis patterns. In written English it can be translated with any device that conveys stronger tone or different word emphasis (an exclamation point, italics, bold, capital letters, or nothing). Sometimes yo is only about emphasis and does not involve particularly strong emotion.
In the first episode of 絶縁のテンペスト (Zetsuen no Tempesuto) (English title: Blast of Tempest), Yoshino, one of the protagonists, is reading or translating into English out loud as part of class. While he does a gaggle of girls gossips in hushed voices about him. As he reaches the end of a section they wonder whether he has a girlfriend. Finishing the section he coolly replies out loud, as if he were still reading for class, "iru yo." (I do.).
When Naruto says "dattebayo", however, yo conveys strong emotion and basically means exclamation point.
Background
Naruto has been one of the most popular and successful anime series in America and presumably also in Japan. According to wikipedia, the original show ran for 220 episodes excluding movies and OVAs (original video animations [anime jargon]). After Naruto ended, a sequel series called Naruto: Shippuuden went on the air. To date that show has broadcast 320 episodes (see wikipedia).It's fairly common in anime for characters to be given idiosyncratic speech (sometimes just an overused word but other times a general pattern or style of speech) to create an impression of uniqueness and to facilitate characterization. Naruto, the protagonist/main character of the Naruto shows, was given a catch phrase of sorts (it's much more in the vane of an overused word/phrase): He would very often end his sentences with or say「だってばよ」(da tteba yo).
The phrase was evidently not well understood among the fansub community (I also did not understand it when I first encountered it) and remains a mystery to most anime fans and fansubbers today, as evidenced by the discussions here, here, and here. Many if not all fansubs avoided the problem by simply tacking「だってばよ」onto the English translation of Naruto's lines whenever it occured, rendering it "dattebayo". Now, that kind of thing is not unusual: Japanese titles and forms of address (chan, san, sama, dono, O-nii-chan etc.) are often left untranslated (Funimation's dub of Ouran High School Host Club went so far as to make them part of the English dialogue). Leaving bits of Japanese in the subtitles/translation is in many ways a lazy translation decision (possibly even a poor or incorrect one), but it has been heartily embraced among many anime fans. I think it's because it gives a sense of connection to and understanding of Japanese culture and because the knowledge can be reincorporated into various geek subcultures. Regardless, "dattebayo" took on cult status among fans, and a fansubbing group even adopted the phrase as its name ([infamous?] Dattebayo Fansubs).
 |
| I don't know who to credit for this image, but it isn't me—believe it! |
Dattebayo Myths
Apparently a mythos has developed among fans about what "dattebayo" means/is. Much of it is incorrect. Here are the main contentions, which I gleaned from the three links above because I found them pretty representative and reminiscent of what I've seen over the years.- "Dattebayo" is a verbal tic
- "Dattebayo" doesn't mean anything
- "Dattebayo" doesn't have a literal meaning or doesn't have a literal English translation
- "Dattebayo" is one word/unit
- "Dattebayo" is a made up word/unit
- "Dattebayo" is related to the word "datte" meaning "but"
- "Dattebayo" doesn't not mean "Believe it!" because "Believe it!" is used to fill up time and match mouth movements
My problem with the verbal tic explanation is that to me a verbal tic is something that is involuntary or compulsive, not merely something that someone says more than others. However, Tv Tropes uses verbal tic as terminology for idiosyncratic speech phenomena and lists dattebayo" as an example. Since you can't argue with a tautological definition and in order to avoid sophistry, I'll just say that "dattebayo" is just as voluntary as the rest of Naruto's speech and leave it at that. The grammar discussion will dispel the other myths.
Grammar Time
It's no wonder fansubbers did not understand "dattebayo"—it's full of wacky grammar stuff that isn't explained well in classes or books. This analysis is based on my observations from watching a LOT of shows. None of the books I have right now support it (or refute it), so if you find any sources let me know. Interestingly, the current entry 8 for "dattebayo" in Urban Dictionary breaks "dattebayo" up into all the right parts, but many of the details beyond that are wrong."Dattebayo" is not one word but three (da, tteba, and yo), though I'll analyze it by morpheme. The morphemes are da, tte, ba, and yo.
Da:Da is the "informal"/"plain" form of "desu", which means "be" (Japanese has slightly different verb forms for different levels of formality/politeness). Japanese verbs don't exhibit person (1st, 2nd, 3rd person), so they don't change no matter what the subject is. Japanese also generally doesn't mark the future tense, so "present tense" verbs can also be future tense. Thus da can mean is, are, am, and "will be".
Tte:Tte is a contraction that has undergone at least partial grammaticalization. Tte is probably a contraction of to and some form of iu (say/speak/tell/call), though there are some other possibilities. For our purposes, the Japanese word to is translated as "that" or changes the translation of iuu. It's not clear whether tte is a contraction of "to iuu" or "to itte" or "to ie", but it clearly displays special grammatical properties of each of them and of its own: For instance, tte can be used as a replacement for to in many contexts, it can end a sentence, it can be used in front of a noun without no or any verbal connector, it can be used with no as if it were a verb, and it can mark the topic of the sentence. Because of those wacky properties, tte has many correct "literal" translations, but in "dattebayo" it only means say/tell. Here are some example sentences from「どんなときどう使う日本語表現文型辞曲」(When and How to Use It: A Dictionary of Japanese Expressions and Sentence Patterns)to illustrate some of those grammatically special usages of tte. As usual, the English translations are mine.
| Sentence with tte | Sentence without tte |
| 後藤さんは明日来られないって。 Gotou-san wa asu korarenai tte. "I hear he can't come tomorrow." "Mr. Gotou said he can't come tomorrow." |
後藤さんは明日来られないと聞いた。 (Gotou-san wa asu korarenai to kiita.) "I heard Mr. Gotou can't come tomorrow." 後藤さんは明日来られないと言った。 (Gotou-san wa asu korarenai to itta.) "Mr. Gotou said he can't come tomorrow." |
| A:PCって何ですか。 A:PC tte nan desu ka. A:"What's a 'PC'?" A:"What do you mean by 'PC'?" B:パソコンのことですよ。 B: pasokon no koto desu. B: "It means personal computer." |
A:PCとは何ですか。 PC towa nan desu ka. A:"What's a 'PC'?" A:"What do you mean by 'PC'?" |
| 子どもを持つのって、大変ですか。 kodomo wo motsu no tte, taihen desu ka. "Is having children hard?" |
子どもを持つというのは大変ですか。 kodomo wo motsu to iu no wa taihen desu ka. "Is having children hard?" |
| これは村上春樹って作家が書いた「海辺のカフカ」っていう小説です。 kore wa murakami haruki tte sakka ga kaita "umibe no kafuka" tte iu shousetsu desu. "This is a novel called Kafka on the Shore, which an author called Haruki Murakami wrote." |
これは村上春樹という作家が書いた「海辺のカフカ」という小説です。 kore wa murakami haruki to iu sakka ga kaita "umibe no kafuka" to iu shousetsu desu. "This is a novel called Kafka on the Shore, which an author called Haruki Murakami wrote." |
Ba:Ba is a bound morpheme (i.e. not a word in isolation) that means if and usually only attaches to a certain verb form (referred to as base 4 in some books). It's one of at least four ways to express if. Normally iu in ba form would be "ieba", which is one of the reasons it's possible that tte is a contraction of "to ie". Since tte can be used interchangeably with to, "tteba" it could also be a contraction of "to ieba" (say "to ieba" several times quickly and without articulating the vowels very clearly) or of "tte ieba".
From a non-native speaker's pesrpective, the difference in sound and form between "tteba" and "to ieba" is fairly large and is probably why the fansub community didn't widely recognize it (though of course a deficiency in Japanese instruction played a large part). The fact that tte is not generally classified as a verb further obscures the equivalence.
DialogueClick for Romaji
Palm:最近気付くと包丁（を）持って、それをじっと見詰めて落ち着く自分がいるなって思ってて。これ、ほぼ限界に近いってことだから、手遅れになる前の今なら逃げても追っかけてまで殺そうと思わないと思うの。
Killua:これさえなけりゃ。 Bisky:本当に美味しい御飯なんだけどねえ。 Gon:逃げないってば。何度も言ってるでしょう |
DialogueClick for Romaji
Earth: なんだ、あれは。
Elle:一体なんですの。 Sunbeam:馬鹿か。 Umagon:メロメ。 Kyanchome:やっぱり。 Folgore:あ、あいつだ。 Kyanchome and Folgore:キース！ Ellie:なに？あの方と知り合いなのか。 Sauza:来寄るな。 Sunbeam:短い付き合いだった。 Kyanchome:敵だよ。 Folgore: 滅茶苦茶強いんだってば。 Ellie:入るぞ。 Earth:よい。 Kyanchome:無視しないでよ。 |
Yo: When used at the end of a sentence yo conveys emphasis and/or strong emotion. Although it is often explained as being equivalent to an exclamation point, that is not the full story. In spoken English, the emphasis yo conveys can be reflected in tone of voice and/or in word emphasis patterns. In written English it can be translated with any device that conveys stronger tone or different word emphasis (an exclamation point, italics, bold, capital letters, or nothing). Sometimes yo is only about emphasis and does not involve particularly strong emotion.
In the first episode of 絶縁のテンペスト (Zetsuen no Tempesuto) (English title: Blast of Tempest), Yoshino, one of the protagonists, is reading or translating into English out loud as part of class. While he does a gaggle of girls gossips in hushed voices about him. As he reaches the end of a section they wonder whether he has a girlfriend. Finishing the section he coolly replies out loud, as if he were still reading for class, "iru yo." (I do.).
DialogueClick for Romaji
Girl Gaggle: 吉野って割りとよくねえ？
まあね。真広いなけりゃただの人だし。 可愛いんだし。とりあえず言っとけば？ でも、さ、彼女いるって噂、聞いたんだけど。 Yoshino: いるよ。 |
When Naruto says "dattebayo", however, yo conveys strong emotion and basically means exclamation point.
"Dattebayo"
Putting all that together we can see that "dattebayo" does have a meaning and a literal translation: "If I say it is!". Because Japanese operates according to different rules for what constitutes a fragment and when the rest of the idea is implied, and because tense works differently, we can modify that meaning to "If I say/tell you it is/will be, [then it is/will be]". Now, since English doesn't follow the same fragment/implication rules as Japanese, Viz could not have used the literal translation to make a quality dub, so it had to come up with a more idiomatic English equivalent. The less-literal, more-idiomatic translation options include "Count on it!", "Bet on it!", "I'm telling you ([x])", "I said so, didn't I?", and "Because I said so."—depending on context. Turns out "Believe it!" was a brilliant translation, not only because it could be used to cover extra lip movements but also because it matches the Japanese meaning naturally in a large number of contexts. だってばよ！Update
When I first wrote this I mentioned that there were other options besides the possible contractions of to and iu. Since then I have thought of some major possibilities that deserve mention. One is a contraction of to and te (The same て in the て form). Another would be that tte is a phonetic change of a probably different te (the type that appears in "te na wake de" which has the same meaning as "to iu wake de"). It's clear from older Japanese forms and from words and expressions that survived into modern Japanese (though they might be considered archaic) that ba can attach to adverbs/adverbial phrases. That makes these other possibilities reasonable in the absence of more information.Friday, June 14, 2013
Ask a Grammar Ninja
I haven't been very active with this blog. I suppose because I lost motivation. I have a bunch of half-done draft posts I might finish, but things might be much more fun and engaging if some of what I write is motivated purely by people who visit the blog (hopefully there will be such people) rather than just what's in my head at the time. Let's try something different.
Ask me questions!
Ask me stuff about Japanese or grammar or any other general topic I post on. You can ask in a comment on this post or send me an email. I'll find a place for your question and my answer/thoughts somewhere on the blog, whether that's here, a new post, an update, or a comment. Even just a "How do you translate this?" or a "Why is it this and not that?" would be great. I'll tell you and I won't even have to kill you.Monday, January 9, 2012
The Secrets of Japanese: -てみる (-te miru)
To understand this installment of The Secrets of Japanese, you need to have learned the "te form" of Japanese verbs. I assume that you know how to recognize it, how to form it, and its basic meaning.Sentences marked with an asterisk (*) are incorrect.
My Japanese teacher in high school translated [verb]-てみる as "try to [verb]" and as "try x". However, she also gave example sentences that didn't fit well with attempting to do something, such as the following variations on the theme of eating sushi.
Unless the person in question has some sort of physical or mental problem with eating in general or with eating fish specifically, it does not make sense to say "Would you like to attempt to eat sushi". The context of the conversations in class, the textbook's stories, and our exercises never even hinted at such details. Instead of attributing the strangeness of the interpretation to the idiosyncrasies of a foreign language, it makes much more sense to assume that the interpretation is wrong and that the straightforward translation "do [verb] and see [what it's like]/[what happens]" is correct. In specific cases, such as those of food, or where the point is to experience the thing in question, the meaning of "do[verb] and see" is consistent with "Try [noun]" (as in "You should try ginger" or "You should try hot springs"). When one considers the expression -てみる in this light, it becomes clear that it can never mean "try to [verb]": "do [verb] and see" requires that you finish the action in question, while "try to [verb]" allows for the possibility that you might fail to complete it or even to start.
In the interest of allowing for credit to be given where it might be due, I have to say that I can't recall what my textbook said -てみる means (we were using the Ima! series, level 3, which I think was called Hai, Ima), but I distinctly remember that my whole class was confused. Fortunately for students, there are popularly sold reference books that do not confuse the pattern with "try to [verb]". Unfortunately, those books tend to give a correct definition that is not complete.
Rita L. Lampkin's Japanese Verbs & Essentials of Grammar (pg. 37) gives the "do and see" meaning and the "try doing" one, but not "try [noun]".
Another reference, an nifty book I picked up during my study abroad in Japan titled 「どんなときどう使う日本語表現文型辞曲」(When and How to Use It: A Dictionary of Japanese Expressions and Sentence Patterns),gives "try doing" as the shortcut translation of -てみる and gives the following English description of its meaning: Try something in order to find out more about it (pg. 199). When and How to Use It is written in Japanese with explanations of the expressions in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. It does not provide translations of its examples. The Japanese explanation of the expression translates to "Indicates doing something as a test in order to learn something/find something out."
Although When and How to Use It gives a variety of clear examples, not all of them can be translated according to the "try doing", or "try [verb]ing", pattern. What's going on in the English? Well, we can see from my earlier discussion that "try [noun]" is appropriate whenever the main concern is to experience the noun (to learn what that noun is like). Sometimes, though, the main point of trying something is to test out a certain action or approach as a way to accomplish a particular goal. It seems that that is the major nuance of "try [verb]ing". For instance, if you want to get the taste of some other food out of your mouth so you can appreciate your sushi, someone might tell you to try eating ginger—and though one could respond to the question "what should I use to cleanse my palate?" with "try ginger", one could not tell someone to taste ginger by saying "try eating ginger". Thus, despite the slight overlap in meaning, we can see that the general implications of "try eating ginger" and "try ginger" are different, but they are both consistent with "eat ginger and see"; it just depends on what you see.
Finally, just to play a bit of Devil's advocate, we should ask ourselves how we really know that -てみる means "try [noun]", "try [verb]ing", and "do [verb] and see". After all, if I'm going to question my teacher's interpretation, I should question my own. Furthermore, just because the Japanese expression sometimes matches up with certain uses of the English word try doesn't mean that it actually covers all the same nuances that the English word does. Grammatically, -てみる literally says "[verb] and (then) see", and although the expression lends itself to metaphorical seeing rather than literal seeing, the second examples from Japanese Verbs and When and How to Use It demonstrate that -てみる still retains the much of the meaning of its parts. The food examples I discussed at the beginning of the article and the first example from Japanese Verbs prove that it covers "try [noun]".
The idea that "try [verb]ing" is also covered is supported by Japanese Verbs example number 2 and When and How to Use It example 4. For a definitive example of -てみる in the sense of trying an action as a means to accomplish a goal, I think it'd be fun to consider the "real life" speech of an anime, specifically a scene from the delightfully provocative children's sci-fi show Dennou Coil.The premise of the show is that in the future there are glasses that connect your brain to a physical, three-dimensional virtual reality, which you view and interact with via the special glasses. With the glasses you can type on a keyboard of air, view web pages or email projected on the air in front of you, make phone calls, and even touch virtual pets. Those who do not use the glasses neither see nor are affected by the virtual reality.
In episode 19, the main character's little sister is attacked by a virus that separates her consciousness from her physical body and forces her to wander the virtual world. Left untreated, the girl will fall into a coma. The main character's unusually tech-savvy grandmother has whipped up a hack that will fix the girl's condition, but only if her physical body is within 3 meters of her mind. When the characters are discussing how they can get the girl's mind and body back in the same place, the grandmother says 「可能性は低いが、電話かけてみ」("kanousei wa hikui ga, denwa kakete mi")("The probability [of success] is low, but try calling her"). "Kakete mi", an informal way of giving a command, is equivalent to "kakete mite". The grandmother could not have been saying to try the phone to see what it's like (the characters have all used a telephone before): she can only be saying to test out the possibility of using the phone to reach the girl's mind and tell her where to go to reunite with her body.
Trying Something, or Trying to Do Something?
The difficulty of learning just what [verb]-てみる means is that many Japanese teachers do not fully unsderstand the word try or the difference between the things traditionally labeled the gerund (-ing) and the infinitive (to [verb]). It's clear to native speakers that "Try to do your homework" is completely different from "Try doing your homework", but for many non-native speakers, the difference is not clear since all they see is "try + -ing as a noun" and "try + infinitive as a noun". Similarly, subtleties in other languages' methods of expressing "try" might not be transparent to native English speakers. Since most books define the expression -てみる as try but don't specifically contrast it with "try to [verb]" (or even explain how to say "try to [verb]"), it can be difficult for native English speakers to determine which senses of try the expression covers. Another factor that makes -てみる difficult to interpret is that some books fail to explain its full range of meaning because they treat it as a set phrase to the exclusion of explaining the meaning of its parts. Sometimes -てみる does not mean try, but if the idea that -てみる is mostly analytically transparent (it means what its parts mean ["do something and see"]), not just an idiom for try, is never validated, then students miss or dismiss the idea and learn to use and interpret the expression only for situations that strictly match the English usages of try, whether they're the right senses of the -てみる or not.My Japanese teacher in high school translated [verb]-てみる as "try to [verb]" and as "try x". However, she also gave example sentences that didn't fit well with attempting to do something, such as the following variations on the theme of eating sushi.
| Incorrect Translation | Correct Alternatives |
| 寿司を食べてみて。 sushi wo tabete mite. *"Try to eat sushi" | "Eat sushi and see [what it is like]." "Try eating sushi." "Try sushi." |
| 寿司を食べてみたいですか。 sushi wo tabete mitai desu ka. *"Would you like/Do you want to try to eat sushi." | "Would you like to eat sushi and see [what it is like]?" "Would you like to try eating sushi?" "Would you like to try sushi?" |
Unless the person in question has some sort of physical or mental problem with eating in general or with eating fish specifically, it does not make sense to say "Would you like to attempt to eat sushi". The context of the conversations in class, the textbook's stories, and our exercises never even hinted at such details. Instead of attributing the strangeness of the interpretation to the idiosyncrasies of a foreign language, it makes much more sense to assume that the interpretation is wrong and that the straightforward translation "do [verb] and see [what it's like]/[what happens]" is correct. In specific cases, such as those of food, or where the point is to experience the thing in question, the meaning of "do[verb] and see" is consistent with "Try [noun]" (as in "You should try ginger" or "You should try hot springs"). When one considers the expression -てみる in this light, it becomes clear that it can never mean "try to [verb]": "do [verb] and see" requires that you finish the action in question, while "try to [verb]" allows for the possibility that you might fail to complete it or even to start.
In the interest of allowing for credit to be given where it might be due, I have to say that I can't recall what my textbook said -てみる means (we were using the Ima! series, level 3, which I think was called Hai, Ima), but I distinctly remember that my whole class was confused. Fortunately for students, there are popularly sold reference books that do not confuse the pattern with "try to [verb]". Unfortunately, those books tend to give a correct definition that is not complete.
Rita L. Lampkin's Japanese Verbs & Essentials of Grammar (pg. 37) gives the "do and see" meaning and the "try doing" one, but not "try [noun]".
| From Japanese Verbs |
| おいしいですから、食べてみて下さい。 Oishii desu kara, tabete mite kudasai. "It's delicious, so eat it and see." "It's delicious; try it." (my rendition to illustrate "try [noun]") |
| 怪しい音が聞こえたから、部屋に入ってみました。 Ayashii oto ga kikoetakara, heyani haitte mimashita. "I heard a suspicious noise, so I went into the room to see (check it out)" "I heard a suspicious noise, so I tried going into the room [to see what was up]"(my rendition |
Another reference, an nifty book I picked up during my study abroad in Japan titled 「どんなときどう使う日本語表現文型辞曲」(When and How to Use It: A Dictionary of Japanese Expressions and Sentence Patterns),gives "try doing" as the shortcut translation of -てみる and gives the following English description of its meaning: Try something in order to find out more about it (pg. 199). When and How to Use It is written in Japanese with explanations of the expressions in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. It does not provide translations of its examples. The Japanese explanation of the expression translates to "Indicates doing something as a test in order to learn something/find something out."
| Adapted From When and How to Use It (translations are my own) |
| この新しいボールペンを使ってみました。とても書きやすいです。 Kono atarashii BOURU PEN wo tsukatte mimashita. Totemo kaki-yasui desu. "I tried this new ball-point pen. It's very easy to write with." |
| 日光ですか。ぜひ一度行ってみたいと思っていたんです。 Nikkou desu ka. Zehi ichido itte mitai to omotteita n desu. "Nikkou?(a place) I was thinking I'd certainly like to see it [at least] once." ("...like to go there and see what it's like [to go there]") |
| ちょっとこのスカートをはいてみてもいいですか。 chotto kono SUKAATO wo haite mite mo ii desu ka. "May I try this skirt on for a bit?" |
| コンサートの切符がまだあるか聞いてみましたが、もうないそうです。 KONSAATO no kippu ga mada aru ka kiite mimashita ga mou nai sou desu. "I tried asking whether there were still tickets, but it seems there aren't any any more." |
Although When and How to Use It gives a variety of clear examples, not all of them can be translated according to the "try doing", or "try [verb]ing", pattern. What's going on in the English? Well, we can see from my earlier discussion that "try [noun]" is appropriate whenever the main concern is to experience the noun (to learn what that noun is like). Sometimes, though, the main point of trying something is to test out a certain action or approach as a way to accomplish a particular goal. It seems that that is the major nuance of "try [verb]ing". For instance, if you want to get the taste of some other food out of your mouth so you can appreciate your sushi, someone might tell you to try eating ginger—and though one could respond to the question "what should I use to cleanse my palate?" with "try ginger", one could not tell someone to taste ginger by saying "try eating ginger". Thus, despite the slight overlap in meaning, we can see that the general implications of "try eating ginger" and "try ginger" are different, but they are both consistent with "eat ginger and see"; it just depends on what you see.
Finally, just to play a bit of Devil's advocate, we should ask ourselves how we really know that -てみる means "try [noun]", "try [verb]ing", and "do [verb] and see". After all, if I'm going to question my teacher's interpretation, I should question my own. Furthermore, just because the Japanese expression sometimes matches up with certain uses of the English word try doesn't mean that it actually covers all the same nuances that the English word does. Grammatically, -てみる literally says "[verb] and (then) see", and although the expression lends itself to metaphorical seeing rather than literal seeing, the second examples from Japanese Verbs and When and How to Use It demonstrate that -てみる still retains the much of the meaning of its parts. The food examples I discussed at the beginning of the article and the first example from Japanese Verbs prove that it covers "try [noun]".
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| Dennou Coil's main character on her virtual phone. |
| Click here to see a clip of the episode. |
In episode 19, the main character's little sister is attacked by a virus that separates her consciousness from her physical body and forces her to wander the virtual world. Left untreated, the girl will fall into a coma. The main character's unusually tech-savvy grandmother has whipped up a hack that will fix the girl's condition, but only if her physical body is within 3 meters of her mind. When the characters are discussing how they can get the girl's mind and body back in the same place, the grandmother says 「可能性は低いが、電話かけてみ」("kanousei wa hikui ga, denwa kakete mi")("The probability [of success] is low, but try calling her"). "Kakete mi", an informal way of giving a command, is equivalent to "kakete mite". The grandmother could not have been saying to try the phone to see what it's like (the characters have all used a telephone before): she can only be saying to test out the possibility of using the phone to reach the girl's mind and tell her where to go to reunite with her body.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Why Japanese is Hard to Learn, or The Secrets of Japanese
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| This infographic comes from Voxy Blog. |
| Click to enlarge. |
It is not just prestige-seeking braggarts and students making excuses for poor grades that say Japanese is difficult: Even the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) recognize its difficulty. This declassified paper from the NSA concludes that for English speakers Japanese is relatively harder than Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, and Vietnamese among others. The FSI has developed a rough categorization of languages (see infographic on the right) according to the approximate study time needed in order for its students to reach its goals. The people at the FSI expect to have to train their students with 2200 hours of class split up into 88 weeks. That's daunting in comparison to Spanish, which is only 600 hours max spread over a maximum of 24 weeks. Let's not forget that those figures do not include the students' study time—it's only the class time! Moreover, the FSI's program is designed with people who are already highly motivated and able to learn language relatively well in a class setting. Since the NSA paper does a thorough job detailing what kinds of factors make learning a foreign language difficult (with especially detailed explanations about Japanese), I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and explain all the features of Japanese that back up these huge numbers; inquiring minds should just check the paper. Instead, I'm going to get straight to my perspective about the problems with Japanese education, why I consider the information hidden, and why I think we can do better than what we have.
When two communities that each speak a different language come into contact, a lot of things can happen—even if you rule out the possibility that one will conquer the other. Sometimes a primitive, mostly grammarless language with words borrowed from the two full-fledged languages develops (In linguistics it's called a pidgin). The Pidgin language can help people get by with daily tasks, such as simple sales and transactions. If children are raised in the pidgin language environment, they might assign more grammar onto the pidgin, expand its vocabulary, and cause it to become a new, separate language (called a Creole). Or perhaps the children grow up to be bilingual. In any case, it's gonna be a while before complicated communication in one language can be understood/interpreted/translated for the other. In the meantime people have to try to decode words and grammar by the situation, make hypotheses about the meanings of the words and the structure of the grammar, and see whether the hypotheses continue to make sense for new situations. Consider how many nuances there are in the word order of English and in vocabulary words such as accountability and responsibility, killing and murder, honest, frank, and blunt. Clearly it's a monumental task. If the two languages are similar (English and Spanish for instance), it's a much easier story—but if the two languages are entirely different in word order and vocabulary (English and Japanese), then it's more complicated. That doesn't even take into account cultural differences in communication. Once some of the members of each community believe they have decoded enough of the other language, they probably start teaching it. Since neither side has a complete picture, there are going to be things that are unclear or even entirely wrong.
One way to teach language in this kind of environment is to teach set translations of difficult expressions and to show students how to use certain grammatical structures in certain situations. Usually this means learning sentence "patterns" that have blanks left in them so that the learner can substitute different nouns or verbs. Then it doesn't matter if no one knows how to use the grammar in any situation: everyone can squeak by for topics they're taught. In this kind of instruction, there's very little emphasis on understanding grammar, whether in the native language or in the other language. Japanese is usually taught this way. For example, many Japanese textbooks do not mention parts of speech and do not label new vocabulary words with possible parts of speech. That can be very confusing if one does not know much about the grammar of the language. If you don't tell English learners that jump can be a verb and a noun, or that some words (such as exploit) have different pronunciations depending on the part of speech, they might not learn how to use or understand those words, even if they have a general idea of what they mean.
Now, this is not to say that that approach to teaching language is all wrong: It can help student's develop fluency by making them familiar with certain ways of saying things and making them repeat similar sentences. Instead of thinking through the grammar to build a sentence for the situation, students can default to certain patterns they know and switch out a few words to adjust to the specific topic and get their point across. However, because they do not know much about the grammar, students will be more likely to make mistakes or be unable to understand "new" uses of the words or structures they learned. They will also have more trouble adjusting to new topics or trying to find ways to express nuances in their native language. A simplistic example of this problem in Japanese education for English speakers is how to say "thank you".
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| No matter how much you would enjoy this card, |
| "thank you" cannot change tense. |
Although I can't say for sure, I suspect that Japanese classes typically do not include this information because the material for teaching Japanese-speakers English and the material for teaching English-speakers Japanese are probably old and probably contain the kinds of mistakes that naturally result during the long process of decoding other languages that happens when languages come into contact. Previous generations' hard work at deciphering words, creating dictionaries, and understanding unfamiliar expressions and grammatical structures was not perfect (nor should it have been), and the mistaken/incomplete explanations and solutions have piled up and been transferred through classes to future generations. After all, most Japanese teachers are native speakers of Japanese with an imperfect understanding of English acquired from English-speakers with little to no understanding of Japanese. Similarly, many English teachers in Japan are native speakers of English with an imperfect understanding of Japanese. There are also many English teachers who are native Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English acquired from other Japanese-speakers with an imperfect knowledge of English. However, English and Japanese have been in contact for at least 160 years. We should be able to make better grammatical and semantic descriptions now, and we should be able to use the new analysis to revise and demystify the troublesome areas of these languages. Just as this post explained why "thank you" has tense in Japanese, future posts in the series "The Secrets of Japanese" will each tackle a specific difficulty I've run into and discuss the grammatical secret(s) that make each problem easier to understand.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Police Mascots
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| The staging area for commemorative photos, complete with piipo-kun. |
Somehow, though, saying he greeted me at the entrance is putting it lightly: He wasn't just in one place at the entrance—he was all over it.
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His name comes from the Japanese pronunciation of the English word people (piipuru, ピープル) and the Japanese pronunciation of the English word police (porisu, ポリス). They mashed the two words together to get piipo because he is supposed to be a bridge between the people and the police. Then they added the Japanese "kun" (a title similar to Mr. or Mrs. except its friendly, not just polite). Someone in the Tokyo metro police station was a fantastic marketer or a refreshingly idealistic person.
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| A flyer on the bulletin board outside the Tokyo police headquarters. |
So it seems that Piipo-kun does serve as a bridge between the people and the police. He even has his own website on the Tokyo metro police site. When I got back to my dorm I researched the police mascot thing, and it
turns out that every single prefecture in Japan has its own police mascot. Check them all out here. I'm pretty sure that at public events it's some police officer's job to wear the mascot suit. I find this all fascinating because it seems to be a terrific way for the police to try to maintain a good reputation and be friendly with the citizenry, not that the Japanese police seem to need the help.
Japanese police are remarkably approachable. There is nearly always an officer or two stationed at a police box within a block of each train station. There are even officers who patrol the area on foot in addition to those on motorcycles and in cars. It's an official part of the police's job to give people directions, and the police boxes usually have maps in case the police need extra help telling you how to get where you want to go. The Japanese police even have a supply of money to lend people who have lost their wallets so that they can afford the train ride home (unfortunately not everyone pays the money back).
Now, I'm sure there are corrupt police and cases of police brutality or something in Japan, but most people don't seem worried about such things, and I didn't see any reports of it while I was there (though I also can't read everything in the newspaper yet). These mascots, on top of the direction-giving policy, are PR gold because they ensure that the populace have friendly, non-crime-related interactions with the police force. I wouldn't even dream of stopping the police in America to ask for directions, and I imagine that most people only see the police when they're investigating a crime or handing out traffic tickets. Hopefully, American police still do elementary school visits. Otherwise there's little opportunity for the police to develop a positive relationship with the citizenry. The closest thing to the police mascot America has is McGruff the crime dog, though I haven't seen him around in a while and I don't think he's an official police officer.
I get the feeling, though, that in America people might think extensive use of mascots would somehow be unprofessional. I know at first I thought Piipo-kun was ridiculous. Now, though, I think there's a lot of potential in these sorts of PR techniques to change the paradigm of our relationship with the police. Many communities have a negative view of police, and many don't cooperate with them. But if they never interact with police in a positive way, how can the situation change. It would be nothing short of glorious if the solution to the problem is as simple as a cartoony figure like McGruff, but I don't think it would be unrealistic to say that those kinds of PR moves and positive community interaction could really make a difference.
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