And to make things worse than before...

[akujunkan]

...I ran out of vegemite today! Help! (I love that stuff. It's like miso paste, only with more vitamin B.)

Now that that bit of woe has been dealt with sufficiently, let's talk more about foreign language accquisition. I translated a bit of the new Saiyuki Gaiden chapter for a friend last night, and there were a couple of sentences that really gave me the runaround. Not because they were particularly complex, but because they offered two opposing choices: keep the phrasing intact and lose the meaning, or translate for meaning and lose the phrasing. There was no compromise between the two.

It's similar to watching the Bleach raws. I know what's being said in Japanese without the intermediary step of mentally rephrasing it into English, and I'm finding the sentences I comprehend instantly are often harder to deal with than those that aren't, because what's being said is 放せなくなったじゃねぇか (PS: did that one ever knock me onto the floor); because its meaning derives from what's being conveyed and the words and phrasing used to convey it, it's difficult to find a suitable substitution in English.

Which got me on to thinking about how much translation really deals with how one hears one's own native language, to a much greater degree than how one hears the second language. My friend Jen and I were frequently corrected during our lessons for speaking too much like men. We both found this boggling. I've heard women who've learned the majority of their Japanese from manga and anime; they sound like guys, but I didn't think I did.

Then it occurred to me where the problem lay: that what our teacher heard as specifically men's speech, we heard as assertive speech. I'm never going to use かしら, sentence-finial　わ, or gods help us all, あたし, because I hear them as disgustingly passive. I'd bet money that my sensei only hears them as female-appropriate. So it really comes down to how one hears language. I put assertiveness before gendered speech; I doubt most Japanese do the same.

That will be all.

Comments

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

My friend Jen and I were frequently corrected during our lessons for speaking too much like men.

There you have it, social engineering at work. I don't think there's actually much difference between what's usually called "men's" speech and what's called "assertive" speech -- in the eyes of the Japanese (and in the eyes of anyone studying Japanese society from the perspective of gender politics) they're the same thing. Men are socially constructed to be more assertive than women, so any speech patterns that are more frequently used by men are socially contructed as assertive, and vice versa. After all, there's nothing inherently passive about あたし, just the ways and contexts within which it gets used. Anyone who tries to speak assertively in a Japanese context is de facto acting/speaking like a man.

It's interesting that some younger Japanese women are responding to this by deliberately adopting more assertive (=masculine) speech, just as you do. There are a couple of characters in Azumanga Daioh who consistently shock me by coming out with speech that I'm only used to seeing in the mouths of rough-speaking male characters. I wonder how that pattern will continue to evolve in Japanese society.

What does 放せなくなったじゃねぇか mean, by the way? ^_^ All I can make out of it is "(Someone) became not able to set free/release, didn't they."

<------Gender studies major.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Congratulations. You'll never be able to shut me up now.

Your first paragraph is what I was trying to get at: while native Japanese start with 'feminine' or 'masculine' as point A and proceed from there, I, as a second language speaker start with 'I am assertive' as my point A, and this is where the problem arises.

The paradox here is that while I've adopted assertive speech, I haven't adopted men's speech, at least from my point of view. Being a JSL-speaker, I miss the cultural connections between the two. If anything, I would argue that I consciously adopt non-masculine speech in my daily interactions. It's all '私は this' and　'私は that' when I'm talking to someone, but in my internal monologue, I'm always 'ore.'

The language is changing, albeit slowly. I've heard women in the staffroom bust out with 腹減った, sentence-finial ぞ (but never ぜ) is common among both genders here (although this could also be dialet; men in this prefecture famoulsy use わ, which freaked me out to no end when I got here), and I could get away with referring to myself as 'boku' in Nagoya - among certain groups and when I wasn't in class, although an element 'look at the kooky foreigner' might have factored into their tolerance for this too.

And back into the beautiful land of Saiyuki appreciation, 放せなくなったじゃねぇか in context means, "I don't ever fucking want to let you go" and was as good as a declaration of undying love from the character uttering it. I don't even like that ship, and there I was, a sputtering pile of guh on the floor.

Cause that sure is some sexy masculine assertive speech right there;)

Re: <------Gender studies major.

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

The paradox here is that while I've adopted assertive speech, I haven't adopted men's speech, at least from my point of view.

So, I'm curious, what do you think your teacher was identifying as masculine speech? Is it that you say what you really think and want without pussyfooting around (which in itself might be enough to mark you in Japanese cultural terms as masculine, and foreign to boot)? Is it that you avoid traditionally feminine markers she was expecting you to use, but otherwise use neutral speech -- and that alone is enough to make a woman sound masculine in Japanese ears? Or were there specific masculine particles/forms she was objecting to?

I actually heard one of the girls on Azumanga Daioh use ぜ. I was like, whoa. (Not to adopt Keanu speech or anything.)

Language and society is a fascinating thing. ^_^