(July 2014)
Yep. Interesting, as you’d expect. I’ll get
something more scholarly and substantial written up over at the other place eventually
(maybe).
In the short term I’ll just note that the
disconnect between students’ and teachers’ expectations essayed in Aya Matsuda’s
chapter
(Students’ and Teachers’ Beliefs
about English Teaching in Japan) comes across like the plot of an Ealing
farce in the completeness with which the actors fail to understand each other’s
motivations, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so depressing, and Seargeant
himself has a prose style best described as ‘never knowingly underwritten’. Yasutaka
Yano’s chapter
(English as an
International Language and ‘Japanese English’), meanwhile, contains an
couple of very insightful ideas, but is otherwise an absolute mess of fuzzy
thinking and
ex cathedra
pronouncements, ranging all the way from unsupported essentialism and cliché (“…the
Japanese language is a highly sophisticated language…” p133) to
demonstrable bullshit (“Japan, a small island nation…” p133), and you can’t help but wonder
if, had it been submitted by a less eminent scholar, it might have been edited
more stringently or even rejected outright. Still, even reading stuff you
disagree with has the advantage of forcing you to consider
why you disagree with it, so it all comes out in the wash.
"the Japanese language is a highly sophisticated language"
ReplyDeleteUh, no.
Now you see, I would argue that it is a sophisticated language. But then I'd also argue that every human language that's developed beyond a pidgin is sophisticated: that's what makes it a language as opposed to just a series of unrelated noises and signifiers. So saying that Japanese is a 'highly sophisticated language' is essentially tautologous, like saying 'beer is a very wet drink'. If I wrote a line like that in one of my essays the marker would rip me a new arsehole.
DeleteThere may be languages more sophisticated than English, but it won't be Japanese: fewer of everything (phonemes, verb tenses, vocabulary) except obscurantist kanji.
DeleteAs for that 細長い島国 crap ("a small island nation"), it's as big as the habitable parts of Canada, also strung out in a single line, us hugging the warmer border
You appear to be conflating 'sophisticated' with 'complicated', which, to be fair, is pretty much the default position. Given the first has positive connotations and the second doesn't really, it's always an interesting exercise with something like that Yano article just to go though on a find an replace and see how it sounds. I suspect people would be less keen to claim their mother tongue is 'complicated'.
Delete