Ok, it’s really not that hard to grok.

Back in the states, I used to tell my Asian friends that they were “speaking asian” when they would do things like forget to pluralize nouns (I ate three apple) or conjugate verbs incorrectly (I’m eaten already). I’ve noticed a similar (albeit reversed) thing happening when I speak English lately. In Thai and Japanese, it’s very common to soften your comments by adding a bit of uncertainty to them. For example if you ask a starving Thai person if he’s hungry, his reply will generally be “Ohh, I could eat but no rush”. I was talking with a Japanese friend recently and broke out laughing when he said to me “yeah so this friend of mine sort-of maybe died, I think”.

Where I have noticed this uncertainty appearing most is in teaching yoga, I’ll say things to students like “yeah, it might be better if you moved your foot forward some” which literally means “you’re doing the asana wrong, move your foot now”. I’m not totally sure why it’s creeping into my teaching; it could be that I’m use Thai so much in class and when I use English, my brain is still stuck with Thai grammar patterns.

This all brings up an interesting point about translation issues. In the example about being hungry, were that dialog in a Thai movie, translating it into English could be tricky. If the two people were speaking in Thai, they would understand that “Ohh, I could eat but no rush” means “Yes, I’m starving” and the plot could continue along (in which case, the English subtitle should read “Yes, I’m starving). If one of the speakers was not native Thai, there is a chance he would misunderstand the implied meaning, in which case it wouldn’t be so obvious how to translate into English.

On my way back from the USA, I spent five days in Tokyo, which I think is about as close to another planet as I will get to in this lifetime. I’ve spent time in places like India and Nepal and it’s rather easy to accept that they are totally different given that they are still developing countries. The deal with Tokyo is that it is a huge, developed megalopolis, but it developed in a way that is totally different from the way that New York or London developed. What really stands out about Tokyo is how similar it all looks, I mean there are really interesting buildings and (what seems like) people with really interesting style, but once you dig a little deeper you realize how everything fits into some very well-defined category. What is especially noticeable is that all of these categories are uniquely Japanese, there is some random outside influence but the Japanese tend to make their own unique version of it.

The photograph above was shot in the park near Harajuku is Japan’s answer to the 1950s greaser culture that we had back in USA. The deal here tho is that Japanese greasers get dressed up in the same gear, except they make their hair even bigger and then do choreographed dances. Check out this video if you don’t believe me.

Anyway, I will be back in Tokyo for the month of May. Leaving BKK on April 29th and coming back on June 2nd. I rented an apartment near Komogome, I will be practicing yoga with Tarik in Shibuya and will be studying the Japanese language from 9-1 every day near Takadanobaba. My original goal was to find an apt and Japanese school near the yoga school, but the best I could do was to find them on the same subway line. If you’re over there and want to hangout, shoot me an email … Recommendations on galleries, museums and other fun things are always appreciated too.

So I started school back this week, taking five classes which mostly seem pretty fun … in case you’re interested here’s the workload:

• JA211: Japanese Conversation
• TH247: Introduction to Readings (seems to teach critical reading and analysis skills, probably not too hard)
• SN343: Introduction to Spanish Literature (looks really fun)
• FL346: Northern Thai Languages and Writing Systems
• JA201 LEC: Japanese Reading Skills
• SK202: Sanskrit 2
• JA201 LAB: Japanese Listening Skills

The Japanese coursework represents a change in their curriculum for this year, they had previously started the second year by teaching 600 or so Kanji characters but now they focus on reading the characters and understanding the grammar first. I’ve only had one class so far, but it seems like they want us to be able to understand passages writing at about a 3rd grade level, be able to translate them into Thai, stuff like that. They don’t seem to interested in our ability to translate Thai back into Japanese just yet (well the conversation class does that but at a different level).

The Spanish lit class starts with early writings by Columbus and moves through modern writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Juan Rulfo. In some cases, the texts have been simplified for a foreign audience, other times they just provide notes to help us understand more.

In FL346, we will study three different dead languages which were used mostly to write stone inscriptions like this one 500+ years ago in Northern Thailand (and parts of Burma and Laos). I will post more on this as I understand it, it’s fascinating to see how the early writing system and grammars all influenced this modern system. I don’t really grock enough yet to explain it tho.

Part of me was a bit worried that studying five (well eight if you could all three languages taught in FL346) different languages in the same term would be hard, or more so that I wouldn’t have enough time to dedicate to all of them. This blog posting makes some good points that it is actually a good thing to do. Basically it says that studying more than a few languages at once might make things slower going at first, but that it would pay off in the long-run by forcing your brain to work in new ways. I think that this is especially true for languages with different writing systems and radically different grammars. (My friend Alan claims that I am the only person he knows who is making linguistic preparations for his past lives by studying four different dead languages).

That being said, I am going to focus on just these languages for now … I’ll keep working on Lao / Issan with the girls at work, and will keep working through the Pimsleur Vietnamese CDs in preparation for my trip next week, but am not going to spend too much time on anything other than my coursework for a while.