You’re hard pressed to not have noticed by now that I study another language and have been doing so for a little over half a year at this point. One of the things that I thought right from the beginning was that I really, really want to document, somehow, the changes that take place inside my head as I go from comprehending nothing to comprehending everything (well, you know what I mean). Right now, it’s safe to say that I won’t understand what is being said unless it’s a fairly standard phrase — in other words, I could probably survive using only Japanese, but it’d be a fairly pathetic sight.
But some things have changed since I started. Some things that I expected to change did change. One of these things is what this entry is about — sentence-separation. The most significant border in learning any language out there is the fact that, initially, when you hear the language being spoken, you can’t even look words up! This is for two reasons:
- Spelling and pronunciation. Hearing a word does not automatically mean you know how to spell that word. So you might hear “Can-O-Jo.” but that doesn’t really help you much in terms of spelling, unless, of course, you are familiar with pronunciation rules. Fortunately in this case, Japanese and Swedish pronunciation is nearly identical. Which means, with very few exceptions, all words, if spelled as I think they sound, are correct.
- Distinguishing words from within a sentence. More importantly, however, is the ability to distinguish the separate words in a sentence. I’m not as lucky in this department, but I’m luckier than native English speakers, I believe.
Turning a sentence into a series of words, even if one doesn’t understand a single one of those words is purely grammatical but also has to do with hearing comprehension. To illustrate my point, I’m going to write a sample sentence for you in two separate ways. This is the first way:
- “Kanojowagakuseijanakutesenseida.”
Pretty hard to get anything out of that, I’d say, even though it’s a fairly small sentence. In natural speech, languages and dialects of languages seldom put emphasis on each separate word. While there may be emphasis on parts of words, sometimes the emphasis appears in the middle of a word, or at the end of a word, and so on. Learning how a language in general emphasizes words is one of the most important aspects of learning to comprehend that language when it is being spoken.
For example, my name is Kalle. This is pronounced in a way that native English speakers cannot* pull off. I had an American girlfriend for over a year, and by the end of that relationship, she still couldn’t say my name. The reason? Emphasis differs between Swedish and English. That’s pretty much it.
(* When I say “cannot” I of course refer to the general population, especially the caucasian, as many Mexicans or other mixed-culture/nationality Americans would have little difficulty saying it.)
Here is a separate sentence from the one above, this one in English. Exaggerated emphasis has been put in using “·” characters; word-separation (normally expressed using space) is for clarification purposes expressed using hyphens here:
- “·Hi-·my-·na·me-is-·Kalle.-·I-·often-·go-·fishing-·with-·my-·friends.”
To further clarify what I mean, here is the sentence broken down into blocks rather than the convential word separation:
- “Hi-my-nay-miss-kalleh-I-often-go-fishing-with-my-friends.”
While a part of the sentence is no longer word-separated, most of it, in fact, is. The words that were “split” here are name and is and that’s pretty much it. Let’s try this same sentence in Swedish:
- “·Hej-·mitt-·nam·n-är-·Kal·le.-Ja·g-går-·of·ta-·ut-·och-·fis·kar-·med-·mi·na-·vän·ner.”
And doing the same thing here:
- “Hej-mitt-nam-när-kal-le-ja-går-of-ta-ut-och-fis-kar-med-mi-na-vän-ner.”
A lot more mangling is taking place in this sentence. An English-speaking person who doesn’t know neither Swedish grammar nor vocabulary would hear something like this:
- “Hay-mit-nam-nayr-kal-leh-yaa-gore-off-tah-yute-ock-fizz-karr-maid-me-nah-wen-nar.”
Out of this sentence, the words mitt, namn, kalle, jag, ofta, fiskar, mina, and vänner have all been “mangled”. This is 8 words out of 14, i.e. over 50% of the entire sentence. Every second word is mangled, and thus, there’s a one in two chance that when you go to look that “fizz” word up, you’ll realize that there is no such word in any Swedish dictionary. (As a sidenote, I purposefully pronounced “Kalle” differently in the English version and the Swedish version, not to make my point stronger, but because my name is pronounced differently (due to this very issue) when spoken in English and Swedish.)
Let’s try this on the Japanese sentence now:
- “Kanojowa·gakuseijana·kute·sen·sei·da.”
Before we even go further, you should know a funny little detail about written Japanese. There is no word separation. Period. While we use a tiny gap to clarify “new gap word gap new gap word gap new gap word”, Japanese, written Japanese, handles this completely differently. While this may seem irrelevant to a hearing comprehension study, it most definitely isn’t. This is exactly where the emphasis point is made, because only one single word above was emphasized “as is”, and that was “da” - the last one. The other words were all mangled. This is what the above sentence looks like, in written Japanese:
In written Japanese, words are emphasized via the use of Chinese characters (kanji), and separated using Japanese hiragana characters. This lets the reader separate the words from each other without the use of spaces. There is a very natural explanation to this that I won’t go into here, but this, regardless, flows into and affects spoken Japanese as well.
I made it a point from the very beginning to get as much hearing material as I possibly could, to get accustomed to the sound of the language. Even before I knew a single word, I watched lots and lots of Japanese movies with subtitles, and initially, what I heard was just a stream of sounds. I tried to look words up and every time I actually managed to find one, I was grinning like a fool, because more often than not, I’d be attempting to look two words up, or half-a-word up or, worse, I’d be trying to look a word up that was “mutated” (something that happens more often than not in Japanese; and yes, I know that “mutated” is not the official grammatical term(s) for it) with no clue how to convert it back into its dictionary form.
Over time, however, it’s become easier and easier for me to distinguish words from within a sentence spoken at natural speed, to “demutate” mutated words into their dictionary form, and to, thus, look them up and figure out what they actually mean. I believe this is the greatest roadblock in learning a language, and I believe that I’ve managed to more or less overcome that roadblock. No amount of grammatical rules or complex grammar or horrifying requirements to learn thousands of separate characters in order to understand written Japanese are going to stop me now.
But, presuming you don’t know Japanese already, let’s wrap this up so you can find out what that sentence actually means. Explaining how the word separation takes place (inside my head) is something I honestly haven’t even figured out yet, but I do know it’s got less to do with word emphasis than in any other language I know. Instead it has to do with detecting particles, detecting “mutations” and detecting (common) words within a sentence. A normal, romanized (alphabetized) version of the sentence would look like this:
- “Kanojo wa gakusei janakute, sensei da.”
- “Kanojo” means “she.”
- “Gakusei” means “student.”
- “Janakute” sort of means “isn’t” (it means more than “isn’t” in this case, but what the hell)
- “Sensei” means “teacher.”
- “Da” means “is.”
Which turns it into “She [wa] student isn’t, teacher is.”
She isn’t a student, she’s a teacher.