Languages and Linguistics

at Cornell University, but when I first went to Japan, I realized that there was a lot I didn't know.

Three things helped me up my conversational skills:

1. Watching TV. There were no closed captions in those days, and of course, since I was in Japan, there were no English subtitles either. I found that the easiest shows to understand were soap operas, anime, and song shows. Back in my research student days, commercials were very brief but were repeated three times in a row. Great listening practice!

When I first arrived, I spent two weeks renting a room in the YWCA, where breakfast (toast and two eggs any style) was included in the price. After breakfast, all the guests would gather around the TV to watch the NHK morning soap opera. These run for a few months and usually deal with a topic from the past. It was the middle of the current soap opera, which was about a singer in the 1920s, so the other guests explained what was going on and who all the characters were. I continued watching after I moved into my apartment as each soap opera ended and the others started.

2. Reading manga, which were and still are available everywhere. I was enrolled in a women's college, so I concentrated on so-called "ladies comics." (That's how they were labeled in English.) The great thing about manga for language learners is that they are the only place where Japanese is written exactly as it's spoken, with slang, slurred pronunciation, mistakes in grammar, and sometimes regional dialects. There are manga about every imaginable demographic and interest.

3. Every once in a while, I would hear an expression used in a certain situation, and I would realize that it was the equivalent of an English expression. I kept a notebook of such expressions. For example, I had dinner at the home of a young man who had been an exchange student in our town during my youngest brother's senior year of high school. A few days later, I happened to run into his father at a train station, and his father said, "Mezurashii tokoro de aimashita." (Literally: "We have met in an unusual place," or, to put it into more natural English, "Fancy meeting you here.&quot I also learned how to say "So what?" "No way!" "Don't play dumb" and other useful expressions.