Sons of Loki

Me ma’s been watching Swedish smash-hit crime drama Wallander and, on another of her crackpot schemes, picked up a book on Swedish grammar. Clearly, my mother was never meant to learn Swedish, but I thought I’d have a flick through and it’s interesting stuff, you know.

You know how athletes will run at high altitudes with heavy weights so that, when they’re accustomed to that, running unladen at sea level feels like a breeze? It’s like that after studying Japanese. Two years of banging my head against the brick wall of fluency in Nippongese, and when I try my hand at Swedish, it’s like punching through cardboard. There’s so many cognates that vocabulary – lång (long), hem (home), också (also, pronounced ockso) – just pops into my memory in a way that Japanese words never do. Knowing a little German helps too – läsa (lese, read), arbeta (arbeite, work).

It always seems remarkable to monolinguists like myself when you hear of people who can speak three or four or six languages, but once you’ve learned the skill-set necessary to learn a language – which tools to use, how conjugating works, what articles and particles do – the next language is half as hard. Conjugating Swedish verbs is essentially the same as conjugating Japanese verbs – it’s just a matter of learning different ‘bits’.

I watched Tora Tora Tora today (remarkably, half-directed by Kinji Fukasaku, he of the Yazuka Papers and Battle Royale) and as a test, tried to understand the spoken Japanese without the subtitles. Entirely hopeless. Been studying this two, three years and I can’t understand even a sentence or two.
I know the answer is “study more” but it’s hella depressing.

I also watched the much-hyped The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor) and found it to be pretty enjoyable, even if I’m always suspicious when beautiful troubled young women end up sleeping with chubby, middle-aged author surrogates. (When I’m an author, my protagonists will be celibate and miserable.) I liked Lisbeth – she put me in mind of one of William Gibson’s heroines, and in a way the whole film is like some kind of modern post-cyberpunk thriller. Sort of. You know, the stuff that Gibson was pioneering in the 80s – technology as an integral part of our daily lives, a world where everything’s on the net and information is a commodity, all those cliches which were revolutionary then but today sound ancient – that sort of stuff is so mainstream now that you hardly notice it.

I noticed Lisbeth’s password was only four characters, though. No real hacker would let that slide.

So I’ve hopefully got an interesting little job lined up, if I pass the final interview next week. Heading up to Leeds this weekend to move into my house and kill a few days before the interview and then, if I get it, starting my induction the week after – then it’s Freshers’ Week and finally, after that, lessons begin again.

I’ve been worrying about what to do for my dissertation, but the other day I found myself writing a blog post about the future of Japan – slowing economy, fossilised government, aging population, freeters, continued backwards attitude to immigration – and realised I’ve got a beautiful paper to write right there. If I do it right. The New World: Changing Paradigms For Japan In New 21st Century Economic Realities – Demarking the Migrant Pathos and the Erotics of Primal Pathology, it will be titled.

Until then, then, I chill out, raid the fridge, learn lines like “Du bröt dig in i mitt hem. Jag kan ha ihjäl dig utan vidare.”* and try to put off packing until Friday.

* “You broke into my house. I can kill you without consequence.” Learning lines from films is much more fun than “I am Herr Smitt,” don’t you think?

Here’s your linguistic paper of the day – an analysis of English-Japanese code-switching.

Code-switching is what happens when speakers who share two or more languages switch between them, like if I was to say to you “It has a certain je ne sais quoi“, that would be English-French code-switching. It gets more complex than that, but those of us doing Japanese here kind of find ourselves doing it as a joke, or to better explain something that can’t be done in one language, or even unconsciously at times.
For example, one thing that crops up in the academic literature is the way bilingual speakers will express sums of money in Japanese even when speaking English, and I’ve realised I do that all the time without even realising it: “How much does it cost?” “A return ticket is 五千円。” [Five thousand yen.] As another example, I sent Rob a message the other day saying ”多摩から [I'm coming from Tama], meeting at 吉祥寺中央口 [Kichijoji station Central Exit] at 2130 if that’s cool.” I mean, there you have one benefit of code-switching – it’s easier to type “多摩から” than “I’m coming from Tama”.

With bilingual children, as evidenced in the paper, things get interesting:

Kye (a young boy confident in both English and Japanese, doing origami): エミリ、これ持っといてstick-onするから。[Emily, hold this, because I want to stick on something.)
Emily (his sister, less confident in Japanese): はい。[Yes.] Two more.
Kye: No, that’s enough.
Emily: (realising) かぶと！[A samurai helmet!]

This stuff’s weird, isn’t it? I was thinking about perhaps doing a dissertation in my second or third year of English, if I can do one in joint honours (from the website I think I could, but I’ve heard otherwise). Code-switching is more a linguistics thing, though, and not much to do with English. Still, I might be able to work it into a topic.

Today was really good, in that quiet, unassuming way that days can be. I got my article published in Metropolis (tried tracking down a paper copy, but I think they haven’t hit the racks yet) and finished my second one (fingers crossed it goes in). To celebrate sort of becoming more of a writer, I bought myself a new watch for a disturbingly low price (it’s either a knock-off or stolen, except no one has ever been mugged in Japan). I finished off my homework for once, had a wander around Kinokuniya bookstore, posted off my registration for proxy voting (I’m a good citizen, me) and paid my health insurance bills (apparently despite being three months late there are no ill consequences) at the post office, bought some sandalwood incense from the panhandlers outside Shinjuku west exit, and strolled down the street listening to King Tubby’s prime dub cuts and trying hard not to think about this Onion article.