My wife and I both speak Japanese fluently. She does because she grew up speaking it with her parents at home in the U.S., and spent summers with her relatives in Nagoya. I do because I lived in Japan through part of elementary school and junior high, and returned to Japan periodically over the years, while continuing my interest and study of the language in daily life.

I also speak Mandarin Chinese, and although my vocabulary is somewhat limited, I do have very good pronunciation and fluency. I began studying it in college, spent some time in China, and have continued trying to practice and study that language as well.

Since our son Oliver is now three months old, my wife and I have been thinking about how to teach him more than one language.

It's been assumed between us for a long time that we would at least try to teach him Japanese. It would seem a shame for him not to learn it as we both speak the language. But the situation in the world has convinced me that everyone in every country is going to need all the tools they can get to compete in the future. Resting on our laurels is not an option.

Thomas Friedman has come out with another book titled "The World is Flat" on the subject of globalization and global competition for knowledge work. I'm not sure when or whether I'll actually read it, as I follow these things regularly and probably am aware of most of what he's written in this book. But I do think he's right on the money in his views as to how much more difficult things are going to get as millions more people come onto the market for jobs that used to be geographically limited and therefore had a measure of natural protection.

So I'm thinking about trying to teach our son Chinese as well. Although there are various theories floating around about how best to achieve this, a practical approach seems to be simply for each parent to speak a different language. My wife would speak Japanese, and I would speak Chinese; he would pick up English in the beginning from the environment and his grandparents, then later from school and from us. Three languages may seem like a lot, but it's pretty clear that children have little difficulty adjusting to it, and it's clearly much easier than attempting to learn later in life.

Here in Northern Virginia we're also lucky to have a couple of schools nearby with bilingual Japanese-English education curricula through elementary and junior high school. If these schools seem up-to-par when the time comes, it might be a good option. There are also lots of DVDs and VCDs out there now for teaching language to babies and young kids. We will have to load up on these materials in order to create an environment in which he sees variegated use of these laguages on a daily basis...

We haven't made any final decisions about how to approach this, but it will be an amazing process... :)

Lately I've been working on a paper about China's implementation of the TRIPs agreement (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property), and have been looking at a number of Chinese language sources for information. So I made up a little table of the most common words related to IP in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean to see the similarity.

In the spirit of my newfound outgoingness, I finally went to a Chinese conversation group that meets here in D.C. They call it the Chinese Table...

So I finally got to speak Chinese for more than 2 minutes. When I used to work at Quark in Denver, there were a bunch of Chinese guys there I used to chat with, but now I don't know anyone who wants to speak it... Most 2nd generation Chinese seem to like English better. So this was actually a really great experience, and I'm planning to go again (and drag my wife Yuki next time ;) ).

There were about 15 people there, and quite an interesting group. I talked for a long time with two people who are studying Chinese in an intensive course to prepare for assignment abroad with the State Department. There was another girl there who had been in the boonies in China for 8 months doing Peace Corps, and got dragged home because of SARS... She's now working for a defense contractor. Get that — crazy. She says she gets flak from her liberal friends for that, hehe.

Aggh! I absolutely abhor political correctness. This post by Jonathon is very interesting and disturbing. It reminded me of some of the very serious problems we face here in the U.S. with regard to education, and some similar sad problems in Japan.

So, first of all, as I've mentioned in the last few posts, the English language depends heavily upon both Latin and Greek for its neologistic capabilities, and for most of its more specific, detailed, and complex vocabulary. Without an understanding of these roots, one is unable to grasp fully the expressive capacity of English. I feel somewhat handicapped since I never learned Latin or Greek in school, so I'm trying to learn Latin now, but I have always had a good understanding of the word roots we commonly use.

We lose a lot when these subjects fail to be taught to the next generation. And now, not only are we losing connection with the upper reaches of our vocabulary, we're also losing all sorts of other things due to the irrational and excessive fear of offending young students. It's stupid, and I'm really upset when I'm forced to think about it. I'm probably not going to be satisfied to send my children to public school in this country, ironically the country where my Puritan ancestors built the first schoolhouses to teach from the King James Bible, and where we had such an incredible level of literacy and education up to the turn of the 19th century.

Similarly, Japan has lost a lot of the flavor of its language through excessive standardization, almost PC-ization of the kanji system. Ask any Japanese today about the stroke order of a character, and they'll say there is only one proper stroke order. In fact, for most characters there have always been alternate stroke orders, usually at least 2 or 3. There have been different styles to writing some characters, alternative forms, and stylizations that have been basically lost due to this standardization push.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a standard. I'm just saying that the modern Japanese person has in many cases lost the intuitive understanding of style when it comes to kanji. People used to prefer certain forms of characters; now, only one is usually considered the 'right' form. People used to write characters with their own style. Now, many people resort to a child-like pencil style when writing characters. I just wish they hadn't gone so far sometimes. It would be nice if everyone could have an elegant and idiosyncratic calligraphic syle of their own.

A very long but interesting post at EmptyBottle thinking all about languages (esp. Korean) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Pinker, etc.

I actually subscribe to what he calls the "weak formulation" of the theory -- that language as the ultimate medium does have somewhat of an effect on us, coloring our perceptions of things in certain ways, but not determining or truly limiting them. Languages just tend to portray the world in a certain way, reinforcing cultural perspectives, and possibly creating a sort of local minimum which it might take a little extra effort to jump out of...

With regard to confucian concepts imbued in Korean and Japanese, it's interesting to note that Chinese also had many formalisms that were totally stripped away with the communist revolution. Currently some of them are coming back, but only since the beginning of China's economic boom... For instance, to ask one's name the phrase used to be "您贵姓?", or "Your honorable name?". As I've learned and heard it most of the time in China, people now usually say "你的名字是什么?", or simply "What is your name?"

Also, I should mention Lojban, which is a constructed language specifically created with the goal in mind to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The language is constructed unlike any natural language. It's similar to LISP in some ways, actually... ;) But during college I and my friend Paul became sort of infatuated with it and learned a lot of it, even attempting to have conversations in it constantly... hehe. I still remember quite a bit, and talk to my wife in it occasionally. (She knows a few phrases...) Anyone interested should read the historical background information on their site, and do a search on it, since there are a number of other sites about it not linked to from their main page. :)

This post at EmptyBottle.org really got my blood boiling, as it did his, obviously... ;) He references an article in the New York Times which talks about Asian orthographies as opposed to Western alphabets...

In particular, it references a new book by William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service..." The hypothesis, or rather, the seemingly unproven assertion, which the book is based on is that Asian orthographies are a detriment to scientific and analytical thought.

The first major mistake the article makes is in asserting that Asian orthographies are "syllabaries." In fact, no asian orthography is exclusively a syllabary, although Japanese includes two. A syllabary is an 'alphabet' in which each symbol represents not just a letter as we know it in English, but a whole syllable of sound, such as "ka" or "ban".

Japanese includes two full syllabaries, called hiragana and katakana, as well as chinese characters and the roman alphabet. With regard to its use of Chinese characters, sometimes they are read with one syllable, sometimes two, and sometimes three or four, depending on the situation. There are even characters read as English words, such as 釦 (ボタン), for 'button'.

Korean is not a syllabary either, but a true alphabet, and far more logically constructed than western alphabets. The forms of all the letters are based in a phonetic analysis of ancient Chinese, and were created in the 1400's by King Sejong. Like sounds look alike in the Korean alphabet (such as T and D), because they were constructed to resemble the position of the mouth and tongue when uttering those sounds!

The only thing "syllabic" about the Korean orthography is that each syllable is arranged into a square when written. This came about due to the aesthetic and cultural influence of Chinese characters, and because of the desire to harmonize the look of text containing both Korean characters (hangul) and Chinese characters. So, for example the word kabang (bag) is written as 가방, in two blocks, rather than ㄱㅏㅂㅏㅇ, horizontally. You can see how the individual letters are just arranged into the two squares. But it's still probably the most logically and abstractly constructed alphabet in the world.

Chinese characters are not a syllabary either, because they are partly ideographic, partly phonetic, and inconsistent in how they are constructed. Some have called them 'logographic' or other things, but they are constructed in a variety of complicated ways, and are clearly not a syllabary.

Furthermore, the assertion that they inhibit abstract thought is bass ackwards, considering that the whole system was created based on abstract thought. Ideographic components are commonly combined with phonetic components to produce modern characters, as in the character for 'flower', 花, which combines 'flower/grass' on the top with the sound component 'hua' underneath. Sometimes two or more ideographic components are combined, as in the character for 'natural disaster', 災, which combines 'river' on the top with 'fire' on the bottom...

It's a complicated business, and clearly each character involves an ancient thought process of abstraction. Now in the sciences, Chinese compound words are much much easier to read than western terms, because we use latin and greek, while they use their characters. An example off the top of my head is the word for 'diabetes'. In English, you don't know what it is until you simply memorize the word, but in Japanese the word is 糖尿病, or sugar-urine-disease, probably because those who had it had sugary or sweet urine. SARS is called 非典型肺炎 in Chinese, and 新型肺炎 in Japanese, which mean non-traditional-lung-inflammation and new-form-lung-inflammation respectively. Much easier to parse (and direct to the point) than some of our medical terminology...

So now let's look again at Hannas's assertion as related in the article:

Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.

Now how silly does this seem?

I must say though, in the case of Chinese, there are other reasons to suspect it really does cause everyday problems for people, but in the cases of Japanese and Korean, I don't think you can argue that at all.

In Chinese, there's really no reliable way to write anything unless you know the characters, whereas in Japanese and Korean, the alphabetic or syllabic characters are accepted parts of the language, and can always be used as fallbacks. Chinese has the 'pinyin' romanization system, but it's rarely used and isn't considered part of the language. So if you're not very literate, you may come across cases when you aren't able to write something you're thinking about... This still doesn't prevent you thinking about it though, and you can always look up the characters in a dictionary. There's really no way that it can hamper thought, just maybe make everyday note-taking or writing harder.

Interestingly, Korean may be entering a new era when their orthography becomes much more similar to western ones than eastern ones, in that the old compounds which were created and written with chinese characters are now written in hangul, their alphabet, so some of the compound word roots may become forgotten or harder for the average Korean to remember, just like our Latin and Greek roots... :)

P.S. Doesn't Unicode rock?! I could never have written this post a few years ago without resorting to images. Now we have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English, all playing well together! Sweet. ;)

Since Chinese is such an important language now, I have to try to keep using mine or I'll lose it. Maybe I'll try to start writing in alternating languages just to give myself some practice. ;)

我这次想用中文给中文世界介绍自己。我虽然不太喜欢简体字，但是 Microsoft 的繁体输入法不能够用拼音。；）

我在大学学了三年的中文。大学毕业了，我跟四个朋友到中国练武术，利用我的中文（我知道它还差得很！）。回来了在可罗拉多州认识了一位很了不起的八卦掌老师，跟他开始学八卦掌。可是，可罗拉多得经济不好了，我没法办儿，就会到我故乡华盛顿。我现在住在华盛顿，试试进入法律大学院。因为我在大学学了电脑科学，所以我现在想成为一个对于软件的专利权律师。现在的中国而说，专利权是一个很重要的问题。如果中国不能够保持发现人的权利，就大概不能创造一个健康的软体市场。我未来希望帮助中国人提高中国的专利知识。

Hmmn... has been talking about his renewed verve to study Japanese. I learned Japanese there as a kid, I've learned Mandarin since, and studied many other languages as well. So why did I learn Japanese there, while others I know have lived there 17 years and only know how to say "ikura desu ka?" Many reasons, beginning with desire, social contacts, openness, and optimism. As a kid you don't know it's hard... :)

I was 10 years old. Before we moved there, my parents bought some books and we tried to learn some Japanese as a family around the dinner table. Needless to say, we didn't learn crap. ;) My next memory is walking around a supermarket in Tokyo with the daughter of my parents' expat friends (Maya Ravindranath). We got a sample from one of the little tables, and I asked her how to say it's good. She told me to reply "oishii."

But my first real sentence in Japanese was this: "Hyaku-en kashite..." This was the basis for my entire knowledge of the Japanese language. I don't know how it went exactly, but the other kids in my school (Nishimachi) always went to the corner store to get candy & snacks after school... They were always borrowing money from each other, so I picked this up and just started saying it in Japanese whenever I needed to borrow money... Soon this progressed to "Keshi kashite..." and "Empitsu kashite..." It was really very simple for my mind to absorb these quick phrases.

Yet more disturbing information about literacy in the U.S. This article describes an incredible situation. Students who can read, but cannot understand the meaning behind the text. They are the victims of fad-based education. Victims of teachers who believe that tests and high standards serve only to hurt the self-esteem of kids. I have news for those teachers. They're morons.

Don't we all know by now that competition is what drives people in this world? The economy does not run on self-esteem. People are not motivated by platitudes. They are motivated by competition: the challenge to be better than yourself, better than others, better than everyone. People don't try to improve themselves when they're told they're great the way they are, or they should be satisfied with themselves whether they can read or not...

So am I saying that people shouldn't be happy with themselves? In a way, yes. People should always be striving to improve themselves and everything around them, because only in striving can humans be truly happy. Complacency and laziness may sometimes seem to fulfill our desires, but this is only temporary. The longer you lay on the couch, the stiffer you get, and the less interesting the TV becomes. People need to have struggles, because they give our lives meaning.

This is why competition is the key to everything in society... not because we're selfish, but because striving is living. Isn't it the height of irony that this nation, the leader of the capitalist world, doesn't apply this principle to its education system?

Somehow, for some reason, many Japanese people blow a fuse when confronted by a foreigner speaking Japanese to them. I have an anecdote, and a theory about this I'd like to share with you...

So a while ago we went back to Tokyo to visit my friend Paul and have some fun, on the way to visiting Yuki's family in Nagoya... We decided to take the subway from Narita airport to his place, and ended up at Tokyo station, where we had to change lines. At some places in the massive tangled Tokyo subway system, you have to actually leave the station and walk down the street a bit to find a connection to another line... This happened to be one of those cases, so I stopped at the booth to ask which way I should walk to find the subway entrance.

My wife Yuki had never been in Japan with me until this time, so I knew that she was about to see something she had never seen before — the raw shock of a Japanese accosted by a gaijin with fluent Japanese...