3/6/2007

One of the largest advantages of learning another language is that it gives you a great deal of insight into a culture that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a textbook or a periodical. In other words you know you’re making headway with a language when you realize that you are beginning to understand how and why native speakers of the language act in certain ways.

Take for example the subtlety of communication within the Japanese context. People never say what they mean and part of learning Japanese is accustoming yourself to reading between the lines. When you ask a Japanese person to do something together—let’s say go out for some coffee on Wednesday night, you’ll rarely receive a flat-out “no”. What you will get oftentimes—if the response is meant to be negative—is a hesitant answer, following somewhere along the lines of “well…I’m not exactly able to…”, or “I do have such-and-such to do on that day but…”. If you interpret such phrases literally, technically they are not sending across the clear message that “no, I can’t hang out with you that night”. However, when you interpret it under the context of subtlety in Japanese culture, it does come across clearly as a “no”.

Another example is when I ask Japanese people I know if they like karaoke (most of them don’t…their loss). If it turns out that they do, they’re very clear in their response and generally enthusiastically so. However, if they don’t—and especially if they already know that I do love karaoke—they will often make their answers really ambiguous. Oftentimes they make it look like just simply saying “no, I don’t like karaoke” is the most painful thing they could possibly do. But the whole point here is that once you understand the principle of “maybe” almost always meaning “no” in Japanese, you’ve also begun to understand the polite, passive aggressive, and “never-say-what-you-mean” aspects of Japanese culture.