日本人友達: I don't understand why presentations [like your thesis] have to be so difficult. Can't you use easier English?
私 (me): Well, it isn't really the English itself. It's just difficult to understand new concepts. It's not like describing something concrete, like this glass or this water. I'm having to explain something you can't really experience from them, or something that only talks about what we experience -- something entirely abstract.
(Brief interrogation about the meaning of abstract.)
私: It's basically the opposite of 具体的 [concreteness].
友: But I think that has a lot to do with culture...
My friend has been veraciously studying the English language, its history and its applications. The content of her presentation (as she described it) for her university homework was something new to me, as it may well have been for her academic audience. She proposed a deep cognitive difference between our (Euro-American and East Asian) cultures concerning abstraction and perception, evidenced by the implementation in English (and other basically neighboring languages) of countable and uncountable units of measure (i.e., glasses versus water).
These Asian languages appear instead to have evolved from no such primary sense of these kinds of units but instead of shape and size, respectively evidenced by the vast number of kinds of units (i.e., 一人, the count of a person; 一台, the count of large and unwieldy objects; 一本, the count of long, cyllindrical objects, or of books; etc.). It would seem that while we (Greeks, Germans, whoever) were mesmerized by the universality of measure of different kinds of things -- how we could measure both the length of a room and a flagpole and be consistent with the unit of measurement we use -- East Asia saw difference, saw not so much the universality of strata as they did the plurality of the things they perceived. It was more important somehow that I immediately got the gist of the shape and size of what you were talking about by the way you measured it or, more directly in this case, counted it.
I know I'm in danger again of bipolarizing the cultures, the psychologies, by using adjectival opposites (and prior to that by using pronouns like 'we' and 'they'), but I'm finding it remarkable: the degree to which the Japanese are so consistently concrete in comparison to the Euro-American regions of the world. The significance of this very simple feature of difference between the two types of language has just never really dawned on me before.
5 comments:
More power to your Japanese friend for trying - half the time I have difficulty with your English. You use twisty, bizarre grammar and obscure vocabulary. I was raised by an English major mother and my father was even tougher on my grammar, and I learn foreign languages for fun, and have been complimented on my communication skills repeated times, and I'm not dumb, but I had a lot of difficulty following conversations with you, back when we had them. I'm not trying to attack... just saying that maybe sometimes it's not just that the concepts are too complex.
Well, I won't deny that my English is sometimes a bit unorthodox, but to clear up some confusion, I don't think my friend has even read my thesis. She was referring to the papers of fellow students in her major in London.
Hey! It is me what you wrote about. How could you always remember a casual remark about what I did not merely pay much attention to? and which made me flash back and please me. It is like you. It was nice to see you again and , it was just a few days, but I had a great time with you in Kochi. This still flashed me back. I miss those days. Anyways, thank you so much for writing about you and me.
I'm reminded of something I heard about the Greek (ancient or modern or both; I don't really remember) way of thinking about time. Whereas most people I've ever met mostly think of themselves as moving forward along a relatively stationary timeline, these Greeks thought of themselves as stationary, and time constantly overtaking them from behind, so that when they "looked forward" to something in a temporal sense, they were thinking of the past (what had "passed" them, rather than what they themselves had "passed"). It makes sense when you realize that you can only see what is in front of you, just as you can only remember what has already occurred.
I think I've oversimplified here, but it's an interesting point all the same.
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