I usually don’t make much research before I buy a Japanese novel. Provided reviews are good enough and the topic seems like a fit, I buy it and try and read it.
But, more often than once, I understand after a few pages (sometimes a few lines), that most dialogues of the book I started reading are written in some local Japanese dialect.
I have nothing against said dialects. I am looking forward to understanding as many of them as possible. I also understand that they’re not *that* different from the standard Japanese. But they’re really hard to deal with at this stage of my learning process. Details matter to really understand a sentence, and at this stage it is a challenge for me to grasp “all” of the details even in standard Japanese. But the transposition into a dialect makes it extra-difficult to grasp.
To give you an idea of where I am talking from : I am taking JLPT N1 this December with, I’d say based on the mock exams, a 90% chance to pass it. When I read Higashino Keigo’s novels I use the dictionary mostly to check readings (in preparation of said JLPT). I can read 3000 kanji. But just yesterday, I started reading 孤狼の血, by 柚月裕子, and it’s loaded with Hiroshima dialect. I understand the gist of it, but it is frustrating not to understand the details, the nuances, of it.
So I start wondering if I should give up this book for now, give it a chance later. Or is it worth it struggling through it? Another example of such an experience is 細雪 by 谷崎潤一郎. I gave up after a couple of pages, because it is a classic, I didn’t want to waste it. Yet another example is 火花. I read that one through, but I wonder how much I missed in the process.
I don’t live in Japan (although, I would love to), so all dialects are equally intereresting or uninteresting to me. To me, books are a path to Japanese. Dialects are an oddity in those books. I’m wondering if I should face this oddity or avoid it. But/and I have found no easy way to avoid it except after the fact.
So my questions are:
* Do you know good resources to lookup words, expressions, or grammatical alterations of various regional dialects?
* Did you, in your learning process, dig into dialects? And did that grant you any benefit towards a better understanding of Japanese as a whole?
* Do you know any “reviewer” of novels/books who explicitly mentions whether or not any dialect is heavily present in a book?
* Do you have any thoughts about how, in your own experience, being in touch with dialects interacted positively or negatively with the general goal of becoming fluent in Japanese?
Thanks.
4 comments
I’d say even just a crash course on Kansas Ben is pretty helpful for consuming media. Game Gengo I think does a good job in his Kansai video as well as his Ni no Kuni video.
Depends. Hagrid uses a Tohoku/northern dialect to reflect his speech in Japanese Harry Potter, for example.
Recognizing how some words are slurred together across dialects can help with how words are spoken IRL/
I used to work with a bunch of people from Kansai despite having never studied Kansai-ben, so I made an effort to do that. Then I got someone from Ehime-ken and their dialect was even harder to understand. I remember the first time I understood someone in Kansai-ben, when my boss walked up to me and said 呼ばれへんかった？ He would often switch to standard for me, but it was really nice to know I could understand his actual dialect.
There’s a [website for Kansai-ben](http://www.kansaiben.com/) that does a pretty good job, and then I just researched the Ehime-ken one when I needed to, so the stuff exists on the internet, but I doubt there’s one website that collects it all.
[Except I did find this cool website](https://hougen.u-biq.org/hiroshima.html) that has some of the features of some of the major dialects.
I wouldn’t say learning dialects helps with better understanding overall. It helps with that dialect. Like, learning all the British words for foods isn’t really going to help you understand American ones. It could actually cause confusion if you’re not aware there are differences (I once encountered a non-native English speaker online who was incredibly offended that Americans didn’t understand her when she asked if there was a chemist nearby, she didn’t realize Americans wouldn’t really have heard that word used that way unless they’d been to the UK or were Anglophiles). But since the different dialects do appear in media, knowing the primary featurs of the major dialects would be useful. And Japanese isn’t quite the same, since you can always just fall back on standard Japanese, whereas there’s not a standard English, so I don’t see it hurting to learn it.
I’m personally just okay with the ambiguity. Eventually things will come to make sense, because the way sentences are constructed stay the same. You don’t have to lookup stuff like やねん or ほんで to understand its use in context if you know that’s where なんだよ or それで usually go. There’s always new stuff to learn, and it’s a shame to stop yourself from enjoying something just because you don’t have it down perfectly.