So, background, I grew up speaking Japanese at home. I live in the States, and my family emigrated circa ~1947. My grandma (whom I was raised by/learned Japanese from) was born in 1928 or thereabouts and came from a small village in Hokkaido. (I tried looking it up but can’t find it.)
So growing up, I was exposed to standard Japanese (through various sources) but have never visited Japan or spoken Japanese with anyone outside of my immediate family. I was pretty much raised in a language bubble, I guess.
Smash cut to earlier today. A neighbor is hosting a Japanese exchange student and knows I speak the language. Thinks it’ll be cool for her to know me. I meet her (a college student) and just start talking. She’s super silent, and I wonder if I’m doing something wrong. Then she says, in English, “It’s hard to understand you.”
So I’m sitting there, confused. I’m speaking normal Japanese (or so I think), and she can’t understand me. I try to use standard but I’ve grown up speaking this way and I’ve never really spoken it, only heard it on occasion. And I start to think that I actually don’t know Japanese.
As it turns out, learning Japanese from a pre-WWII old lady from a teeny tiny village makes me sound like a pre-WWII old lady from a teeny tiny village. Her dialect has a lot of archaic words, grammar, that sort of thing. A lot of loan words from Russian that aren’t used in standard Japanese too.
So… I’m wondering if learning standard (I keep calling it that but I’m not sure if that’s the right word) would be easier or harder for me. I want to learn it, especially how to read and write, but I’m kind of scared that even if I do, I’ll still be the old man out whenever I open my mouth.
Edit: Wasn’t expecting people to be that interested in this lol. I’m going to try and record myself but I also might have videos of my grandma speaking, if that’s better.
by internetgeriatric
36 comments
Having a good intuitive knowledge of how the grammar works and being able to already understand the language can only make it easier for you. A lot of people who learn Japanese have nothing to go off of.
Learning standard should be pretty easy, at least compared to learning without already knowing Japanese. Pretty much everyone in Japan does it, after all, and without much trouble. You’ll already know a lot of the fundamental structure. If you are fluent speaking with your family, you might be able to pick up the modern language simply by watching Netflix or Youtube… although the without being able to read, navigating will be difficult … I believe you have to set your Netflix UI to Japanese for the Japanese subs & dubs to even show up, and you won’t see anything in Japanese on YouTube without searching in Japanese, or using a VPN to pretend you are in Japan. So, probably you will end up having to do some formal study to learn the written language.
A lot of small villages in Japan have ceased to exist, so you may never find your grandmother’s village, unfortunately. If a village has a small population to start with, it doesn’t take a whole lot of people deciding to seek careers in the city to depopulate it. It may be on an old map though, so perhaps you can at least find the site, but it may involving looking at the maps in Hokkaido museums.
Naturally the Japanese language has changed a lot in 100 years (esp post-war), so even if your grandma wasn’t from a tiny village in Hokkaido, the way she speaks is probably a bit archaic. Language changes super fast. Just think about how fast slang words come in and out of fashion in English – same goes for Japanese.
Post-war there was much more standardization of Japanese language. But of course it took longer to reach the furthest reaches of the north, so there are still dialects that most Japanese people can’t understand. Just google Tsugaru-ben in Aomori for a modern example. And assuming your exchange student is young and possibly urban-raised, they probably haven’t been exposed to many dialects.
Regarding her village, there were many local government mergers in the last 30 years so it may not exist on a map anymore. It’s probably a subdivision of some nearby town or city now. If you know the region of Hokkaido you may be able to find it but it would probably take some investigation.
Before switching to standard, PLEASE record yourself. This is history of a small place you cannot find easily! I’m sure there will be a time you will want to look back on it, or even submit for linguistic evaluation!
As others have said before, please record yourself and write down the origin of your family. It’d be an amazing linguistic study! It would be good to compare to modern people from the region too
From what I understand ‘standard Japanese’ or ‘NHK’ Japanese is probably the proper English for it. 標準語 (ひょうじゅんご) my teacher says it’s basically the dialect used in government and NHK.
Absolutely hold onto that dialect though, definitely record you and anyone else in your family who is willing, and maybe even see if there is a museum or university in that region who would want to preserve it. That’s really cool!
Surely there are groups in Japan that are interested in this stuff, and archiving it or historical purposes. I’m sure they would be very interested in talking to you before you relearn
There are gender differences and regional dialects in Japanese language.
Post ww2 entered an era where there was a huge push for cultrual and linguistic homogeneity. My grandma was shipped to a cultural reeducation school in mainland japan from okinawa in an effort to wipe out indigenous, native dialects in favor of a more universal form of Japanese.
To this day, as a native yanbaru-japanese speaker, it’s hard to understand northern and city folks’ dialects/accents.
Your experience I’ve seen happen a lot in Hawai’i – there were a plethora of old school Japanese and Okinawans who moved to Hawai’i and that timeline of language was encapsulated. I’ve visited family in Hawai’i and I can’t understand the old school Japanese or Okinawan speakers there; it just from a totally different era.
I, like many people here, would highly encourage yoh to document the language you learned for linguistic anthropological and etymological* reasons. The version of the language you speak is important!
As a native Russian speaker, I’m very interested in those loaned words you mentioned. Can you please provide a couple of examples?
The only Russian word used in Japanese that I know of is イクラ (salmon roe or caviar).
Wait. So you said you’ve heard standard Japanese before… but you never thought “wow that sounds really different from how my family and I speak”?? How did it take you so long to realize this lol
What part of Hokkaido is your grandma from? Can you give me some examples of the Japanese you learned? I live in Hokkaido and I’m pretty fluent in old Hokkaido people Japanese.
Since Japanese pioneers came to Hokkaido from all over Japan in the late 1800s, the people here more or less speak the standard Japanese dialect. They needed to in order to understand each other. That doesn’t mean there is no Hokkaido dialect, there definitely is, but it’s not as unintelligible as say the Tohoku dialect. You can pick up standard Japanese very easily I think.
i’d love to hear a voice sample with examples!
Ha. My wife has the same exact issue in Cantonese. When we went to Hong Kong, people started responding to her in English.
Wow this sounds super interesting!
Maybe it’s the Kuril Ainu or other non-Japanese ethnic groups.
My mother told me that she once met a Kuril Ainu when she worked at the Akasaka Prince Hotel.
He apparently moved to Tokyo after World War II because he could not live in his hometown.
He didn’t speak any of the Ainu language, though, and apparently had no intention of returning to his homeland.
(He was troubled, however, that he could not visit his family’s grave in Kuril.)
Please please please give an example? If not audio could you reply 日本語で with an aisatsu? A short jikoshoukai? I’m dying to hear some examples.
What pronouns did you grow up with?
How do you conjugate verbs? Like how would you say “I’m on the way to the store” “I went to the store” “I will go to the store”
This is pretty similar to why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice was dubbed over by another actor on German releases of his films. His regional Austrian accent made him sound like a country boy to native German speakers, rather than what you’d expect from an action hero.
Interesting, let me hear how you speak in 日本語. I can speak both 現代日本語 modern Japanese and 古典日本語classic Japanese.
Would you mind sharing the name of the village? I’d be interested in seeing if I could find it somehow using more local sources. I’m sure others would be interested too. That said, if sharing it publicly is a no go, but you’d be willing to share it privately, please send me a PM. I’d love to dig into it if I can.
That’s amazing, my family is in a similar situation. Grandmother was born in 1926 and apparently some of the phrases we learned from her are very formal and archaic. We never really learned to fully speak Japanese though.
She also spent most of her time in Japan in Tokyo so I don’t think we have any regionalisms.
That’s really cool. I’d love to hear you speak. I have noticed that same thing in many nisei/sansei. I’ve also noticed many nisei and sansei retain older cultural thinking as well. Japan has changed a lot and continues with rapid change so the nisei/sansei are linguistically and culturally lost at times when they go back. The rigid roles and expectations put on people in Japan have relaxed a lot over the last 50-100 years.
It should be easy to bring yourself up to date though. Imagine a time traveler from 1950 America coming to 2024. It would take a bit but they would adjust.
Op, I’m still learning too but I’m actually laughing out loud at “turns out, learning Japanese from a pre-wwii old lady from a teeny tiny village makes me sound like a pre-wwii old lady from a teeny tiny village”
Is your grandmother Ainu? Maybe you’re speaking Ainu language?
I’m so fascinated by this!
What an intriguing story! Thank you for sharing. Super inquisitive like the others about what your Japanese sounds like, haha.
curious, could you understand her, or did she sound weird to you at all?
You should reach out to some universities. I can imagine professors of linguistics and/or the Japanese language and anthropology may be very interested!
i major in linguistics and i find this hella interesting lmao, like what many have said here please record yourself speaking that dialect!
Just wanted to chime in that this is actually super cool. You’ve kept a piece of your ancestry and history with you!
If you go to Japan for a year, you will easily be able to rephrase those words. The first hurdle is knowing.
Coming from someone who lived in Japan 20 years and learned the language there.
Slowly putting together some more stuff for you guys. Spoke with my aunt, and she’s coming by some time next month so I’ll ask her history stuff then.
Some of the vocab differences that I see after poking around in dictionaries (again, I can’t read or write Japanese so I’m going entirely off of how it sounds to me) are:
写真 or 活動 -> movie (Saw that these mean photograph or “moving picture” lol)
ちょっち ちょっち -> My grandma would say this and I think it meant “come here” or at least that’s how I’d always interpret it.
蛍光灯 -> This or something similar is what my grandma would call us sometimes. I always thought it meant “dummy” and I guess I was close lol
故人 -> These were my grandma’s friends she’d invite over. It means… the deceased?!
Again, these are all copy pasted from online dictionaries based off of how I think it’s pronounced. I have no clue how it was written.
I kind of hope OP is in an Amish community, and speaks only Amish English.
Consider contacting a university with a Japanese linguistics department to see if they would want an example of the dialect.
It might sound/feel narcissistic but you’d be doing them a favor if they are missing/ have limited samples of the dialect.
Regional dialects are still very common in Japan (based on what my Japanese friends tell me.)
The recent generations (even those in Tokyo) are actually struggling with keigo and kanji as the former isn’t used as commonly and the use of digital correspondence has reduced the practice of handwriting kanji.
I’m not sure anymore about what “standard” is called, but we’ve always referred to it as Tokyo dialect (or NHK-speak 😂.)
Can you read and write? Notice any differences there?
That’s super cool but yeah you probably sound old timey and country ish