Practical Manual : Quantitative Expressions in English

Still rare are those 英会話 books that come with audio CD including both English and Japanese spoken aloud. This one, 数量表現の英語トレーニングブック is a good manual for unintended reverse usage, including interpretation training, that is, for learners of the Japanese language. You can download the chapters' list from the publisher's web site.

Noisy Voices from Japan

That the book Voices from Japan ありのままの日本を知る・語る is hailed in the foreward as a breakthrough tells a lot about the untold story that opportunities to listen to next door's people talking in Japanese about things of life is not obvious. Besides the acute lack of choice in Japanese podcasts, normal, non-marketing, non-media intoxicated daily Japanese language, spoken by anyone expect people well known to be famous is a rare resources. The voices space is massively occupied by marketing-marketed-order-made voices. So yes, this collection of short interviews of unknown Japanese on various subjects should be welcome. The closest thing is the Colligan-Taylor Living Japanese book that comes with a DVD. Unfortunately, the recording quality of the audio CD that comes with that new book is appallingly bad, so much that I could hardly recommend it. Why on earth do we have to cope with such bad quality in 2009, in a country, Japan, that spells technology? There might be ways to filter the content, betterize it to some extent, and yes, a few tracks are not perfect but audible. But all in all, listening to the whole is a painful experience. I was thinking to use the CD in my interpretation course but it won't fit in the bad acoustic of the classroom.

Learning to liaise in business

The lucky people at the University of Trieste will have a full day conference on "Mediation at work. Learning to liaise in business" on December 4th. The blurl is here and the program is linked from that page. Now, when will they release teletransportation?

More accelerator : Sight translation

Excellent stuff in French, the doctoral thesis "L'intérêt de l’enseignement de la traduction à vue à des apprenants de FLE" by Jeanne Van Dyk at the University of Pretoria. The part 01part1-sectionA.pdf is especially eloquent with a reference to liaison interpreting.

Accelerators for language acquisition

Shadowing as an accelerating method of language acquisition is spreading beyond English, to new languages in books here in Japan. Publishers are serializing practical approaches books by language. Spanish is the latest to be targeted. Although the scope is not large - only a minority of publishers highlight shadowing - oralization as a necessary practice to move beyond translation based language learning is proving a boon to publishers at large.

Orality and the cretinization of Japanese learners

‘‘The popularity of Japan’s pop culture, such as comics and animation, is contributing to increases in the number of Japanese-language learners.’‘

Is it irreverent to ask whether this tendency is cause for an advanced cretinization of Japanese language learners? I hope it is irreverent.

The other day at my course on French for science and technology, we had a discussion on the pathetically thin volume of free content in Japanese, in the form of podcast, etc. outside the realm of bootleged comics and animation. My students who are on average older than my students of interpretation have had no idea about that fact. After all, when 96% at least of a population is hooked on TV as the major source of content, showing mostly no critical sense, unawareness comes as a natural result. I complained several times in the past about the lack of audio visual resources of "serious" Japanese. You can listen or watch full courses on medicine, IT, mathematics, physics, philosophy for free, thanks to a large choice of podcasts, in English, Fench and some other languages. In Japanese? Nothing. Yes, Tokyo University has videopodcasts, but they are a shame to that institution.

This piece of news, and the attached comments, tell a story of blatant stupidity that is just starting to ooze out. That a majority of learners of Japanese are brought toward Japan for the love of Kittychan & Co. That's where AJATT starts and ends with. It is a well known story that Japanese content available outside Japan has always been massively the result of a pull dynamic, that of fans and marketers looking to develop a market outside Japan. The Japanese government starting with pathetic past PM Aso has been keen to pretend it has applied a push (outside) strategy, but it has mainly played clueless catch-up. The primary receivers of serious Japanese content should be ... the Japanese themselves. After years of following Japanese podcast offering evolution, there are no noticeable changes I can point at. The choice is as before dominated by junk and crap.

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has been pointing the endemic, nay, pandemic cretinization devised and brought forward by marketing. That massively, only cretinizing content reaches the surface of free acquisition tells the level of advancement of marketing action in the core tissue of contemporary Japan. It also shows that cretinization doesn't result in the drying out of intelligent content production. Under the cretinization visible crust lays a deep vein of "serious" content that simply doesn't reach the surface. Academia, universities, associations, federations, organizations of any kind accumulate the production of audiovisual content, recordings of conferences, speeches, debates, courses, etc. Only, they are not dispatched. Even the Japanese association of professional interpreters participate to the cretinization by shutting the blinders close of what oralized content it produces. Passive cretinization is as perverse as active cretinization.

Not a single Japanese university listed in iTunes U tells a tale of ultimate cretinization. That NHK news in Japanese are not available for download in mp3 tells - behind the stale copyright justification - a tale of cretinization. I would prefer to listen to stuttering stultified university professors professing in Japanese than nothing. That even these are nowhere to be found tells a tale of ultimate cretinization. We may need to wait for Chinese universities to invest iTunes U and start see something moving in cretinized Japan. I am not counting on it though.

Neutrality?

Books on community interpreting are full of the neutrality warning. You are just but a linguist, at best, a cultural agent. Only, it doesn't work when I vaguely think I should tell the client I am nothing but your Japanese mouth when I bring you to the police headquarter meet your son, juvenile, who dreamed about Japan while being in Japan and foolishly ended up behind the bar. The father wants to rely on someone's shoulder - BGM : That's what friends are for - asks me if I am available for lunch, wants to be reassured (the lawyer was cold), wants a shot in the arm of vitamin, a gentle slap on the back - BGM : We'll meet again. What machine are you that would slap him back in the face "Sorry dude, i am only but your voice in Japan. Otherwise, I am mute and neutral like a piece of soap". Who would dare behave like that?