Comment by DeOrio

November 7, 2006 @ 8:46 pm

Angelo, Mike, well done, you guys. I hope you both will come back to TPR soon - I’ll give you a better intro when you do.

Comment by ken

November 8, 2006 @ 2:46 am

Hey guys, I liked this a lot. Would have been cool to hear a bit on treatment of Japanese vs. Chinese on using new words for technology, like パソコン vs 電脳. Maybe a future topic?

Comment by Mike Missiaen

November 11, 2006 @ 2:15 am

Thanks for inviting me into you virtual community. I had a great time recording the podcast and also enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Angelo. I feel like his questions and ideas helped me sharpen and clarify the points I was trying to make.

Ken - I think the comparing and contrasting how the Chinese and Japanese deal with new tech and foreign ideas would be an excellent topic, but I’m not the man to address it - I don’t know jack about China. Maybe a conversation between someone who knows China but not Japan and someone (me?) who’s got the opposite knowledge base would be enlightening.

Keep up the great work guys.

Comment by DeOrio

November 11, 2006 @ 12:35 pm

Thanks, Mike. I have a question, though.

Is it really important whether or not loan words, such as ダウンロード (download) are tethered in Japanese or not? I don’t think many English-speakers are coming to the meanings of such words intuitively, more likely they’re exposed to a new concept, exposed to a word that explains it, and they associate the two, like a child learning nouns.
Is it more important to say that someone could infer the meaning of a word or that they are likely to?

Comment by Mike Missiaen

November 12, 2006 @ 8:58 am

Garret -

I think it is significant that the loanwords of the past quarter century are not connected (or tethered - to use my term from the podcast) to the Japanese language for a couple of reasons. First, because adults don’t learn like children and second, because many of these new words are first encountered in written form. Many of the loanwords that refer to computer usage and new technology would first be encountered on websites, in instruction manuals, and written in embossed plastic on the underside of various gadgets. I’ll grant you that imported words for food and clothing and such are learned in the manner you described, but new technical jargon and political ideas are often learned while puzzling through instruction manuals and newsweeklies - times when a knowledge of the prefixes, suffixes, and word formation would normally come into play.

Comment by Ken

November 12, 2006 @ 1:54 pm

Hey Garrett, I think it’s really important that a word is tethered to an idea in English. The example that Mike gave is a good one. People may swicth ‘upload’ and ‘download’ but the fact remains that when they hear either, they know some kind of transmaission is going on. The key here is ‘load’ - which 100% of English speakers will understand. There’s an image in the mind and familiarity with the word at a level that Japanese speakers won’t have.

Comment by Alex

November 15, 2006 @ 2:24 pm

I don’t know if I agree with this “Mike” character wholeheartedly… he assumes that most English speakers (especially young learners who are acquiring new vocabulary) have any real knowledge of root words which they use to decode new nouns. In my experience as an educator, children would have firsthand experience with a word like “computer” or “receiver,” and equate it with a real physical thing, whereas they would have no idea what the verbs “compute” or “receive” mean.

Comment by DeOrio

November 15, 2006 @ 5:00 pm

Thanks, Alex, I agree. I think it’s a similar situation for Japanese adults (although I am in no way implying that children and adults learn languages in the same way.) While I agree with Mike that an English-speaker could guess what a new tech-related word meant by breaking it down, I don’t think they do. Furthermore, by the time you deduce that something might be coming “down” off of the Internet or going “up” onto it, you probably know enough about how it works to have come across “download” and remembered it in the way that you would remember a concrete noun.

Comment by Mike Missiaen

November 17, 2006 @ 3:29 am

Alex, Garret -

I agree that children and teenagers would make direct connections to the word. This happens in any society, in any language. It’s actually integral to my point. Young and old acquire new vocabulary differently and encounter new words in different situations. I’ll grant you that some words are learned in the direct-connection manner, by adults and children - most notably all the words for foreign foods. I mention this in the podcast. However, you’re looking at the acquisiation of words in too general a way. I spoke about loanwords in the context of future shock. You have to imagine the situations when this occurs and ask yourself how you or anyone would process words in those situations. For example: How does one process new words when you read an instruction manual for a digital camera, if you’ve never owned one before? How does one process new words when you are listening to a political ad on the radio? What about when reading in the paper that the グロバルヘルスケアアプリケイションプロジェクット (gurobaru herusukea apurikeishon purojekutto) is getting it’s funding reduced? I maintain that a younger person, due would work through it and realize that the global healthcare application project is getting less money, but an older person would likely through up there hands and wonder what the fuck was happening to the world around them.

Comment by ken

November 17, 2006 @ 3:42 am

Mike rhymes with right.

Even a kid could get that.