Today, one of my advanced and highly motivated students embarked with me on his first foray into Japanese literature: we started reading the short story 「神様」 (“Kamisama,” or “God”), by Hiromi Kawakami. It’s the second time I’ve taught this story, which features a walk to the river with a delightfully polite bear.
It was hard work for him, of course, and it introduced a lot of new grammar his formal textbooks hadn’t covered. This particular student prefers non-fiction to fiction in English, so I’d warned him ahead of time that he might find it frustrating, but over a three-week holiday break he got through the first page just fine. I thought things were going pretty well until he said, “I don’t see how this is helping me speak Japanese.”
I was flabbergasted for a moment. In my head I heard the question, What good is literature? But I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction—it’s never occurred to me to question literature’s usefulness. For me, and for many of my friends, being able to read foreign literature is one of the goals of learning a language. But today, for the first time, I personally witnessed the proof of the theory that you don’t need to care about literature to be passionate about learning a language.
In which case, what good is literature, to the language learner whose interests lie elsewhere?
My answer to my student was that studying this story would help his listening comprehension by introducing him to speech that people use in conversation or on TV, and he’ll now notice them using it and know what it’s doing. And I 100% believe that’s true. I also believe that literature, along with comic books and television, tells you how people actually speak in a way that textbooks don’t. But now that I’m not on the spot anymore, I think there’s more to it than that.
Literature is also good for us so that we don’t fall into ruts. When you’re speaking a language you didn’t learn as a child, it’s dreadfully easy to find yourself recycling the same limited phrases or constructions over and over. Even I find myself sometimes latching on to phrases and developing speech tics I have to force myself to shake off. You see, it’s easy to only use a small portion of what you actually know. To become repetitive, because (1) learning takes repeated practice, and (2) traditional textbooks won’t expose you to anything outside the box.
Fiction is usually where we find the most creative use of language, where authors actively try to put words together in provocative ways. I submit that whatever your level of enjoyment, literature can’t help but expose you to new patterns and new expressions. And so I think that literature can help us go beyond functional into articulate.
What do you think? Have stories been useful to you?
**Yes, in addition to my full-time and freelance translating, I also tutor in the Japanese language. It’s pretty fun. Feel absolutely free to question my work/life balance skills, though.
I absolutely used literature; learned a ton from the Ring series. Parasite Eve was incredibly dense in medical terminology. Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet in Japanese was a rich source of new vocab. Also enjoyed Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Akagawa Jiro. But I hit all those later into my self-learning. Prior to that, my teachers were whoever I met at the izakayas I hit every weekend with an electronic dictionary in one pocket and a memo pad in the other.
I feel like I missed out by not learning from izakayas now! (In more ways than one…)
That’s cool to hear about your literature use, thanks. Japanese literature is crazy hard to hack early in self-learning, I think; it’s so different structurally from our lit that until you already know a ton of Japanese, it all kind of looks like The Sound and the Fury unless you have a guide to hold your hand and teach you the ropes. But before I read my first novel (and started with a light novel), I definitely consumed manga the way some people smoke cigarettes. I’d never read American comic books before and had no idea whether I’d enjoy Japanese ones, but it was SO good for my learning. Ruroni Kenshin had all these different characters with radically different speech styles, and stuff like His and Her Circumstances had a ton of useful things in it that I could actually stick into conversation with people my own age, who for some reason didn’t want to talk about textbook topics like directions to the post office, how to buy an umbrella, etc. So even the fiction that most people don’t think of as “literature” was super helpful for me.
Thank you for sharing your experiences as well! I find it interesting in that it’s a bit different from mine. I was a long-time fan of American comics (the good stuff: Moore, Miller, Wagner, etc.) and found a lot of manga to be not so good by comparison, lacking in plotting and characterization. Two very notable exceptions: Akira (you will learn kanji in ways you never thought possible from that comic) and Shamo, which is brutal and goes in some seriously strange places.
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