Basic Technical Japaneseby Edward E. Daub; R. Byron Bird; Nobuo Inoue

Basic Technical Japanese by Edward E. Daub; R. Byron Bird; Nobuo InoueReview by: Kiyoko MoritaThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Apr., 1992), pp. 52-59Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489447 .

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Volume 26, Number 1 Volume 26, Number 1

of shinuredo as shinda keredomo and the mis-identification of the tra- ditional Japanese months as equivalent to January, February, etc. All three reviewers thought the volume a bit pricey for a required student purchase, one noting sadly "Anything published in Japan is a strain on student pursestrings." All three noted that Helen Craig McCullough's Bungo Manual is much less expensive and one said that, viewed strictly as a reference, it is more convenient to use. M.U.

REVIEW FORUM

BASIC TECHNICAL JAPANESE, by Edward E. Daub, R. Byron Bird, and Nobuo Inoue. The University of Wisconsin Press; University of Tokyo Press, 1990. Pp. xii + individually paginated chapters. $35.

Reviewed by Kiyoko Morita

This assessment of Basic Technical Japanese is based on my experience teaching the technical Japanese course at MIT during the summers of 1990 and 1991.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether linguists or scientists are better qualified to teach Japanese language dealing with technical matters. There are very few teachers who have both linguistic and technical backgrounds. It is therefore no easy task to write a textbook on technical Japanese, especially one that is suitable for students with varying backgrounds. This ambitious textbook is the first comprehensive text dealing solely with technical topics, i.e., science and engineer- ing. The authors know the audience and its needs well and are clearly focused on the goal of achieving reading proficiency. Each of the authors has a background in both the Japanese language and a scientific discipline. The tone and the layout of the book provide encouragement for the scientists and engineers who are often more concerned with the skills needed to stay abreast of rapidly changing technical information than with developing strong oral-aural skills.

The book proposes "to teach scientists and engineers with no previ- ous background in Japanese how to make accurate English translations of Japanese technical abstracts, research publications, and reference

of shinuredo as shinda keredomo and the mis-identification of the tra- ditional Japanese months as equivalent to January, February, etc. All three reviewers thought the volume a bit pricey for a required student purchase, one noting sadly "Anything published in Japan is a strain on student pursestrings." All three noted that Helen Craig McCullough's Bungo Manual is much less expensive and one said that, viewed strictly as a reference, it is more convenient to use. M.U.

REVIEW FORUM

BASIC TECHNICAL JAPANESE, by Edward E. Daub, R. Byron Bird, and Nobuo Inoue. The University of Wisconsin Press; University of Tokyo Press, 1990. Pp. xii + individually paginated chapters. $35.

Reviewed by Kiyoko Morita

This assessment of Basic Technical Japanese is based on my experience teaching the technical Japanese course at MIT during the summers of 1990 and 1991.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether linguists or scientists are better qualified to teach Japanese language dealing with technical matters. There are very few teachers who have both linguistic and technical backgrounds. It is therefore no easy task to write a textbook on technical Japanese, especially one that is suitable for students with varying backgrounds. This ambitious textbook is the first comprehensive text dealing solely with technical topics, i.e., science and engineer- ing. The authors know the audience and its needs well and are clearly focused on the goal of achieving reading proficiency. Each of the authors has a background in both the Japanese language and a scientific discipline. The tone and the layout of the book provide encouragement for the scientists and engineers who are often more concerned with the skills needed to stay abreast of rapidly changing technical information than with developing strong oral-aural skills.

The book proposes "to teach scientists and engineers with no previ- ous background in Japanese how to make accurate English translations of Japanese technical abstracts, research publications, and reference

52 52



Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

works" (p. ix). One must note, however, that making "accurate English translations" is a method used by the authors to measure skill in reading and is not the ultimate goal of the book. It should be emphasized that the process of translating to check one's own understanding of material is very different from translating a document into another lan-

guage for general consumption. It should therefore be made clear that this book does not train the student in the art of translation, but uses translation as a tool in developing reading comprehension.

Language teaching traditionally focuses on the acquisition of four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The book focuses almost exclusively on "translation," i.e., reading. From the outset, it introduces the reader to Japanese kana and kanji, avoiding the use of ro- manization. This helps students immediately familiarize themselves with authentic Japanese written materials, an approach I wholeheart- edly endorse. In fact, the emphasis on reading is so pronounced that, as the authors put it, readers "will be able to read about neutrons, halides, integrals, and computers, but . . . will not be able to buy a train ticket, ask about the nearest noodle shop, or savor the subtleties of Japanese poetry" (p. x). Although one of the strengths of this textbook is its focus on reading comprehension, this only reinforces the way in which engineers and scientists approach a foreign language. Handling technical materials seldom requires the skills to judge the kind of subtleties that exist in poetry, or in the use of honorifics. However, the ability to understand such aspects of spoken Japanese should not be so easily dis- missed or discouraged, even by scientists and engineers; such skills may often be called upon in making accurate translations.

The book has reserved many pages for information intended to make the book "wholly self-contained" (p. ix). For example, the section containing large printed kanji certainly makes the book look impres- sive; I feel, however, that this space could be better used for expanding the sections on grammar, or in providing some basic survival conversa- tional expressions. It seems unlikely that anyone interested in translat-

ing technical Japanese materials would be totally uninterested in the

spoken aspects of the Japanese language, or in being able to handle a simple task of, say, asking for directions to the nearest computer shop.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not quite agree with the authors' approach of emphasizing kanji over grammar. Because this is a major ele- ment of the book, I should discuss this point further. I commend the authors for having so carefully selected the kanji most frequently used in technical articles. But it is unfortunate that the authors emphasize kanji as being the major challenge to reading Japanese. In my opinion, the book places far too much emphasis on learning kanji at the expense

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Volume 26, Number 1

of grammar. Once the student learns how to use a dictionary and under- stands the general rules of forming kanji compounds, kanji are not as much of an obstacle as the book makes them seem. Indeed, from my experience, it is grammar that seems to pose a greater problem for students.

Owing to the authors' conviction that kanji is the major obstacle to reading technical Japanese, grammar in general is neglected. I found the grammar explanations to be too short and overly simplified. A number of the materials that I used in my class gave students difficulty because many Japanese engineers and scientists are not good writers; spoken and written grammatical rules were mixed, and paragraphs were often filled with long run-on sentences. Because of this kind of irregularity in authentic technical materials, the authors' explanations of, for example the "connective" and "conjunctive" forms of verbs and adjectives in

Chapter 9, are inadequate. For example, the conjunctive adjective form "-ku," rather than the connective form "-kute," is quite common in written materials, a fact not emphasized by the authors.

Another example of inadequate presentation of grammar, in Chap- ter 10, is the explanation of "provisional" and "conditional" forms. Here the authors mention that the provisional form -ba and particle to are more common in technical Japanese than the conditional form -tara, but they omit the further explanation of the provisional use of to, stat- ing simply that it was already mentioned earlier (there is a sentence explaining this grammatical function and one example sentence on p. 7- 20. The particle to is often troublesome to students because it may appear many times within a single sentence, serving a number of grammatical functions; to may be used to connect nouns, as a quotative, or as a provisional.

The selected reading materials cover a wide range of technical fields, and are presented in small units, such as a phrase or sentence, as well as in longer paragraphs and passages. This format, combined with exercises and tests, is a reasonable means of building up a student's level of competence. However, I do not agree with the use of English words in parentheses in the selected practice materials. The original materials should be presented as they are and not with English interpretations. The English words too easily draw the student's attention away from the kanji and disrupt the smooth flow of the material. If the authors feel that it is important for the text to be "self-contained" and serve as a dictionary, then a separate vocabulary list, on the same page or the next page, would be preferable.

Where a student of technical Japanese should begin his or her study will always be the subject of debate. Certainly one should not dwell on

54




E. Jorden's JSL, but perhaps it would not be such a bad idea to begin with a conventional presentation of fundamental Japanese, and then focus on developing a specific set of skills. Basic Technical Japanese has many unique and useful features: chapters on mathematical and chemical

terminology, reading exercises in a variety of technical subjects, lists of technical katakana words, a list of kanji frequently used in technical articles, and tables of verbs and adjective forms, to name just a few. I have no doubt that this book will serve as a valuable reference or as a textbook to be used with the assistance of a language instructor, but not as a "wholly self-contained" text for self-study. I have the feeling that those who are enticed into beginning the study of Japanese from the technical side will soon realize that it will take much more effort to work through the book than the authors claim. As the Japanese proverb warns: "Isogaba maware." When in a hurry, try a detour.

* * * * *

After soliciting and receiving Professor Morita's review of this volume, we were approached by a group of scientists who had been using it to study Japanese and thought that our readers might be interested in their reactions. We are delighted to have the opportunity to present double discussion of a textbook, judged from the points of view of both teachers and learners. M.U.

Comments by: David Fahy, Mark A. Matthews, Gary M. Smith, and Richard F. Walters

For the past six months, we have been working through Basic Tech- nical Japanese (BTJ) and have found it an excellent guide in many ways. We offer here our observations, made from the vantage point of the student and the scientist, on the book's strengths and some of its weakness- es. Three of us are research scientists determined to make Japanese a working professional tool. Prior to studying with BTJ, we each had elsewhere learned the fundamentals of general Japanese and had come to the point when we were ready to concentrate on written Japanese. BTJ seemed well suited to our needs: it revises the set of 500 kanji introduced in Comprehending Technical Japanese (Wisconsin, 1975, the author's earlier reader, designed for scientists who already have a general knowledge of basic Japanese), and like the earlier volume, presents technical vocabulary and a variety of practice material. Equally valu-

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Volume 26, Number 1

able to us has been BTJ's descriptions of basic Japanese grammar. The brief, usually very careful and precise grammatical descriptions have served as excellent review and, indeed, have made clear for us much that had been less so before. The descriptions are often so brief, however, and the exercise material for the grammar so scarce, that we won- der if our needs are not better served by this book than the beginners for whom it is intended.

Our procedure is to study on our own a designated portion of the textbook and then to meet as a group once a week with our fourth mem- ber, a professional Japanese language teacher, who answers our ques- tions and goes through some of the reading exercises with us. We have found BTJ to be an invaluable guide; without it, none of us would have the skill we now possess to handle even somewhat sophisticated Japa- nese technical writing. Of course, we find the book not free of problems inherent in any such textbook intended for a wide audience. And we find it not free of many problems it has created for itself.

Among the problems inherent in a textbook of this sort are decisions about the fields of science to be included and about how technical to make the examples. Our group includes a biologist, a chemist, and a computer scientist. While working on any particular reading passage, one person might be fully engaged while the other two are all but yawning. The trick, we feel, is to have examples that are sophisticated and authentic but also at a level general enough to engage everyone. As often as not, the examples in BTJ seem to err toward one extreme or the other. Those having to do with chemistry and physics-by far the most prominently represented fields in the book-tend to be quite specialized, leaving even our chemist on occasion wondering what the writers were getting at. The few biological examples in the main grammar chapters are notable for their extreme simplicity, but perhaps this is to be preferred. All the examples and readings in the main grammar chapters, we feel, would be best written with a less specialized scientific reader in mind. That way the science is unlikely to confuse the student when the Japanese does not.

As far as we can tell, the science in the examples is nearly com- pletely free of error. A sentence in the exercise on p. 9-25 states that not all chemical reactions are exothermic, although most of them are. (Kagaku-hanno no zenbu ga hatsunetsu-hann6 de wa nai ga, sono dai- bubun wa soo de aru.) This is not true. Since the direction you write a chemical reaction is arbitrary, there is an equal number of exothermic and endothermic reactions. In a mistranslation of another example, we are told that "plants are always breathing in atmospheric carbon diox- ide" (p. 13-25). Plants, of course, do not breathe, and the Japanese sui-

56




ireru does not require this translation. The same essay as misleadingly refers to "the velocity of the photosynthesis." But these lapses are rare. Much more common, especially in the early chapters, are state- ments that do not seem to say anything. Example sentences like Koon no kotai wa taihen atsui ("High-temperature solids are very hot," p. 8- 21), and K6on wa atsui ga, taion wa atsuku nai (High temperatures are hot; body temperatures are not," p. 7-24) are surprisingly common and at first made us question our understanding of the Japanese. When we no- ticed their repeated occurrence, we wondered if such tautologies were characteristic of technical Japanese. The authors let them pass without comment.

Another problem having to do with across-field interest is the se- lection of vocabulary introduced in each chapter. Vocabulary in BTJ is learned through kanji. Each chapter introduces a set of new kanji (20 each in most chapters, somewhat more in the later ones), and then for each new kanji presents compounds in which the kanji appear. Several chapters introduced more than a hundred such compounds, all of which had to be learned before going on to the practice material. We feel the authors could have found a more helpful way to present the kanji and the compounds than merely listing them with their English glosses. Many of the compounds are so field-specific that those of us in other fields spent little time learning them and thus tended not to learn well the individual kanji used to write them. Much more helpful to all of us, we feel, would be to replace the simple glosses in the kanji lists with short descriptions of the basic meanings of the kanji, coupled with a discussion of how these concepts are applied in words from as many fields as possible. With this firmer sense of each kanji's range of meaning and usage, all users of the book would be more likely to learn every kanji and to spend time going over the list of example compounds, which in the book's present lists include many specialized words, even jargon, mostly from the fields of physics and chemistry.

Why need the vocabulary be so specialized? Why not focus on a more general science vocabulary in the main chapters and leave the more field-specific terms for the later vocabulary build-up chapters? The same could be asked of the contents of the reading passages. Why not focus on more general subjects in the body of the book and leave the jargon-filled, specialized essays for the end? Why not more passages, and more vocabulary, on basic biology, for example, or basic engineer- ing, or geology or astronomy? Geology is strangely absent from the book but would seem to be an excellent subject for non-specialized essays ac- cessible and interesting for people in all fields.

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Volume 26, Number 1

There are other problems with the vocabulary. Very little is to be found on the principles of compound formation except a few unhelpful comments in the introduction. ("TAIYOO combines TAI, meaning 'fat and burly,' and YOO, the positive principle of activity and brightness in Chinese philosophy: thus, 'sun.'") Also, having learned as many as 200 words in any one chapter just to get to the practice material at the end-we count the kanji compounds, the single-kanji words in the kanji charts, and the additional, usually non-scientific vocabulary scattered in short lists throughout the chapters-we then find it frustrating to encounter so many reading passages sprinkled with bracketed English glosses for yet additional new vocabulary. There is also a great deal of forward referenced vocabulary and kanji not caught in proofreading. It would be simple enough to look up these words, but one turns only with the greatest reluctance to the strangely conceived and hard-to-get-at indexes here. In fact, if there were one improvement we would most want for this book, it would be the replacement of the existing indexes with one comprehensive Japanese index and a more complete subject index in English.

The authors of BTJ are convinced that "mastery of the kanji is the most difficult part of learning to read Japanese" (p. ix). They further assume that "the grammar is easier than that of most European lan- guages" (p. x). Our experience goes against both of these assumptions. We feel very strongly about this point. Grammar is not just a matter of conjugations and case markings. Nor is written Japanese, as the authors too often seem to think, a matter only of the system of kana and kanji. Our experience is that kanji is not the problem in learning to read Japanese, technical or otherwise; the main problem is the "grammar," if we understand this to include the way sentences are put together and, stretching it a bit, the way sentences are put together to form dis- course-the logic of the language, that is, and the various styles in which this logic is made to work.

BTJ has far too little to say about the way sentences are put together, and nothing to say about the way passages and whole essays are constructed. Each chapter in BTJ's predecessor, Comprehending Technical Japanese, contains a central essay that the authors use as a main teaching tool. Along with a vocabulary list, complete romaniza- tion, and additional example sentences further illustrating important constructions, there are notes to the essay in which the authors comment on vocabulary and grammar. It is unfortunate that BTJ does not retain this sort of annotation. We would have liked to see it not only retained but expanded to include discussion of the style of the writing and how it differs from Western technical writing and non-technical Japanese. As

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Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

it is, the only commentary we get is what comes through implicitly in the translations. And for the great majority of the practice readings, there are not even translations.

In much the same way that the kanji lists offer no more than read-

ings and English glosses for the the new material, too much of this book remains on the surface of technical Japanese, overly concerned with the

writing system and the words used to write technical Japanese, and dis-

appointingly little with the way technical Japanese works. We feel

disappointment, but at the same time we are deeply thankful, because without Basic Technical Japanese we would not now be in position to be-

gin exploring beneath the surface on our own.

NTC'S BASIC JAPANESE: A COMMUNICATIVE PROGRAM IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE, Level 1, by Lynn Williams. Lincoln- wood, Illinois: National Textbook Company, 1992. Pp. xi + 347. $26.60 (hardbound).

Reviewed by Hiroshi Nara

In the introduction to this textbook, Williams says that Basic

Japanese embodies years of experience in Japanese teaching and that it is a response to a need for communicative Japanese. It is supposed to con- tain a number of lively, stimulating, and communicative activities. Williams also says that the book has been designed to be completed in one academic year. Also claimed is that all four skills (speaking, lis-

tening, reading, and writing) are developed from day one. No claim is made in the book itself as to what level this book is suitable for. The

publisher, however, says that it is intended for college instruction and that the three-volume Basic Japanese will cover essentially the same material as Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part I. The first volume, Level 1, is out and the other two volumes will follow shortly.

The book is divided into nine topical sections, and each section contains two to ten smaller chapters called units. These ten topical sections are "Greetings" (3 units); "In the Classroom" (7 units); "School Life" (5 units); "Time, Days and Numbers" (9 units); "The Weather" (3 units and an "extension unit"); "Myself and Others" (8 units); "Families and

it is, the only commentary we get is what comes through implicitly in the translations. And for the great majority of the practice readings, there are not even translations.

In much the same way that the kanji lists offer no more than read-

ings and English glosses for the the new material, too much of this book remains on the surface of technical Japanese, overly concerned with the

writing system and the words used to write technical Japanese, and dis-

appointingly little with the way technical Japanese works. We feel

disappointment, but at the same time we are deeply thankful, because without Basic Technical Japanese we would not now be in position to be-

gin exploring beneath the surface on our own.

NTC'S BASIC JAPANESE: A COMMUNICATIVE PROGRAM IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE, Level 1, by Lynn Williams. Lincoln- wood, Illinois: National Textbook Company, 1992. Pp. xi + 347. $26.60 (hardbound).

Reviewed by Hiroshi Nara

In the introduction to this textbook, Williams says that Basic

Japanese embodies years of experience in Japanese teaching and that it is a response to a need for communicative Japanese. It is supposed to con- tain a number of lively, stimulating, and communicative activities. Williams also says that the book has been designed to be completed in one academic year. Also claimed is that all four skills (speaking, lis-

tening, reading, and writing) are developed from day one. No claim is made in the book itself as to what level this book is suitable for. The

publisher, however, says that it is intended for college instruction and that the three-volume Basic Japanese will cover essentially the same material as Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part I. The first volume, Level 1, is out and the other two volumes will follow shortly.

The book is divided into nine topical sections, and each section contains two to ten smaller chapters called units. These ten topical sections are "Greetings" (3 units); "In the Classroom" (7 units); "School Life" (5 units); "Time, Days and Numbers" (9 units); "The Weather" (3 units and an "extension unit"); "Myself and Others" (8 units); "Families and

59 59



Documents

Basic Technical Japaneseby Edward E. Daub; R. Byron Bird; Nobuo Inoue