"More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"

[Harold F. Schiffman]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Laura Miller wrote:

> Yes, poor Roy Miller has been criticized for openly expressing his anger, but he was not alone in his desire to counter the many bizarre folk theories about the Japanese language that were (and still are!) so widely popular, although he went about it with a rather raw and seething tone that we are taught not to use in academic writing. Harumi Befu and Peter Dale have also documented the popular media consumption of this form of  "theorizing the Japanese" (nihonjinron), and much of it is indeed quite racist.
> Related to his sentiment that :
> "he found it always disconcerted people who couldn't accept the idea that foreigners could
> speak Japanese; it just shouldn't have been possible, given what the popular conceptions were,"
> I once wrote an article about the fashionableness of Japanese-speaking foreigners on TV, which on the face of it would seem to contradict this notion, but which in fact serves to buttress it:
> "Crossing ethnolinguistic boundaries: A preliminary look at the gaijin tarento in Japan."
> In Asian Popular Culture, edited by John Lent, Westview Press, New York, 162-173,1995.

Roy mentions this, I think, in his book--about how "amusing" the Japanese
find it is when gaijin speak Japanese, e.g. in the media. Apparently there
are some Turkish people who settled in Japan after WWI, and they now speak
Japanese fluently; they are constantly brought in to "shock" people on TV
programs, usually just with walk-on parts, never anything serious. Roy
quoted a term for this, which I can't remember.  But it's sort of like
"these are our little pet monkeys, they speak Japanese, how amusing!"

I must say I have the same problem in India, trying to speak Tamil. Nobody
ever misunderstands me on the telephone, or even asks anything about who I
am etc. but then I go in person to the travel agency or whatever to get my
ticket and they can't figure out who I am, or even understand my Tamil.
Sometimes they even "Tamilize" my name, i.e. I become "Dr. Sivaram". It
gets a little annoying, and sometimes I don't even bother to try to speak,
if it's a short encounter, because I don't feel like being "funny" or
having to explain my whole life story.  For Miller, whose Japanese was
much better than my Tamil, and who lived for years in Japan, and never
succeeded in convincing the Japanese that he was anything but a weird
phenomenon, it was truly annoying.

HS

 >
>
> >>> "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu> 07/01/03 09:54 AM >>>
> Thanks Laura for clearing this up; I only knew about it from Miller's
> writing, and he characterized it as racist; he was somebody who had spent
> a lifetime studying Japanese, spoke it fluently (like a native, I was told
> by some native speakers) but loathed all the cottage industry stuff that
> was so popular in the Japanese popular press, and was out to demolish it
> wherever possible.  Because he spoke Japanese so well he found it always
> disconcerted people who couldn't accept the idea that foreigners could
> speak Japanese; it just shouldn't have been possible, given what the
> popular conceptions were.
>
> HS
>
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Laura Miller wrote:
>
> > The study Hal refers to was from a book by Tadanobu Tsunoda, entitled
> > "Nihonjin no no: No no hataraki to tozai no bunka" (1978), it was later
> > translated and published as "The Japanese Brain, Uniqueness and
> > Universality" (Translated by Yoshinori Oiwa, Tokyo, Japan: Taishukan
> > Publishing Company, 1985). Tsunoda is an otolaryngologist who made up an
> > odd "tapping method" to determine which hemisphere of the brain
> > processes sounds and language. He claimed that Japanese process some
> > sounds, especially music and natural sounds such as insect chips,
> > differently than Westerners, thereby making them more in tune with
> > nature. He doesn't claim that the Japanese brain is superior, or that
> > the difference is genetic, just that it develops in a different way
> > because of the "unique"  nature of the Japanese language. The book was
> > awful science, but the Japanese reading public loved it! It made the
> > bestseller list and went through several reprintings. Tsunoda and his
> > perplexing brain testing apparatus are featured in a short vignette in
> > the film Sukiyaki & Chips: The Japanese Sounds of Music.
> >
> >
> > >>> "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu> 07/01/03 08:07 AM >>>
> > This business reminds me of claims made years ago, and reported by Roy
> > Andrew Miller in his book "Japan's Modern Myth: the Language and Beyond"
> > that Japanese also supposedly used different parts of the brain, and
> > therefore was cognitively different from every other language on earth.
> > Miller tried to show that this was part of Japanese agendas to show some
> > kind of deep cultural superiority of the Japanese; at least it was
> > 'racist' (covertly maybe).  The "research" done in Japan even showed that
> > Japanese Americans did not use the same parts of their brains as did
> > Japanese speaking Japanese, etc. etc.  Supposedly this also had to do with
> > the difference in writing, and it explained (as Peter points out for
> > Chinese) why the Japanese have such difficulty learning other languages.
> >
> > Hal Schiffman
> >
> > On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Patrick, Peter L wrote:
> >
> > > i haven't seen more than the news items, which are obviously badly reported
> > > by Reuters, the BBC and the Guardian (eg English speakers use "half their minds")--
> > > those supposedly intellectually-superior organs of the British press...
> > > (not that i can see much evidence for that, as a regular reader!)
> > >
> > > Eg, the inference that Mandarin is "harder to learn" than English appears to derive
> > > from an off-the-cuff remark the researcher made about adult SLA of Chinese by
> > > English speakers -- not from any research reported. And the "long-held theories"
> > > that this "overturns" are not described or identified.
> > >
> > > While it's nice when research confirm things one suspects, there doesn't
> > > appear to be anything else new here -- certainly not the speculation that lexical
> > > tone involves music-like properties -- you have to wonder what it is that
> > > made the researchers (psychologists, apparently) "very surprised"!
> > >
> > > Rudi's point is well-taken. The BBC online illustrated this with a picture of a
> > > repressive-looking Chinese soldier making a "Stop!" gesture in Tiananmen Square.
> > > What picture would have been used if it WERE about Yoruba speakers? Or, god forbid,
> > > about Deaf native signers? (though that research would be interesting to hear about...)
> > >
> > > 	-p-
> > > Peter L Patrick
> > > Dept of Language and Linguistics
> > > University of Essex
> > > patrickp at essex.ac.uk
> > >
> > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Gaudio, Rudolf [mailto:Rudolf.Gaudio at purchase.edu]
> > > > Sent: 30 June 2003 22:33
> > > > To: 'linganth at cc.rochester.edu '
> > > > Subject: "More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English
> > > > http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030630/hl_
> > > > nm/brain_langu
> > > > age_dc_2
> > > >
> > > > The link above is to a news story about some recently published
> > > > neurolinguistic research that found that Mandarin-speaking
> > > > listeners used
> > > > both sides of their brains to perceive & interpret Mandarin
> > > > speech, whereas
> > > > English speakers used only the left side to process English
> > > > speech.  This
> > > > has apparently set off a lot of buzz about how Mandarin (or
> > > > "Chinese") is
> > > > harder to learn than English is.
> > > >
> > > > Is anyone familiar with this research?  I can't help but
> > > > wonder whether, if
> > > > similar results were obtained in a study comparing, say,
> > > > Yoruba and English
> > > > speakers, the media buzz would be the same.
> > > >
> > > > Rudi
> > > >
> > > >
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