Why language pronunciation and listening matter
Posted: August 1, 2009 | Author: Doug | Filed under: Japanese, Language | 5 Comments »This scene from Monty Python’s movie “Life of Brian” isn’t just a hilarious scene (and it is), but is also illustrates something that happens when you don’t understand a language well enough. Pay attention from 00:40 to 00:55 especially:
I actually do the exact same to my wife frequently when she tells me something in Japanese. She’ll tell me that they went to the store today to be buy some eggs, but I thought she said that we should go later today, so I’ll reply “yes, we should.” She’ll look at me strange, like Pontius Pilate above looked at the guard, and get annoyed.
I don’t blame her. My listening skills in Japanese still aren’t that good, so I frequently misunderstand what people are saying, and then give answers that don’t relate to the topic. I do this to my wife’s in-laws too.
This is yet another reminder that to learn a language well, you have to practice vocabulary, grammar and listening enough so that you can respond to someone’s words correctly. Otherwise, hilarity ensues. 
As for pronunciation, if you’re speaking, it’s important to speak correctly. People often underestimate how important this is. Years ago, when I studied one summer in Hanoi, Vietnam, I attended class with other college students from various universities. Before long, I remember the initial introductions where people talked about studying Vietnamese for 4 years at prestigious California University, and yet when they spoke Vietnamese, their pronunciation was hideous. I mean, really bad. The teachers, native Vietnamese speakers, were patient, but you could see their eyes glaze over because they just didn’t know what the student was saying. The student obviously knew vocabulary, grammar and could read well, but couldn’t communicate.1 If you don’t learn the right pronunciation, and can’t say the words clearly, native speakers have to spent more time mentally deciphering what you said, or will misunderstand. Thought Japanese is not as difficult as Vietnamese in terms of pronunciation, tones to matter.
Don’t end up like these two guys! Invest the extra time and effort to get it right early on, or you’ll develop bad habits. 
P.S. This post is intended to be light-hearted of course. I know that in the scene above, Pontius Pilate has a speech impediment, not a language issue. I just find the mis-communication all too familiar.
1 My teacher at the UW had been very, very strict about pronunciation, and I can’t thank her enough for it. She used to make us stand up in class each Friday, give a presentation, and if we said something wrong, she’d make us do it again. Tough teaching, but very effective teaching.
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
It’s interesting. I find that English has a lot of redundancy built in. You can mangle a sentence like in the Life of Brian scene and still be understood. It also allows for many accents. I don’t get phased by Japanese accented English (and think it’s a waste of effort in them trying to obtain perfect American or British accents) Although with some accents I have to re-tune a bit to understand easily. And my wife (Japanese) often can’t understand English accents and thinks they are speaking another language.
I think English learners are too used to this redundancy when speaking other languages. Japanese certainly doesn’t have much redundancy and you can quickly change the meaning or become unintelligible. Japanese don’t cope well with accented Japanese either. (as distinct from a dialect) Usually they can’t discern a loanword not pronounced in the Japanese style, even when it’s quite close. I think there’s just not that much variance in standard Japanese (I could be wrong) as there is in standard English.
Possibly with people learning a language in an academic environment, reading and writing may tend to still carry the most weight as they are simpler to evaluate by exams.
In terms of listening to Japanese. I find women’s voices easier to understand. I’ve no idea why. I also tend to use feedback questions when I’m unsure.
I (blah blah blah) to the shops.
-was that am going or went- Are you going to the shops?
No, I *went* to the shops,
And sudden utterances when I’m just not in Japanese mode tend to throw me a lot. It takes a little time for me to switch.
Hi ロバート,
My wife’s friends back in the US were all from Japan and all had lived there long enough to get good at the language, but some clearly had a knack, and some had bad pronunciation habits that gave the impression of only being in the country recently. Like you said, having the perfect accent isn’t important, but there’s a point when one’s pronunciation is so poor, people get tired of listening to them. In the same way, having more natural sounding Japanese, as much as possible, gives the native speaker a more relaxed, less stilted conversation, and I feel they’re more likely to want to talk to you again. It pays to spend the extra effort to communicate well, even if it doesn’t relate to job, certification and such.
That was what my Vietnamese teacher really honed in on us, and she was sooooo right.
I have noticed a rather wide diversity in accents in Ireland and the UK, more so, I believe than in the US, possibly because the population there is much younger, less entrenched. My wife only struggled in the US with strong “Southern” accents. She has more trouble here in Europe, though some of that is just acclimation.
Anyways, you’re definitely right about English being a harder language to mangle. We’re so precise with our words, that there’s little else to fill in the blanks.
Japanese has a lot of subtlety, that’s real easy to miss when you’re so used to everything being spelled out. Trips me up all the time at home. 
Yeah, I don’t know why women’s voices are easier to understand (same here), but in my JapanesePod101 lessons, they did mention that male Japanese is lower in tone and faster in cadence. This is certainly true as far as I can tell with the few male Japanese I can speak with.
It seems to me that women slur their pronunciation less than men, and are more likely to use the more polite forms. go teinei ni, as it were. I think I am getting used to the fast pace (I think ‘haya-kuchi’ is one of the aspects of Edo-ben) but the slurred pronunciation is pretty hard to get.
I agree that confirmation is a useful skill, but in my case, I often don’t have time to scan everything to find out what needs to be confirmed–I just assume I heard it right. Sometimes, confirming stuff can slow down the conversation to the point where the Japanese people are thrown off their game, looking at each other thinking ‘Did we do something wrong? What were we talking about…?’
As for accented Japanese, one (somewhat elderly) lady told me that she didn’t like a certain foreigner’s Japanese because it was too perfect. She said (maybe to flatter me) that she preferred my broken Japanese.
I had another person (middle-aged female) comment that my way of speaking Japanese was ‘chaamingu.’ (I use a lot of keigo, reflecting the preferences of my traditional music teacher and my fellow students.) Well, all we can do is keep going…
Regards,
JL
Hi
I have to share this link to another example of incorrect pronunciation in a foreign language
johnl Flattery or not, it’s still nice to hear.
Definitely good that you know keigo so well. I am still bumbling around trying to get used to it. Need it for work among other places.
ロバート Never seen this before. It’s really funny!
Yet another example is the movie “Team America”, and a certain dictator from a certain country. “Oh no, Hans Brix!”