Colin Marshall

Yan-san's comforting anti-dramatics

I just got to the end of Let’s Learn Japanese Basic II, a language-learning video series the Japan Foundation produced in 1995. Before that, I watched Let’s Learn Japanese Basic I which they put out in 1984. Together, they form a 52-episode series that not only teaches the mechanics of the Japanese language but follows the extended narrative of Yan, a youngish Westerner (I’ll guess Egyptian-American, though the show keeps it vague) in Japan to study and practice architecture. He also buys a boom box, visits famous shrines and beaches, falls for a co-worker, gets jerked around by said co-worker, flees to the snow country for solace, and gets drunk viewing cherry blossoms.

The last quarter-century’s Anglophone Japanese-learners regard Yan as legend. Some have even tracked down Nick Muhrin, the actor who portrays him. Japanese teachers screened these videos in class when they were new — when Japan rode high on the global scene — and seem to continue doing so today. I can see why; their production value strikes me as obsessively high, at least by the standards of language-learning shows. Sure, you have to get yourself in a mid-eighties mindset (which I’m always in) to really appreciate some of the computer graphics used in the strictly instructional segments, but man, those skits? The costumes! The sets! The camera movements! The sheer variety!

I have a hard time engaging with episodic art forms the way they’d like me to — hence my non-participation in our current televisual “golden age” — but something about the anti-dramatics of this type of show keeps me hooked. (Well, that and my desire to learn the language.) Let’s Learn Japanese and its brethren don’t care about doling out precisely engineered doses of plots about bombs planted in the middle of D.C. or desert islands brimming with polar bears or cheerleaders sticking their hands down garbage disposals. Their characters go shopping, mail letters, take day trips, clean the house, and hang out on rooftop beer gardens.

These bare-bones, everyday life-derived stories free the show up to concentrate on its own distinctive texture. I want to label the resulting style something like “cheerful utilitarianism.” Each episode’s form follows its function, but it does so with a stereotypical Japanese verve for somewhat ramshackle slickness and slighty goofy efficiency. In these qualities, I sense the indescribable aesthetic-philosophical sensibility that first turned my head toward in Japan way back when.

I’ve already started missing one thing about watching Let’s Learn Japanese: the characters. Or should I just say “the people”? You’ve got the stout, resilient Yan-san, of course, but you’ve also got the hosts, the amiably robotic Althaus-sensei and Umino-sensei, she of the elaborate sailboat sweaters. Above all, you’ve got the skit players: Basic I young dude Kaihô-san, Basic I gamine Sugihara-san, Basic I middle-aged combover guy Mine-san, Basic II young guy Ando-san, Basic II gamine Koyanagi-san, and Basic II middle-aged combover guy Kodama-san. I’ll miss those middle-aged combover guys the most — or should I say, I’ll miss those middle-aged bākōdo otoko the most.

It is an apple; I like apples

As a kid, I assumed both music and foreign languages to be insurmountably difficult and thus avoided any pursuit requiring the slightest facility with either. Other than low self-esteem, I can't imagine why I thought this, although I did burn an inordinate calorie count defending my shaky reputation as "the smart kid" by avoiding anything I might not pull off perfectly the first time. No prizes for guessing what two things now reside, struggle-prolongingly, among my top ten interests.

My ceaseless back-and-forth with the understanding and creation of music is gnarly enough to have already filled 2500 words of an incomplete post so horrifically tangled upon itself that it may never see the light of day. Things only clarified when I realized that music and languages might be two sides of the same coin, at least for me: after all, music is just another "language," right? It has its own regional dialects, its own grammar, its own degrees of formality. Without fluency in music or language, one certainly ends up hitting quite a lot of "bum notes."

A couple summers back, I decided I might learn how to read Korean. People hear that and react like I'd decided to build a twine ball the size of a car or fill a 55-gallon drum with nail clippings. I would submit that no interesting pursuit lacks an element of futility, but I did hold several legitimate reasons:

1. Who could deny that Asia is, at the moment, the world region producing the most fascinating culture? An Orientalist such as myself would argue that this has actually obtained for almost a century¹, but now seems universally recognized that the bureaucratic museums that are London, Paris, etc. have had their day. The Tokyos, the Seouls and the Bangkoks of the world have taken up the slack and then some.
   
   In previous generations, Japan was the country to watch. And to be sure, Japan still puts out better things and ideas than most, but in East Asia, I put my money on Korea as the place to beat. My entrée into this was Korean cinema which in the 2000s was almost suspiciously strong. (Especially the films of Sangsoo Hong.) I soon started imagining how much more I could get out of the country's movies if I could understand, like, every twelfth word. (In the rest of Asia, it's apparently all about Thailand, but Thailand is all about Apichatpong.)
    
2. As a linguistic challenge, it's comparable to the thirteen-and-change-hour flight to New Zealand. There are harder flights to be taken — Australia to Europe seems particularly hellacious — and harder languages to learn — Magyar — but the vast majority are easier. If I've done it, so much else is rendered, comparatively, cake. Freshening up my high school Spanish will be as nothing next to it.
   
   Also note the usual stuff about badly-needed brain workouts. Nothing else I do in life seems to stretch me in the same directions as desperately trying to comprehend languages of which I barely possess any understanding. Perhaps if I were a computer programmer I'd be satisfied, but I jumped those tracks in childhood.
    
3. If I ever happen to become one of those guys so eccentric that his native culture effectively ostracizes him and he must flee to another — I can assure you that these things happen — at least Korean women appear to be East Asia's best-looking. (Yes, I realize Korea's hyperinflated nationalism is creepily racial and I shouldn't stoke the flames, but journalistic integrity, etc.)
    
4. Pure perversity. If I were to take this all the way, I'd study Old Norse or something, but Korean is novelty enough for now.

Despite the relative obscurity of English-speaking Korean-learners — cf. the sprawling legion of American students of Japanese alone — I've managed to dig up surprisingly useful resources in the tubes. Let's Speak Korean, a show on Korea's English-language Arirang TV, is both just what it sounds like and has been uploaded to YouTube in quantity. I prefer the older, clunkier series with the ambiguously English-accented Chakhee Ahn (creepy fan video here) and the goofy Michael Chan to the newer, slicker iterations, but your mileage may vary.

I've also tried a variety of books on the language, which vary wildly in quality. Though quote old, Fred Lukoff's Introductory Course in Korean books break down sentences in a way I find uncommonly helpful. Naturally, I didn't expect any of this solo study to result in an ability to actually speak Korean — for that, it's sink/swim immersion or nothin' — but I enjoyed it on a purely intellectual level. The next logical step was to enroll in an actual Korean language class so as to accomplish some valuable public failing. Alas, the aforementioned obscurity finally bit me in the @$$; it didn't meet its 20-student quorum and was canceled for the year, leaving me in the lurch and with a distinct lack of sail wind to boot.

I sat it out for while before deciding that I'd rather not let what I'd learned thus far go completely to seed as I awaited the next school year. So here I am, starting once again from square one — as I do with after every lacuna, no matter how brief, in language study — but this time on the straightforwardly-domained LearnKorean.com. If nothing else, this keep-starting-over approach has given me a damn solid foundation in the basics. And every time, I discover some vital "new" basic I should have known before. There's something to be said for this method.

---

¹ I agree with what Momus said in our interview: Said was wrong. It's not bad to be Orientalist; it's just bad to be mean and Orientalist.

No good

I hereby refrain from applying the words good or bad to any work. Specifically, I mean the usages of these words not in the moral sense — I've not yet made the long, icky slide into relativism — but in the qualitative one. I have come to terms with the fact that sentences like "That movie is good" or "The book was bad" convey next to no information, and, worse, what information they do convey isn't quite what they appear to; the claims pretend to be about a qualitity of a subject, but they're actually a binary categorization of one's own feelings. "That movie is good" means "I experience an pleasing reaction to that movie"; "The book was bad" means "I experienced a displeasing reaction to the book." The meanings of these statements don't quite align with the words used, and even once translated they're not worth saying.

"Hey now," you might object, "you're the one always wasting so many words documenting your reactions to stuff!" And so I am. But bear in mind: I'm not arguing that all criticism isn't worth the effort it takes to express; I'm arguing that simply slapping the good or bad labels — or, worse, the ehh or blah or meh ones — is the folly. Criticism is most enjoyable, to my mind, when it documents the subjective mind-object transaction with as much clarity as possible. I couldn't care less whether I agree or disagree with a critic; how intelligently and precisely they express their reaction is all. It just so happens that I've noticed that the likes of Wesley Morris, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, to name four shining examples from the film reviewverse, well... they ain't throwin' around the goods and the bads, if you know what I mean. Examples:

• An unthinking me, reacting to Old Joy: "Good!"
• Dargis reacting to Old Joy: "A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Let the Right One In: "Good!"
• Morris reacting to Let the Right One In: "The beauty resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Silent Light: "Good!"
• Hoberman reacting to Silent Light: "Everything in this relatively chaste production is monumentally deliberate, from the human interactions to the stolidly bucolic representation of Mennonite domesticity to the extraordinary, wide-screen landscape shots that bracket the action with four or five minutes of pantheist ecstasy."

Stark, huh?

In yet another desperate bid to uphold my duty as a human being to communicate effectively, I thus update the list of descriptors not to use I originally posted back in November: joining (in)authentic, boring, depressing, disturbing, pretentious, pointless and soulful/less are good and bad. (But it's worth noting that, with some thought, I've realized how a work can be depressing. Though this is perhaps another few posts' worth of material, it all comes down to the creator-audience relationship: if you, experiencing a work, find that you're being talked down to or held in low intellectual esteem, that's depressing.)

Most people are great

Perhaps thanks to my interest in improving my writing and speaking abilities, I'm sometimes assumed to be a grammar, spelling and/or usage wonk, someone who goes around insufferably correcting split infinitives, whos for whoms and grocer's apostrophes. Turns out I can't stand those sub-Lynne Truss types, who I feel miss the forest for the trees; I do bear a major beef, however, with those who use words without regard to their meanings. This is actually more common as it sounds; some seem even to repudiate the notion of meaning in their speech, taking a degree of offense to the suggestion that words don't mean whatever the user wants them to. (Shades of Humpty Dumpty and his linguistic bribery.)

Many words, terms and phrases get debased this way, and I make an effort to excise from my speech whichever ones I realize are beyond help. The most obvious example is great. Were I to cast my vote for the least meaningful word in the English language, great would be the no-brainer choice. Maybe the situation's different in other Anglophone countries, but here in the States, great is pretty much a red-headed stepchild. The amount of abuse it endures, even at the hands of those otherwise mindful about communication, is astonishing when you listen for it. "That floral centerpiece is just great!" "Is still think that Transformers movie was pretty great." "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be great." Really? Out of all the qualities these things could possess, greatness is the one you identify? (This sort of thing isn't limited to one word, either; amazing is similarly thrown around by art wonks, though it's a bit more of a euphemism to describe a work without much articulable merit but which the describer nonetheless fears dismissing or even refraining from expressing an opinion on. An eccentric blue-haired slam poet who melts toy soldiers in a frying pan during his performance is already thin gruel, but if I hear a pack of nervous poseurs whip out amazing and apply it to him, I'll keep my distance and then some.)

I will also henceforth refrain from making statements about "most people." I've written before about wrongheaded invocation of supposedly "average people," but claims about "most people" actually seem to be much more common, more exaggerated, and thus more pernicious. In practice, I hear "most people" used to not to mean "the majority of humanity" but "a construction to whom I feel superior." The weird part is that I hardly ever see anyone call bullshit on this. Bold claims like "Most people just want Costco hot dogs," "Most people are depressed" or "Most people are sheep willingly led to their cultural and intellectual graves by the unholy alliance of the media and the military-industrial complex" do not receive empiricism's smackdowns — as they deserve — but solemn right-on-man-right-on nods. (And don't even get me started on the worst "most people" claims I personally hear, which tend to take the form "Colin, maybe you x, but most people not x," which, as I have demonstrated over and over again, furthers the morally and intellectually bankrupt dogma of Colin Exceptionalism.)