Japanese | Language

This is the Most Critical Skill to Becoming a Better Japanese Speaker

And it’s not memorizing thousands of kanji!

You’ve heard the usual complaints about the Japanese language.

It’s a very difficult language to learn — even if ads promise to make you fluent in just two months.

The writing system is convoluted. There are too many kanji and too many ways of reading them. Japanese people don’t even understand it when non-Japanese people speak Japanese! The list goes on, making Japanese learners possibly the craziest bunch of language learners on this planet.

In my experience, the singular most important skill to be a better Japanese speaker is not perfecting your pronunciation or even memorizing enough kanji to impress your friendly neighborhood obaasan.

Instead, it comes down to listening carefully.

Who’s doing what?

Listening in Japanese is a completely difficult beast, and it can make you look like a linguistic acrobat or a complete jester.

It’s been said to death that Japanese is a high-context language, so much so that it’s very difficult to figure out what is going on in a conversation if you don’t have prior knowledge.

For one, speakers typically drop the subject of a sentence, leaving you bewildered as to who is being talked about. Nouns referring to people — “I, he, she,” and so on sometimes vanish completely.

It can be a challenge for someone coming from a language like English, where the “doer” of a verb is almost always mentioned. It’s always “I ate cake,” instead of “ate cake,” which would be the case in Japanese.

If you cannot follow who is doing what, there is no shame in clarifying. Sometimes, even Japanese people have trouble following the conversation.

Sussing out social rank

When I first started studying keigo — honorifics — I was horrified.

“This is utter madness,” — I’d thought to myself. “Why do simple verbs like “go” or “eat” change depending on who you’re talking to?

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the social significance of encoding social rank within formalized conversational rules. Paying attention to the type of honorific language being used in a conversation is often a very good way to figure out the social hierarchy.

Given that speakers routinely change their pronouns depending on who they are speaking to, listening deeply and paying attention to how people are referring to each other can often be a tremendous source of insight as well.

A few years ago, when I had first joined a new company and a new team, the manager spoke keigo to a team member. This told m immediately that the manager was younger than that particular colleague. Even if organizational hierarchy meant that the manager was of higher status, the manager wanted to respect the age of that particular college.

At another ocassion — a casual party — people started off by speaking to me in tamego (タメ語), so-called casual speech without desu/masu. I look younger than I really am, and when these people found out my real age, they started speaking to me in keigo. They hadn’t told me their age, but I knew they were younger than me.

Age is such an important thing in Japan because it directly affects social rank. Don’t be offended if someone tries to find out how old you are. They mean no harm, in most cases. They only want to figure out the appropriate way to speak to you.

Of course, if one is a non-Japanese person, one can fall outside the bounds of traditionally defined hierarchy. Even if the rules don’t really apply to you, if you need to work in Japan, figuring out how the people in a meeting are talking can give you a lot of insight.

What people say isn’t what they mean

But above all, I believe that listening carefully is the most important skill anyone needs because almost nothing should be taken at face value in Japan.

Don’t take the message literally.

This is not because people are “faking it.” It’s simply because overall, Japanese communicative norms value indirectness.

Saying no without saying no

I once worked with someone who had moved from France. During a meeting with the technical team, when she asked about the feasibility of the project, a researcher replied — while sucking air between his teeth — that the task would be muzukashii (難しい).

She proceeded to ask innocuously, “So, how difficult is it?”

The textbook meaning of muzukashii is “difficult,” but in this case, the answer was actually “impossible” — but as Miyuki Aida highlights, giving a hard “no” is not typical.

For instance, when I was making an arrangement with another student, I said, “Scheduing a lesson that day might be 難しい (muzukashii).” The word means “hard” or “difficult”. But for most Japanese people, it’s a soft way to say “no”.

– “I-shin-den-shin: Why the Japanese Value Communicating Without Words”

On a related note, I’ve attended countless meetings in which the conclusion was always kentō shimasu (検討します). Although this means “I’ll consider it”, you can probably guess that it’s just an indirect way of saying no.

Incidentally, I’ve used this phrase myself on occasion many times when sales reps try to sell me stuff. Try it. It’s a very useful phrase.

Confirming without confirming

Another expression you might hear is kakunin shimasu (確認します), meaning “I’ll confirm.” Why is this phrase so commonly used? In some cases, the person saying this honestly doesn’t know the answer and has to look it up.

But often— and I’ve used this phrase countless times as well — it’s because the person saying it has no authority to decide. Kakunin shimasu really means — “I cannot decide, I have to check in with my boss”.

“Would you like another cup of tea?”

And then, there’s the classic story of drinking tea in Kyoto. If invited to a person’s home in Kyoto and asked “ocha mou ippai ikaga desu ka?” (お茶もう一杯いかがですか), the polite answer would be to decline and say that you are leaving. The host is not asking you if you’d like to have a refill. The host is giving you the cue to leave!

And so, conversations in Japanese are often a test of one’s ability not simply to listen to what is going on, but to read between the lines. What is not said is perhaps even more important than what has been uttered.

Your ability to grasp the unspoken is what will dramatically boost your Japanese language ability.

For more insights into the nuances of the Japanese language, please check out my other related articles.

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