I used that quite a lot in the past and it can make slow radio auditions and songs a bit more interesting. 🙂

One can speed up anything to rap-speed with that, and it may be a good listening exercise.

Which makes it amazingly easy to rhyme, and pun, in lyrically.

For people looking for more Mandarin (+ Taiwanese) rap, check out Dog G 大支 and Witness 黄崇旭.

Anyone have recommendations for Mainland rap, contemporary or otherwise?

I am so glad once again that someone on the language forums pointed me to your blog. It’s such a nice change from the “Well first learn the verbs and memorize the grammar and read the dictionary about the cases and tones” etc. You’ve almost made me want to take up Japanese just for the fun of it (who knows?).

I have a question though; are you of the school of thought that a person can only learn X langauges to complete fluency? Perhaps that was a bad explaination, but I guess would you say that you can use your method multiple times for different languages or would you advise a student to just concentrate on learning, say only Japanese, to complete fluency instead of learning a lot of language to a pretty good fluency?

Secnd question is, what would you advise someone to do if they studied a language for a good amount of time but they are reluctant to continue because of… whatever. Bad experiences with the culture and/or people of the language? Or perhaps that is an issue for a psychoanalyst, who knows?

Thanks Khatzumoto for maintaining the single most useful and comprehensive language blog on the net!

Much more than just a learning method itself, your posts usually describe a certain attitude about learning.

What’s that common saying? Life is attitude? Something like that. Your ideas demonstrate it well. Being in college and taking language courses (besides Japanese, also having done 2/3 of a year of Chinese) I’ve gotten used to the apathetic attitude of many learners.

It’s not my problem if someone in a class doesn’t care to learn the material well (as a whole, I don’t necessarily mean what the class covers). But I’m tired of the people who seem to think that they should be able to become adept at something half-assedly. People complain about something being hard or how they wish they were better at it but don’t put in the effort to do so.

Stop worrying, and just do it.

Although of course, it is possible the younger generation are shifting their pronunciation to be aligned more with the standard pronunciation. I do have friends from Guangzhou who do take note of the aforementioned consonantal distinctions.

Try listening to Chen A-Bian, he’s far worse (IMNSHO) than Jay.

It seems that it would take a lot of knowledge of either language to understand the lyrics of a song. For example. if one learns to read and understand a verse like this by K DUB SHINE:

まず一つの情報　耳から進入　頭に新種　ウィルスインプット
人間の知的な部分刺激　細胞に利益生む　奇跡
今自然に自分の興味に　より呼び起こされてゆく　好奇心
高める　情報処理能力　データ元に分析　高速
脳全体に均等に浸透　少し時間差で届く心臓
つぎ思考回路の核に到達　前より広角　開く網膜
定めるフォーカス　見通す両面　出来るだけ望遠に合う焦点
また洗練重ねていき鋭敏　高い臭覚で得る収穫
頭蓋骨内部での革命　自覚しはじめてる　本来の役目
ヴァージョンアップする本物のセンサー　肉眼で瞬時にすぐ検査
一点差まで　徹底比較　新たな視覚で見抜く死角

that seems, to me, like something of great intellectual value…all those words, all those readings (btw this is essentially standard Japanese). It all deepens and reinforces the connection to the language both directly and indirectly…building vocabulary, expanding usage, seeing new patterns, and just generally enjoying oneself — playing with the language.

I mean, every part of a language is its own little world, right? Newscasters talk like newscasters. Newspapers have the newspaper tone. Academic papers have the academic voice. Older women talk like older women. Novels like to sound novel. Men mumble, women speed up into a giddy frenzy of reflexively repeating each other’s sentences. Country people talk country.

It’s all part of the tapestry of the language. Just drink it all in piece by piece, choosing each piece according to your preference; it’s all good for you. At its core, it’s all the same, just with different topping. This pizza has mushrooms; this pizza was made by psychopaths and therefore has pineapple on it, but the pizza of Japanese all shares the basis of flour, water, salt, cheese and tomatoes — grammar, structure, vocab show only the slightest variance (numerically) between styles and so something you learn eating one pizza will probably come up in and will help you with the next pizza. For example:

もういいかい　もういいよで
広がる世界は予想以上にハード
それでもパニくらず　立ち向かう　新たなカリキュラム
何食わぬ顔で　虎視眈々と
（常に狙ってる）ONE CHANCEを
難関を越えても　すぐ次を当然探そうぜ
常に前向いて挑戦また挑戦
少年時代が過去に変化しても　ただ夢中に遊びてえんだ
大人へとかたむきつつ　まだ無傷じゃ得られないカタルシス
行くか行かないかの判断材料
自分で決めたなら　ガンガン採用
突っ走ってもいいんだぜ　常に見せてけ自分の進化形

This is a verse by KICK THE CAN CREW. Among other things, I learned cool sayings/structures/proverbs like 何食わぬ顔 and 虎視眈々, words like 難関, 新た and 無傷. When I later, in other reading, came across the construction 前向き, I was easily able to infer what it meant due to my previous experience with the 常に前向いて挑戦また挑戦 part of this verse.

For me, I feel like rap gave me an appreciation for the beauty and expressive power of Japanese (“wow! Japanese you can DO that???”), perhaps because very little knowledge of a language is required to appreciate a beautiful song. It gave me a desire to learn more, if only to be able to understand and sing along. Maybe all those rapid-fire verses helped me to speak better, read and think quicker in Japanese (having said that, I’m still working on that speed, and when I’m tired or nervous the words “試着室で試着する(shichakushitsu de shichaku suru)” seem to take a lot of concentration for me to say without fumbling 8) ). As it is, I mostly sing along to rap songs, so when faced with other styles of music, they seem slow and really easy for me to follow by comparison (“come on, let’s finish this verse t-t-today, junior!!”).

Anyway, don’t feel like you HAVE to listen to hip-hop, really, don’t — only if you want to be cool (j/k). Only if you like it; only do what you like, in Japanese. If someone went and told me I had to listen to j-pop that I wasn’t into, it would KILL my Japanese.

Oh and by the way, our bovine buddies do 3 years of cowlege to learn that stuff.

In response to nomadicsiren, check out the Japanese group “Kick the Can Crew”; some of the only rap I’ve really ever liked in any language. =)

Here’s the link to the list of bands. /japanese-bands-the-list

Jay Chou does songwriting for many other singers as well, prominently Jolin Tsai. Lee-Hom Wang (王力宏) and Energy (and its former members) do some rap as well, though I can’t vouch for the quality myself. The Chinese music circle is unfortunately more limited than the Japanese however, (with a large amount of songs being covers of Western, Japanese and Korean songs) unless you look to the Mainland (which is little known in other parts of the Sinosphere) and Hong Kong (which is mainly Cantonese). The main genres of Chinese music seem to be pop, R&B and rock, in that order.

I’m interested in the part in which you say that rap music is the only kind one should listen to. I don’t remember reading you say that so categorically. Do you have a link to a post in which you elaborate on this?