Kaiwa no Nihongo <Doriru &Tasuku>: Japanese through Dialogues for Intermediate Learners<Drills &Tasks> by Mizue Sasaki; Masami KadokuraReview by: John MertzThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Oct., 1998), pp. 71-74Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489581 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE 1 71

Some of the entries seem less useful than others. For example, if a student of Japanese uses the phrase aibyoo (one's [beloved] cat) (p. 37), I would not be the only native speaker perplexed by it. Although the term introduced immediately above, aiken (one's [beloved] dog), is widely used,

aibyoo is not. Items not broadly accepted such as aibyoo could be excluded with no loss of the book's overall validity of purpose or scope of intention.

Because the index includes all the Japanese expressions of emotion,

allowing easy access to all entries, LH can be used as a reference as well. However, as suggested in the subtitle "expressing emotions in Japanese," including an index of key English emotion words directing the reader to

comparable Japanese phrases would have made LH even more useful.

Although to appreciate the example sentences, students must minimally possess advanced-level proficiency, students of all levels can benefit from this book, especially as a reference source.

Last, but not least, the translator's contribution should be commended. The English translation is clear and, in my opinion, captures the difficult nuances that communicate the subtleties of human emotion. Given that

many potentially useful Japanese pedagogical materials lack concise English explanation, LH succeeds as a useful and important pedagogical tool.

KAIWA NO NIHONGO <DORIRU 6 TASUKU>: JAPANESE THROUGH DIALOGUES FOR

INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS <DRILLS & TASKS>. By Mizue Sasaki and Masami Kadokura. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1997. xiii, 197 pp. ?2,300.

Reviewed by John Mertz

This is a fun workbook, offering much language and much practice. The content centers on verb-final patterns including -te iru and -te aru;

passives, causatives, and potentials; giving and receiving; -tara and -eba; -sd da, -yo da, -tokoro da, etc. While the workbook was designed to accompany a primary text which bears the same title (Sasaki Mizue, Kaiwa no nihongo: Japanese through Dialogues for Intermediate Learners. Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1996), reliance on the primary text is minimal, so the workbook can be used in conjunction with other texts, either in or out of class. An answer

key in the back allows for some degree of self-study. Exercises in each lesson run the gamut from simple transformation

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72 I VOLUME 32, NUMBER 2

drills to full-blown tasks. Many of the exercises are valuable for requiring students to think twice about the meanings involved, rather than simply adhering to a specified pattern. In one typical exercise (p.6), drawings and isolated vocabulary are used as cues to elicit written sentences using -te iru

patterns. Students thus produce each sentence on the basis of a meaningful situation, rather than an empty grammatical template. Here as elsewhere, the prolific illustrations are clear and to the point, while offering representative glimpses of life in Japan. One must trust, however, that students doing this particular exercise are given adequate guidance on structural issues surrounding -te iru: otherwise they may dismiss a picture of a 10,000-yen bill lying on a railroad track (...ochite-iru: describing the resultant state) as merely a bad drawing of a bill in midair (i.e., misinterpreting ochite-iru, via English, as "is falling").

To delimit this kind of ambiguity, each lesson is prefaced with a set of

drawings depicting the divergent uses of a particular grammatical construction. Occasionally these are superb: the potential form, for instance, is illustrated with three different interpretations ofoyogemasen ("can't swim," p.52), providing a clarity that can contribute to any descriptive analysis. Other lessons, however, are less successful: the illustrations of the ukemi passive (p.60) do not correspond to the full range of active-passive transformations exampled in the drills (esp. p. 62 top). For this lesson, students will require supplementary analysis.

At the end of several of the lessons, the authors provide commentary (in Japanese and English) on particular trouble spots. But rather than offering useful explanations, these chatty and hortatory 'columns' instead ramble

effusively over the mysterious complexities of Japanese. A column on

passive verb forms (pp. 64- 65) boldly differentiates between ukemi and sonkei uses, but its analysis of each is so perfunctory that it will more likely confuse than clarify. Worse yet is an enigmatic column on onomatopoeia (pp. 138-139) which claims thatgitaigo "appeal to the emotions rather than to the [sic] reason." Such naive commentary would have been better

replaced by additional examples of actual gitaigo usage.

Clearly, the main value of the workbook does not lie in explicit analysis, but in the richness of its individual examples of language at work, each a vignette unto itself of some situation relating to life in Japan. A

thank-you letter describing the events of the Kansai earthquake (p.35, used as a sentence-connection exercise) is particularly vivid and touching-the sort of thing that makes language exercise all the more tangible for learners.

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE 1 73

Pair and group tasks are equally vivid and meaningful, even if they might require some modification to be used in a U.S. classroom. A two-

group task (p.8) offers the equivalent of 'twenty questions,' in which one

group is provided with a simple cue-card naming a location, and the other

group must ask questions (e.g. Nani o shite imasu ka?) and then guess at the location. The workbook advises that the groups communicate by-get this!-cellular phone. Even I, as a fan of telephone exercises, would find it a bit optimistic to rely on my state university students having cell phones which they would be willing to volunteer for 20 minutes at a time. More to the point, if the group leader is the only link to the language spoken at the other end of the telephone, then what kind of practice do the other group members get? The task seems better suited to one-on-one practice, sans cell phone.

Unfortunately, less than a fifth of the workbook really requires spoken language, which makes the title Kaiwa no nihongo (albeit inherited from the

primary text) seem a bit overblown. The workbook does make rich use of

spoken-style sentence endings (ne's andyo's top the list), but only a small

portion of the situations involve more than a single sentence, and essentially none involve necessary speech patterns such as hesitation, embedding, asides, backtracking, disambiguation, or meaningful acknowledgment of a

previous utterance. Whatever exposure the student gets to these techniques will have to come from sources other than the workbook. This is not to say that it is without value for the student who wishes to learn to speak: there can be great value in the stability that writing provides for working through basic structural issues, so long as it is buttressed by real practice at speaking. In the hands of a competent teacher the workbook could provide a basis for potentially valuable, structured conversational practice, thanks to the vividness of its many situations. But, as a workbook, this text centers on writing.

When can the workbook be used? In terms of U.S. college curricula, the focus on post-verb forms seems most appropriate to a second-year level. However, the workbook's fierce array of vocabulary (all in standard

Japanese orthography) is only slightly quashed by a spray of furigana. From the first lesson, words like keizaishi, kensetsugaisha, rekishi-shosetsu, and

tdjo-tetsuzuki burden the pages. Students who live in Japan-or who have

kanji background-may find this less daunting, but students with only one or two (or even three) years of prior study by U.S. norms will not be able to get by without regularly making reference to the primary text or to a

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74 1 VOLUME 32, NUMBER 2

dictionary. Even if students are concurrently using the primary text, it will be rough sailing at times-such as being confronted with causatives

(harawasete kudasai, workbook lesson 4, p. 27) before getting to, well, causatives (lesson 10, starting on p. 66). The question is whether class time

would be better spent explaining the rich language of the examples, or

sticking to a more limited vocabulary to achieve a greater range of

language practice. Teachers who do not employ the primary text can still benefit from the

workbook-if not actually requiring it, then at least culling it for good ideas. It might also be used profitably in fourth-year classes as a quick and

dirty- but fun-review. Happily the workbook is relatively inexpensive and the binding is durable, but the pages are not removable, so it is

impossible for students to submit written exercises without submitting the entire workbook.

COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF CHINESE AND RELATED ASIAN LANGUAGES. Edited by Hsuan-Chih Chen. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997. xvii, 456 pp. $39.50.

Reviewed by Sachiko Matsunaga

This volume is a collection of 24 selected papers originally presented at the 7th International Conference on the Cognitive Processing of Chinese and Other Asian Languages, held in Hong Kong in December 1995.

According to the editor, the goal of this volume is to provide a

representative sample of the recent cognitive research on the Chinese

language and to communicate to the reader the current thinking in the field (xvi).

The 24 chapters are organized into four categories: five chapters under

Speech and Phonological Processing (Part 1), six chapters devoted to

Perception and Processing of Characters (Part 2), seven chapters under

Processing of Words and Sentences (Part 3), and six chapters on First and Second Language Acquisition and Processing (Part 4).

In Part 1, the first chapter reports that tone sandhi words (e.g., a

bisyllabic word /cai qu/ in which the tone of /cai/ changes from the third to the second) are not represented abstractly in the Chinese mental lexicon.

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