Today I was stressing myself looking over various creative writings I have done in the past and trying to find one that was perfect to share, and I finally came to the conclusion, nah. I am going to write up a review of a book I read recently, and leave it at that. This blog is kind of a conglomeration of my thoughts and readings and watchings of many stripes, and so today I want to share something of my language learning journey in a freeform review of this bilingual comic.
Part of learning any language involves lots of input–reading and listening. One of the most famous linguistic scholars on second language acquisition, Krashen, is well known for his writings on the importance of input, and increasingly I agree with him–in order to really understand and use a language, you need to input, input, input, input tons and tons of language. But it’s hard, especially at the beginning, because reading anything or listening to anything that was made for native speakers especially can be immediately overwhelming because there is just SO MUCH new and strange and confusing when you’re learning a language.
That’s why I really like bilingual comics. I like reading them even now, even after reading many manga straight in Japanese, and even after reading several novels in Japanese. The Shogakukan English Comics Doraemon bilingual series was one of the first Japanese-English bilingual works that I stumbled upon early in my Japanese language-learning life. Doraemon is a phenomenon in Japan, extremely popular–the kind of property wherein practically every schoolkid can doodle his face in their homework, and new episodes of his anime are ever on the air and new movies based on his comic adventures are released in theaters practically every year. The idea is basically that this dopey kid named Nobita is visited by Doraemon from the future (I think his future self sends him, but I am forgetting some of the details) at a crisis point (maybe Nobita forgot his homework or something). So Nobita regularly gets into some relatable and always idiotic snafu, Doraemon then produces some future technology that can magically fix Nobita’s problem, Nobita inevitably misuses the technology to Doraemon’s chagrin, and in the end usually things are messier or crazier than when they began. (Note that if you ever ask Japanese students to think of an invention they would like to see in the future, inevitably many of them will choose Doraemon inventions.) In reference to language learning, these comics use mostly easy Japanese in the first place, so reading them is not too hard–though it should be stressed that the Japanese text has been replaced with English in the word bubbles, and the Japanese is set in smaller text outside the panels of the comic. That means that all the kanji in the words have no glosses–no hiragana. Now, again, the vocabulary is usually low level, but if you are using these books to learn Japanese (they are actually made for Japanese learners of English), the reading can be a little frustrating if you don’t know the particular kanji.
This book has 15 stories in its scant 170 pages, so you can tell that usually the tales take around ten pages or so to finish, providing bite-size chunks for swallowable learning times. These are “fantastic stories,” which generally means that the tales tend to be related to fairy tales and fantasy tropes–sometimes a riff on a Japanese fairy tale like Issun Boshi, sometimes Nobita might step into a Western fantasy like Cinderella. You might have fairies making appearances, or a story about Santa, or a tale around a sort of superhero. Some of the stories only seem tangentially related to fairy tales, and just have wild magic-like future tech… which almost all Doraemon stories tend to have. So, in the end, the book starts to feel arbitrary. It’s still fun, though, and Doraemon comics are almost universally episodic (though occasionally reference may be made to tech from a previous story); basically you can jump in and immediately enjoy the ridiculous misadventures without reading any of the other selections.
Part of the selling point for this book was apparently teaching fantasy-related vocabulary and expressions… and the stories don’t feature much sword-and-sorcery-type vocab. Thus the publisher added several pages in the end that function like a vocabulary list for fantasy–things like “devil” and “resurrect” and “legend” and “treasure,” plus an explanation of how the planets in the solar system are named after gods, and a page of terms that come from Greek myths in the end (like “Achilles Heel”). This section has the Japanese equivalents for the words and phrases, too, so it works as a Japanese-learning tool, too–albeit it’s probably better for higher-level learners.
Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.
Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.
Looking at my list, I have things like “mimizuku” (horned owl), “kingyobachi” (goldfish bowl), “otamajyakushi” (tadpole, ladle), and “zehitomo” (by all means), among many others. I wrote a bunch from the final section of the book with the legendary terms, too–stuff like “meifu” (realm of the dead) and “meikyuu” (labyrinth).
For those who are interested in reading more, there are six books in this series, which tries to sort Doraemon tales under specific varieties–love stories, funny stories, touching stories, scary stories. I have read several of the other collections, and they are of a similar quality as this one. Again, reading books like these are great way to practice Japanese and just get started, so if you are looking for something along those lines, there are worse places to start! Why not give it a try? Just don’t give up, and keep getting more input to keep growing!