April 28, 2006
April 10, 2006
Pretending to understand?
Some great commercials from Nintendo promoting their English teaching games for the Nintendo DS, showing Japanese doing 'wakatteru furi' (pretending to understand)
For those who can't read Japanese, there are four clips, accessed by clicking the links with the arrows next to them under the frame. The first you'll see automatically download is the hotel lift, the second the hotel lobby, the third at a party and the fourth is at a concert. You'll be able to understand them even if you don't speak Japanese.
Hat tip to Justin Hall at Chanpon.org.
British electronic etiquette
Telewest commissioned a survey of 1,468 UK office workers on etiquette for electronic communications. The responses on some questions were surprising, but I wonder if this is due to the focus perhaps being on using e-mail, Instant Messaging (IM) etc within the office to communicate with colleagues, rather than communicating externally. I get the impression that Telewest are trying to use this survey to push IM. For example, 44% consider it rude if they have not had a reply to an e-mail within the morning, and 5% thinking it rude if they haven't received a response within 5 minutes. Telewest concludes that this means many employees are using e-mail like IM, and it would be more effective therefore to have IM. But when I suggest to participants in my training sessions that when communicating with Japan, they should adopt the policy of responding within 24 hours to e-mails, many look horrified, so I don't think people expect instant responses to external communications and although I was asked if I thought it would be OK, I haven't so far been promoting the use of IM for communicating with Japanese colleagues.
61% of respondents say they consider a person's seniority before sending an e-mail, changing their language accordingly, proportionately more than do for SMS or IM. This may be due to the unfamiliarity or still early stage of take up for SMS and IM, although I was surprised that as many as 49% have IM at work.
35% of 16-24 year olds and 25% of 25-34 year olds felt it necessary to include icons in their digital communications, compared to a national average of 18% and just 9% of 55-64 year olds. I suppose this is due to the insecurity of younger people, less experienced in communicating remotely and worried that they will be misinterpreted? I usually explain that young Japanese people use a lot of emoticons because of Japan being a high context culture, and e-mails being too low context for comfort, without emoticons. But I get the impression that emoticons are not used in Japanese workplace communications.
Hat tip to 160 Characters
Cultural software
QE Tech, a company based in Japan, founded by a Swedish-American called Nils Plett, was featured in an article in the Japan Times in February this year (alas, does not seem to be in their archive any more).
QE Tech has developed software that assists users in creating English communication based on cultural logic and phrases that readers will understand. Nils Plett says Western thought tends to be more linear. "It has a direction. When we speak, we think about the listener and choose words they will understand. We say 'I follow you' or 'I see where you are going/heading' to signal we are listening, all of which depict motion. The Japanese language, on the other hand, tends to be more image-orientated. Kanji are a good example. Because their cues are more visual, Japanese people will say, 'I can't see what you are talking about.'"
I often draw a few kanji, for tree, woods, forests, rivers, mountains, woman + child = 'like' etc to illustrate this point in my training.
