Fifty Sounds

Polly Barton

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913097516
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi'sori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan. Irreverent, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is an exceptional debut about the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.

Preface

It’s my lunch break and I’m being serenaded by a lime-green owl. ‘Did you know!’ the owl calls as it swaggers jauntily across my line of sight, ‘There are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are people learning foreign languages in the entire US public school system!’

The year is 2019, and I will soon be travelling to Italy for the summer, which is why I have found myself being taught Italian vocabulary and grammar, along with a variety of trivia, by this digital apparition, the mascot of the language-learning app Duolingo. I learned of Duolingo’s existence only recently, but it transpires to be phenomenally popular, offering courses in 23 languages to 300 million users worldwide. Initially, there seems to me something faintly Japanese about the wing-gestures made by the mascot, Duo, but I check and discover that the company originated in the States, as I suppose I should have guessed from the trivia-nugget above; it’s the brainchild of Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, born out of the idea that ‘free education will really change the world’.

Duo’s screech is unvoiced but it sticks in my head nonetheless, whooping and half-demented, Disney-villainesque: Did you know! Did you know! Did you know! And no, as it happens, I didn’t know. At least the first time big-eyed big-eyelashed Duo addressed me, I didn’t know. By the tenth time it pops up on my screen I’ve begun to feel very familiar with this particular bit of trivia, and I also know something else: each run-in with it leaves me feeling a little unclean, in a way I can’t really account for.

As the fact I am spending my lunchtimes with Duo reveals, I am not entirely sceptical of its methods, and I don’t find the comparison drawn between public-school language education and the Duolingo model outrageous, at least prima facie. Unlike a lot of language-focused applications, Duolingo is not devoid of audio content; it has clips of real people talking, and invites its users to speak phrases into the microphone, so they are at least interacting with how the language actually sounds, and feels in the mouth. While its level-unlocking structure drawn from the world of gaming means that users might be focusing on strategies to pass rather than to truly master, the same accusation could be levelled at language education in schools: there is, in short, a lot of hoop-jumping. You learn the language the way that the exam boards or the green owl want you to, but it is, at least, a start. If it makes language education accessible and enjoyable to those who might not otherwise have access to it, then that is surely a good thing.

So why, then, does Duo’s factoid bring me such a sense of unease, and why do I begrudge his hooting pride? It dawns on me that the source of my discomfort resides, utterly unreasonably, with his use of the word ‘learning’. I say unreasonably, because I recognize that this word is used legitimately to cover a whole range of activities undertaken with varying degrees of intensity. The generous, rational part of me can see there is no cause to bar people from calling their five or twenty minutes a day on Duolingo ‘learning a language’. But even as I have this thought, another part of me stamps its foot resentfully, the kind of foot-stamp that ends up hurting the stamper, and declares that the world has turned its eyes from what is real and true. This part wants to say its piece. It wants wider recognition that there is another, far less stable form of learning – a radium to Duolingo’s lurid neon.

The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover; it is streams of sounds pouring in and striking off scattershot associations in a manner so chaotic and out of control that you are taken by the desire to block your ears – except that even when you do block your ears, your head remains an echo chamber. The language learning that fascinates me is not livening your commute and scoring a dopamine hit with another ‘5 in a row! Way to go!’ Rather, it is never getting it right, hating yourself for never getting it right, staking your self-worth on getting it right next time. It is getting it right and feeling as if your entire existence has been validated. It is the kind of learning that makes you think: this is what I must have experienced in infancy except I have forgotten it, and at times it occurs to you that you have forgotten it not just because you were too young when it happened but because there is something so utterly destabilizing about the experience that we as dignified, shame-fearing humans are destined to repress it. It is a learning that doesn’t know goals or boundaries, and which is commonly known as ‘immersive’. The image that springs to mind is a lone figure wading gallantly into the sea, naked, without a single swimming lesson behind them.

As you’ll have inferred from my self-righteous tone, I speak from experience. ‘Immersion’ is exactly what I did when I went to Japan, although probably it’s more correct to say that immersion is what happened to me. If I’d known what I was getting myself into before I went out there I may well not have had the nerve to go, and knowing this, I don’t go around patting myself on the back for having done it. At least, I don’t believe that I do, until I’m confronted with the pride of a green owl, and then I realize that there is some part of me that wants for this experience of mine to be recognized. Not only is this part not rational – it’s furious with all the goal-driven rationality of the commute-friendly app.

In particular, what I’m burning to tell Duo is the following: Did you know! When you immerse yourself in a very different language as a total beginner, not only do you not have goals! You also have no system within which to conceptualize what those objectives could be – discounting, that is, overarching goals like ‘learning to read’, or ‘becoming fluent’, which themselves start to seem less and less meaningful the more you poke around beneath their smooth surfaces!

Immersion in a foreign language is a bombardment of sounds, until you decide that you are going to actually do this thing and learn, and then it becomes a bombardment of imperatives: learn this, learn this, learn this. Just start from the basics, sings a voice in your head as you are tossed around in the waves of incomprehensibility. Yet as you continue to live in a language you don’t know, it becomes increasingly obvious to you how much this category of ‘basics’ could theoretically encompass. Greetings and everyday interactions are of course basic, and there is always something embarrassing about not knowing basic forms of verbs. Everyone knows numbers are incredibly basic, as are colours, clothes, the subjects you study at school, animals, anything to do with weather, and adjectives for describing people. In fact, we could go ahead and say that every object is also basic, and there is something particularly alarming when you don’t know how to say the first words you would have learned in your language(s) as a child: teddy, buggy, shoelace. And then there is the most fundamental-seeming vocabulary of all: abstract nouns, like justice, friendship, pleasure, evil, and vanity.

If the language in question has a writing system different from that you know, then even mastering ‘the basics’ of the spoken language isn’t enough, because a whole new category of basics awaits you in the form of the written one. In particular, Japanese is the gift that keeps on giving in this regard, having as it does three different scripts: two phonetic ones, katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana), with forty-six characters apiece; and then the kanji, or characters of Chinese origin, 2,136 of which have been officially deemed ‘in common usage’. Which means, there is never any shortage of basics to trip you up and convince you of how little you know.

Last week (this is true), I had to look up a kanji that turned out to mean ‘owl’. It wasn’t entirely new to me; I’d learned it somewhere down the line and then forgotten it, but the experience still brought me to my knees with shame. Yes, it’s not a commonly used character, but then I’m supposed to be a translator. I should know something as basic as ‘owl’.

As I sat staring down in despair at the owl kanji, wishing my self from two minutes ago had only managed to remember it, wondering how I could have failed to recognize a legless bird on a tree, I recalled without warning an incident from long ago, back when I’d been learning Japanese for a little over two years and had just found a job at a small Japanese publishing company in London. One day I glanced up to see O, a senior employee, approaching my desk. In his hand were two of the slips that employees had to submit when requesting or reporting time off, and as he moved closer, I saw they were the ones I had recently filled in.

‘Polly-chan,’ he said, pulling up a chair beside me, looking at me in a way that managed to be both conspiratorial and didactic, ‘Let’s talk. Your kanji usage is all over the place.’

‘Oh,’ was all I had the wherewithal to reply. I felt simultaneously apprehensive about what was to come, and flattered that he was taking the time to school me individually.

‘Sometimes you write them perfectly, and sometimes they’re totally off.’

As he spoke, O’s eyes drifted to my computer monitor, around whose edge I’d stuck up a number of kanji written out on small post-it notes. I remember that one of them was ‘crow’: the same as ‘bird’, but with the stroke symbolizing the eye missing. This had cropped up during one of the translations I’d been asked to do the previous week, and I hadn’t known it.

‘You don’t need that,’ O said, pointing at the crow. He began to hover his finger around the other post-its, informing me which I did and didn’t need. Then, with hawk-like focus, his attention moved back to the offending slip.

‘Look,’ he said, his finger thumping the desk. ‘Look what you’ve written here. This is missing a radical. You can’t just miss parts of kanji like that, because then they mean something else entirely. You’re trying to write “problem” and this says “mon”.’

Maybe sensing that I was struggling a bit to keep up, he looked me right in the eye, and enunciated in English of a crispness that bordered on hostility, ‘“Mon” means “gate”. You’ve written “gate”.’

I looked down to see that he was, of course, right. My slip read something that might be rendered in English: ‘Unforeseen absence due to health gate.’

Even ten years on, this episode feels as real and close as it ever did, and I can’t resist the idea that, in some way, it still encapsulates my status in relation to Japan. To wit, I am always writing the gate. It’s a huge, lofty gate of the kind found in temples; I stand by its posts, passing in and out momentarily, variously welcomed, frowned at, and ousted by its keepers. Even when I’m inside, I’m perpetually aware how quickly I could again be pushed out, that I could find some basic item inexplicably missing from my knowledge. Sometimes I ask myself if things would be different if I’d done my undergraduate degree in Japanese, or a proper language course, or a PhD – if I’d entrusted the responsibility for accumulating the basics to a system larger than myself in some way. The answer, I think, is slightly. I imagine I would feel at least slightly less liable to have the rug pulled from underneath me, to realize suddenly that I’m on the wrong side of the gate.

For when learning takes a primarily autodidactic form, mastering something is dependent on noticing it, or having it pointed out to you. To the extent that you’re not consulting other sources, obtaining an accurate view of the inventory of items to be learned is all down to exposure, and your ability to perceive that exposure, which is particularly relevant when we’re speaking about aspects of language and culture radically different from anything we’ve experienced before. We can notice them, be outraged or intrigued by them, exoticize them, and therefore hoover them up, bump them to the top of our rota – or, else, we can fail to see them really, fail to appreciate them in their fullness. We are too busy thrashing around in the waves, gulping, spitting, and trying to stay afloat.

When it comes to Japanese, another possible candidate for inclusion in a list of ‘basics’ is its vast range of onomatopoeia – or mimetics, as this area of the language is often referred to. I say possible because the question of whether or not onomatopoeia should rightfully be seen as ‘bas...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• ¶ giro’: the sound of eyes riveting deep into holes in your self-belief, or vicariously visiting the Nocturama, or every party where you have to introduce yourself
• ¶ giza-giza: the sound of seeing what you thought was yours through the lens of an alternative system, or of having your cock incomprehensibly sucked
• ¶ zara-zara: the sound of the rough ground
• ¶ mushi-mushi: the sound of insects being forced from your body, or laughing as you vocalize an unthinkable situation, or being steamed alive
• ¶ min-min: the sound of the air screaming, or being saturated in sound
• ¶ sa’pari: the sound of a mind unblemished by understanding
• ¶ nobi-nobi: the sound of space
• ¶ moja-moja: the sound of electric hair
• ¶ yochi-yochi: the sound of tottering (at last)
• ¶ zu’: the sound of always and never having been like this
• ¶ mecha-kucha: the sound of a truly mixed tool-bag
• ¶ chira-chira: the sound of the mighty loner and the caress of ten thousand ownerless looks
• ¶ jin-jin: the sound of being touched for the very first time
• ¶ pota-pota: the sound of red dripping onto asphalt
• ¶ kyuki-kyuki: the sound of writing your obsession on a steamy tile, or the miracle becoming transparent
• ¶ muka-muka: the sound of nights with a dictionary, and the thrill of drawing close to someone’s real feelings
• ¶ hiya-hiya: the sound of recalling your past misdemeanours
• ¶ bin-bin: the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality
• ¶ bare-bare: the sound of being so invested in something that it leaks into everything you do, or abandoning hope of appearing cool, or insidious paranoia
• ¶ pika-pika: the sound of my floors and your trainers and our graveyards
• ¶ jara-jara: the sound of a flash of metal in the blood
• ¶ koro-koro: the sound your teeny little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor
• ¶ bishi-bishi: the sound of being struck sharply and repeatedly by a stick-like object, or (infrequently) of branches breaking
• ¶ mote-mote: the sound of being a small-town movie star
• ¶ kasa-kasa: the sound of the desert heat in the heart or the desert heart in the heat
• ¶ bō’: the sound of a ship leaving shore
• ¶ kira-kira: the sound of a #magiclife, or embracing your shining future
• ¶ shobo-shobo: the sound of persistent drizzle on a thirteenth-century Scottish castle
• ¶ chiku-chiku: the sound of kicking against the pricks, or the ugliness of learning a language as a native English speaker, or the manner of stabbing repeatedly with a sharp-pointed instrument
• ¶ giri-giri: the sound of just about getting by, or being weighed on a moment-by-moment basis
• ¶ poka-poka: the sound of stepping into a warm obliviousness that is probably not what a higher self would want or need
• ¶ kiri-kiri: the sound of the small sharp dark piercing feeling, or not loving anime as much as you should
• ¶ gara-gara: the rattling sound the inexplicable makes as it becomes manifest
• ¶ shi’kuri: the sound of fitting where you don’t fit
• ¶ hi’sori: the sound of being a masochist, or having an unrealizable dream of which you can’t let go, or subconsciously aspiring to a form of life governed by discipline, quietude and an absence of sticky emotions
• ¶ beta’: the sound of very sticky fingers
• ¶ pera-pera: the sound of spouting forth, or a bullish market
• ¶ uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken
• ¶ ba’sari: the sound of nevermore, and how it comes when you least expect it
• ¶ nuru-nuru: the slippery sound of knowing the lingo
• ¶ uda-uda: the sound of the wild bore
• ¶ don: the sound of the sexy lovely violent hand slamming the wall
• ¶ dōn: the sound of big drums, bombs, and the good-bad dream
• ¶ uka-uka: the sound of always being slightly wrong
• ¶ boro-boro: the important sound of things falling apart
• ¶ sara-sara: the sound of a very smooth fluid taking you by surprise (and being the most acceptable part of you)
• ¶ ho’: the sound of the xenophobe returning home, or being restored to magical normality by your friends, or tolerating yourself in photographs
• ¶ gu’tari: the sound of your words having more power than you thought, or unexpectedly saying what you mean
• ¶ atsu-atsu: the sound of being hot to a degree that stands just on the verge of acceptability
• ¶ uho-uho: the sound of the jubilant gorilla and the foolish builder done good
• Fifty Sounds: A Multimedia Mixtape Compiled roughly in order of appearance
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright