[Zgarbas]

Right, so I have this really embarrassing problem: I don't understand men.

I'm not referring to exaggerated yakuza or manly speech patterns (oddly enough those are alright - thank you, anime), I don't understand Japanese men even when they're using standard language. I noticed this when I started taking this class which is just me, a male prof + 2 male students. Until then, it was always female professor+mostly female (or foreign) students, and I realised recently that all of my Japanese friends are women. Even when they're talking banal matters like what they had for lunch, I understand maybe only half of the conversation, and even that involves guessing a lot from context. I have no idea why; they don't seem to use any male-specific words, but there has to be some explanation for it. Cadence? Choice of words? Mumbling? The fact that girls tend to accentuate each sound whereas men try to sound cooler by merging everything into a mush of low-pitch sounds? I asked some of my colleagues about it and they said that they have a similar problem, and just kind of space out when men talk.

There's this one guy who has a very soft voice, and he mumbles. I never understand anything he says; which is really embarrassing, since he often directs questions towards me in class, and I have to reply with an awkward smile expressing the fact that I didn't understand them. I'm aware that what's coming out of that mouth should be words with spaces between them, but he might as well be gargling. The other guy (and the prof) have louder, clearer voices, but I still find myself losing the thread of the conversation a lot... I started watching J-dramas just to get used to men's speech, and obviously I've been taking this class for a while now, but somehow my comprehension doesn't seem to improve at all =/.

What's weird is that this also happens in written language; I was recently having a lot of trouble going through what was supposed to be an easy read, going at maybe 7 pages/hour; then i realised that it was an essay-style book written by a man >_< (I haven't had much trouble with fiction so far, but I did notice that I read afterwords at a *considerably* slower pace than I read novels)

Is there some trick to getting it?

I remember having a conversation about this with my Japanese tutor via Skype some years ago, and she had trouble empathizing with me about it. I was adamant that Japanese women generally speak in a much clearer way than the men do, it seemed so obvious to me. They enunciate more clearly and the their speech seems to flow in a way that is easier to comprehend than that of males. Of course there are exceptions each way, but I really do feel that women generally enunciate more clearly than men do. My teacher, fluent in Japanese, of course had no trouble understanding men or women so couldn't really empathize. I wonder if this is something that only people learning Japanese are able to notice, or maybe it's just me and Zgarbas here that are the odds ones out. I'd be interested if anyone else has felt the same, or even the opposite.

I'm a guy, and while standard male speech is one thing, the sort of "polite slur" you see between two native men in certain situations is something else all together. Took me forever to realize that っす was equivalent to です。

I learned a number of languages and it seems to me that women tend to be better/easier to understand speakers in any language, including my native ones.
Their body language seems to be more listener-friendly too.

Roketzu Wrote:I remember having a conversation about this with my Japanese tutor via Skype some years ago, and she had trouble empathizing with me about it. I was adamant that Japanese women generally speak in a much clearer way than the men do, it seemed so obvious to me. They enunciate more clearly and the their speech seems to flow in a way that is easier to comprehend than that of males. Of course there are exceptions each way, but I really do feel that women generally enunciate more clearly than men do. My teacher, fluent in Japanese, of course had no trouble understanding men or women so couldn't really empathize. I wonder if this is something that only people learning Japanese are able to notice, or maybe it's just me and Zgarbas here that are the odds ones out. I'd be interested if anyone else has felt the same, or even the opposite.

I'm a guy and I wholeheartedly agree. One reason is that we're just not that interested in communication. There's just more mumbling, dialect and all that, but at the same I find it more "alive" and we don't tend to yap on about nothing .

I felt the same way at some point but now it actually surprises me when others have trouble hearing people because I can now understand them perfectly fine. The brain is actually very good at this sort of pattern recognition stuff but you obviously just need a bunch of input to train it that way.

I wouldn't dwell on it too much. Just keep moving forward in your studies and as you hear more and more native stuff you'll begin to build up an anticipation for the kinds of phrases people use in certain situations. Thus even when your ears don't actually hear every single syllable of a sentence your brain still receives enough information to fill in the gaps and process the meaning.

(I'm not really sure if that is how it actually works, but having been on both sides of it that is the best way I can describe my experience.)

I don't have a lot of experience with dramas, but so far the male speech that gave me most trouble was from 船越英一郎 (in 早海さんと呼ばれる日) who was doing some old and gruff guy speech, maybe because he used a lot of verbal shortenings and I'm not used to those.

One of the problems I have is that I have more female teachers of Japanese on YouTube then male teachers, which makes me wonder whether my pronounciation and so forth isn't turning too much into female variation.

My impression is different.

For a while I was listening to the CD's that come with Japanese For Busy People and I always thought the male voices were easier to understand (but still difficult for me nevertheless). I thought it was the women who spoke too quickly and sounded like they were running words together.

On teachers: I've taken three Japanese classes at night school and the teachers and assistants have all been female. I said to someone once I'd like to have a male teacher for a change just to get used to different speech patterns.

tetsueda Wrote:I'm a guy and I wholeheartedly agree. One reason is that we're just not that interested in communication. There's just more mumbling, dialect and all that, but at the same I find it more "alive" and we don't tend to yap on about nothing .

LOL!!

I remember once listening to my favorite radio talk show host and he read a story from the news about yet another female university professor recommending that society has to change the way boys are raised so that they won't exhibit their typical male unruly behaviours etc. and the radio host said: "Did you ever notice that nobody ever recommends that girls and women change the way they behave? Oh, no no no no no...girls and women are perfect, you see..." LOL!