Teaching Classical Japanese: A Practitioner's Workshop

What adept readers get: the rhetoric behind the rules, the context in the grammar

“Rhetoric” will refer broadly to phrasings that give an audience a perspective on what is said.

There is a long-standing tradition of teaching the grammar of classical Japanese as rules. For example, “Certain auxiliaries follow only a certain inflected form.” “Following particle zo, that sentence’s predicate is in its rentaikei (‘adnominal’) form, to form a kakari-musubi construction.” “When particle ka or zo ends a sentence, the final predicate is in its rentaikei (‘adnominal’) form.” And so on.

Such rules are handy reminders of how the parts of a sentence fit together. Knowing them helps aspiring readers recognize what they’re looking at in a text. But it is easy to forget that grammatical rules describe regularities. They do not explain them, and they are not the reason for them. Nor do they say how the regularities came to be, or tell us why a construction is deployed in a text when it is. They are mum about what grammar points to in the interactive context that it helps create. Such matters, however, are essential tools for adept readers, who by habit seek to anticipate where the text is taking them.

The explanatory apparatus in CJP aims, whenever possible, to introduce grammar in ways that reveal how constructions both reflect and constitute interactive context. To illustrate, we’ll look at three constructions and their interactive underpinnings: rentai-dome ‘adnominal’ sentences; the kakari-musubi construction; and auxiliary keri introducing what is “already the case.”

“Integrating Classical Japanese into the Undergraduate Japanese Curriculum: Challenges and Rewards”

In an increasingly crowded undergraduate curriculum, students find it challenging to fit in a two-semester sequence of classical Japanese. This presentation focuses on potential strategies for integrating classical Japanese into the undergraduate Japanese curriculum by demonstrating an approach utilized in designing and implementing an advanced Japanese literature course (JPN469), Flash Fiction, Japanese Literature & Translation—a required course for Japanese majors, which has been offered at Michigan State University since 2017.

More specifically, this presentation will highlight the changing and changed academic needs of undergraduate students, the growing availability of online resources on classical Japanese materials, the benefits of utilizing digital technologies, including machine translation, that facilitate and promote student-centered learning, as well as the challenges and rewards of teaching classical Japanese as an integral aspect of undergraduate learning experiences. All such factors have shaped the course design and implementation, including the selection of classical Japanese materials (Hyakunin isshu and Ise monogatari)  that constitute two out of six modules that make up the course, assignment types, as well as learning assessment methods, which have been modified through each iteration of the course.

“Predicate Morphology and Narrative Structure in Early Heian Japanese Renditions of Sinitic Buddhist Texts”

The earliest examples of extended prose narrative in Japanese are found in translations of Sinitic Buddhist texts. The monks who created these early Japanese renderings at the onset of the Heian period (794–1185 C.E.) had to read between the lines, both figuratively and literally, in their acts of translation. Figuratively, because Chinese lacks the complex agglutinative morphological predicate system of Japanese, so the translators had to add Japanese markers for tense, aspect, modality, and honorifics to predicates and case particles to nouns. Literally, because in order to preserve their translations in writing they used diacritic markings between, and occasionally on, the original Chinese characters to denote the appropriate Japanese morphosyntax, or word and sentence structure, and
occasionally phonology, or pronunciation.

These monks used the rich Early Middle Japanese (the language of Heian-period texts) repertoire of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) auxiliaries—ki, keri, tu, nu, ari, and tari—to produce vivid, dynamic vernacular translations. This study examines early Heian Japanese translations of Sinitic Buddhist texts in order to determine the narrative functions of these six TAM auxiliaries. I code every sentence in the overarching narration and in quoted parables for its transitivity, lexical aspect, and function in structuring the story, focusing on sentence-final predicates that utilize TAM auxiliaries, to determine how they were employed to create narrative structure.

I have found that the established past fact auxiliary ki is used to frame the narrative; 
perfective aspect auxiliaries nu and tu actively progress the story; stative aspect auxiliaries ari and tari depict scenes and give background information; and the externally established fact auxiliary keri is most often used inside quotations that sum up the moral of embedded parables.

This study demonstrates how Heian-period Japanese Buddhist monks understood the overarching narrative of the Sinitic sutras they preached, and framed those narratives accordingly in the act of translation using the full array of linguistic tools at their disposal.

“Using Rare Books and Special Collection Materials for Teaching to Read and Translate Classical Japanese”

In this presentation, I explore the pedagogical benefits and feasibility of using texts in university rare books collections as hands-on tools to teach to read and translate classical Japanese. Can less well-known, yet-to-be translated texts in North-American library collections be used to teach to read and translate classical Japanese? What conditions have to be present for such projects to be logistically possible? Does working on artefacts in local collections increase student interest? And could involving students in collaborative translation and digitization projects at local collections be a way to attract interest to the discipline?

I will address these questions drawing on my own experience using texts in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Finally, I will introduce an ongoing translation and digitization project that aims to bring the results of classroom teaching to a wider audience.

“Conventions and wordplay: waka in the classical language classroom”

This presentation discusses some experiments in teaching students of bungo in an independent-study setting, where they are in their second semester of classical language. Through experiments in composition, students strengthen their understanding of grammatical concepts through play with kakekotoba, makurakotoba, and other poetic conventions.