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VideoTapir posted:Wait, it's an actual -る verb? Not する？ So you can say "ググった？" Yes. But it's slang and not proper Japanese. Same level as マクる or メモる or whatever.
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Nov 10, 2013 11:31
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Reverend Cheddar posted:Where it really kills me is in medical terms. They insist upon using the long scientific term, even for consumer-oriented products, which we would never use and probably wouldn't even know unless we were doctors and sperging among ourselves. For instance 'myocardial infarction', which I then have to look up to figure out what the hell they mean and it's a heart attack. Same thing with plants. "Do you know Wisteria floribunda?!" when they're talking about 藤, etc. I had one person ask me about lavender whilst using the long botanic name and I hadn't a clue what he was on about. Pretty much anything in the dictionary that includes a long official term is fair game.
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Nov 10, 2013 16:24
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It's frustrating having to go to an unfamiliar doctor since if you don't speak Latin, you will have literally no idea what the gently caress the guy is talking about. And the guy thinks he's speaking English so he gets frustrated that you're confused and the whole thing is terrible. Everyone I know has been shocked when I explain that the scientific medical terminology they learned is all Latin and the vast majority of English speakers won't understand a word of it. The terrible English education rabbit hole over here is bottomless.
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Nov 10, 2013 16:30
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Grand Fromage posted:Everyone I know has been shocked when I explain that the scientific medical terminology they learned is all Latin and the vast majority of English speakers won't understand a word of it. How does that happen? Do medical textbooks actually claim that a term like "gluteus maximus" is English, or do they just assume that everything written in Latin script is English regardless of circumstances?
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Nov 10, 2013 17:30
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For all practical purposes, Latin-derived scientific terms are English, though. I mean, if English speakers who don't speak Latin get together to make up new words, how is that not English even if those words are supposedly based on Latin to some degree? If someone in Japan makes up a new kanji compound for use as medical terminology it would be silly to say, "Of course normal Japanese people aren't going to understand it, because it's Chinese, and they don't know Chinese!" This is exactly the same. The issue is just non-native speakers of English not understanding that they can't just use random obscure words they pulled out of a dictionary or scientific journal and expect all native English speakers to automatically understand it, but that particular issue isn't limited to Latin-derived words in English and Japanese speakers.
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Nov 10, 2013 17:41
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I haven't seen a medical textbook here, but I presume it works like everything else in English education and that they just memorized it word for word without any real comprehension or practical use. I imagine if you're in medical school then you might use the Latin terms a lot and it's not an issue. Medical education here also seems bad in general. My preferred doc went to med school in the US and lived there a while, so he speaks comprehensibly and doesn't give his western patients the placebo butt shot or tell us to drink warm water or any of the other nonsense you typically get from Asian doctors. Another issue is the common translation apps people use here will give you the Latin scientific name for things as the first result, not the common English name, and as a non-native speaker obviously you would have no idea that your dictionary is telling you the wrong term to use.
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Nov 10, 2013 17:41
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Grand Fromage posted:Another issue is the common translation apps people use here will give you the Latin scientific name for things as the first result, not the common English name, and as a non-native speaker obviously you would have no idea that your dictionary is telling you the wrong term to use.
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Nov 10, 2013 17:46
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Not even with Latin names, but a popular fish to eat in Japan translates to English as "bonito", but who the hell knows what that is? Hearing my Japanese friend say "I just love bonito" and having no clue what she was talking about (not knowing that she was talking about a fish, or even a food) is one of the first things that told me how useless bilingual dictionaries can be sometimes.
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Nov 10, 2013 17:56
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Samurai Sanders posted:Not even with Latin names, but a popular fish to eat in Japan translates to English as "bonito", but who the hell knows what that is? Hearing my Japanese friend say "I just love bonito" and having no clue what she was talking about (not knowing that she was talking about a fish, or even a food) is one of the first things that told me how useless bilingual dictionaries can be sometimes. I think bonito was originally the Spanish or Italian for it, but it has kinda become known as that in English also, probably because of the Japanese. In proper English, I think we call it skipjack tuna. e: nope, it's its own fish, not a skipjack, just similar.
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Nov 10, 2013 18:10
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Samurai Sanders posted:Not even with Latin names, but a popular fish to eat in Japan translates to English as "bonito", but who the hell knows what that is? Hearing my Japanese friend say "I just love bonito" and having no clue what she was talking about (not knowing that she was talking about a fish, or even a food) is one of the first things that told me how useless bilingual dictionaries can be sometimes. My first thought when I see "bonito" is that it's the Spanish/Portuguese word for "pretty" (one of the few things I remember from middle school Spanish). So if someone said that to me I'd probably be pretty confused. I don't think I've ever heard it used to refer to a fish.
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Nov 10, 2013 18:58
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I'm a translator, and I had a dude pull me up for using the preposition "in" in three consecutive sentences, saying that it "sounded unnatural". Nothing I said could convince him that literally nobody would notice or give a gently caress, and anyway it was grammatically correct, so changing it would mean introducing errors. Never mind that this guy was paying me to translate it for him because of my superior English writing skills as a native speaker, I am obviously lying to him and trying to pass off shoddy work.
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Nov 10, 2013 19:25
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Protocol 5 posted:I'm a translator, and I had a dude pull me up for using the preposition "in" in three consecutive sentences, saying that it "sounded unnatural". Nothing I said could convince him that literally nobody would notice or give a gently caress, and anyway it was grammatically correct, so changing it would mean introducing errors. Never mind that this guy was paying me to translate it for him because of my superior English writing skills as a native speaker, I am obviously lying to him and trying to pass off shoddy work. Arbite posted:What sort of requests? "Make this website with dynamically generated content look and behave EXACTLY the same as the prototype static page I came up with" - here the issue was that the behaviour on resizing the window was not EXACTLY the same, because it was using a J2EE framework (Whatever the Weblogic page rendering framework was as of version 8, it wasn't struts) which injected some of it's own code into the page and this couldn't be disabled. Man-months of work there to try and keep the customer happy. "Make this website work with Internet Explorer 6 (and only Internet Explorer 6)" - this for public web-pages, not intranet stuff. The joy here being that the project manager at the customer's end changed part way through and HE used Internet Explorer 8, which lead to a bunch of unplanned changes / testing late on. A tiny TINY minority of developers / software related project managers in Japan have any sort of formal IT training. I was working with people 2 or 3 years younger than me (so born in the early-mid 80s) who first TOUCHED a computer at university, had degrees in things like English or Philosophy, and didn't have a computer at home. It took 7 1/2 years before I met a manager at a Japanese software company who'd even HEARD of the mythical man month. I currently work for a US start-up and some of the questions we get from our Japanese and Korean partners (both of whom are software companies several times our size) are absolutely frightening. Everything from "can you please tell us how to burn an ISO file to a CD-ROM" - their first attempt had them end up with a CD-ROM with a single ISO file on it... - to "Why can't we use the web filter to filter email" - this from a company which makes a web filter! With Japanese software (and this includes "web pages" as it's very rare that you see a static page nowadays) I am always blown away when it works, thanks to 8 years working in the sausage factory. As an aside - and I realise this may seem a little hypocritical- I have had to correct the Japanese of a Japanese employee from time to time - but this is because she studied IT in the UK and refused to believe me when I explained how many loan words there are in the IT industry in Japan, especially when you're talking about marketing
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Nov 10, 2013 23:28
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ookiimarukochan posted:"Make this web page look and work EXACTLY like a native windows application" - seriously, visual design made in VB6 , for a web page. And this is why 75% of the text on so many sites is in jpgs, especially anything you might actually want to copy and paste somewhere. quote:I currently work for a US start-up and some of the questions we get from our Japanese and Korean partners (both of whom are software companies several times our size) are absolutely frightening. Everything from "can you please tell us how to burn an ISO file to a CD-ROM" - their first attempt had them end up with a CD-ROM with a single ISO file on it... - to "Why can't we use the web filter to filter email" - this from a company which makes a web filter! One of our products demo is currently just a set of cli python scripts. The support guys are visibly ageing from trying to get people up and running with python on windows.
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Nov 11, 2013 00:15
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I'd hate to assign anecdotal stories systematic significance, but this all sounds really bad. Could this sort of thing be part of the reason for the persistence of economic stagnation in Japan, some 20 years after the asset bubble?
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Nov 11, 2013 04:31
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TheBalor posted:I'd hate to assign anecdotal stories systematic significance, but this all sounds really bad. Could this sort of thing be part of the reason for the persistence of economic stagnation in Japan, some 20 years after the asset bubble?
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Nov 11, 2013 04:32
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I have to imagine that it is hurting their tech sector some. Galapagos thinking has lead to whole sectors of Japanese consumer products being unfit for export because of how lovely they are compared to basically the entire rest of the developed world.
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Nov 11, 2013 04:48
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It's an age where innovative technology sectors are a huge part of economic growth and the entire economy is controlled by the iron fists of the 70 year old men who run the companies. So yes, it's a symptom of the larger issue of Japan creating a system where innovation is nearly impossible. You can't disagree, you can't suggest better ways that go against tradition, there's no venture capital, there's no risk taking because if you fail once you're done forever. It's frankly more surprising Japan ever had periods that it wasn't stagnant.
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Nov 11, 2013 04:50
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Grand Fromage posted:It's an age where innovative technology sectors are a huge part of economic growth and the entire economy is controlled by the iron fists of the 70 year old men who run the companies. So yes, it's a symptom of the larger issue of Japan creating a system where innovation is nearly impossible. You can't disagree, you can't suggest better ways that go against tradition, there's no venture capital, there's no risk taking because if you fail once you're done forever. It's frankly more surprising Japan ever had periods that it wasn't stagnant. edit: Oh yeah, and Miyamoto's Five Rings is just a book about swordfighting. Seriously. It's not some magic bible for how to succeed in business. It's just about how to cut the other guy with a sword first. Also he was an arrogant jerk. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 04:54
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In the 80s a lot of innovation regarding inventory management, manufacturing processes, and supply chains came out of Japan. They were much more efficient while achieving better QA for a while there. Those kinds of practices are standard for big companies now, though, so it is not a particular advantage of the Japanese anymore.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:11
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It's fascinating because there were some major Japanese innovations for a while, and even today compared to say Korea, there's a lot more creativity going on in Japan. I'd love to read a good book about it that doesn't end up as nationalist trash or orientalist trash or kawaii desu nippon trash or whatever.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:13
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So why was Japan so successful in the 80s? All I ever hear is something about 'consensus-based decision making', which doesn't seem to have gone away.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:16
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Bloodnose posted:So why was Japan so successful in the 80s? All I ever hear is something about 'consensus-based decision making', which doesn't seem to have gone away. That's what I'm curious about. From Japanese workplace culture you'd expect stagnation, but they had a good few decades of being a powerhouse. What was different then?
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Nov 11, 2013 05:17
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Bloodnose posted:So why was Japan so successful in the 80s? All I ever hear is something about 'consensus-based decision making', which doesn't seem to have gone away. Like lemmi said, Japan absolutely revolutionized modern manufacturing during their boom years. When I worked at a canadian manufacturing plant as an engineer in 2007, Japanese manufacturing techniques were required reading for example. They definitely "earned" that success. A number of factors including demographics contributed to the decline and simply going "hurf durf Japanese people are robots with no creativity ever" and pretending Japan just lucked into success like samurai sanders is misleading at best.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:21
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Zo posted:Like lemmi said, Japan absolutely revolutionized modern manufacturing during their boom years. When I worked at a canadian manufacturing plant as an engineer in 2007, Japanese manufacturing techniques were required reading for example. Miyamoto Musashi is still a jerk though.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:22
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Samurai Sanders posted:I can definitely accept that I was wrong. Like I said, I was a kid at the time, that was just my impression and the conclusion I came to at the time. If they really did revolutionize manufacturing back then then that's that. It's fine. Looking at their current state you wouldn't expect that. At the risk of godwin I think the whole situation parallels world war 2. In both cases Japan had an incredible period of success which led them to believe their methods are infallible and do not need to change.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:27
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I mean I knew about Japanese manufacturing. My question is more like why was it good then and bad now? Again, the stuff that was praised and copied about Japanese management in the 80s is still around as far as I can tell. Why was it generating awesome innovative manufacturing techniques then and generating typos on faxes today?
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Nov 11, 2013 05:43
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Bloodnose posted:I mean I knew about Japanese manufacturing. My question is more like why was it good then and bad now? Again, the stuff that was praised and copied about Japanese management in the 80s is still around as far as I can tell. Why was it generating awesome innovative manufacturing techniques then and generating typos on faxes today? Well, it can't have hurt that there were still people alive and in power during those years who remembered the last time "the way we've always done it" led to a truly catastrophic failure.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:50
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Bloodnose posted:I mean I knew about Japanese manufacturing. My question is more like why was it good then and bad now? Again, the stuff that was praised and copied about Japanese management in the 80s is still around as far as I can tell. Why was it generating awesome innovative manufacturing techniques then and generating typos on faxes today? It's not so much that they're bad now but that what made them good is now standard everywhere and they haven't further innovated. It's like Britain during the Industrial Revolution - eventually, textile mills will only go so far and you either innovate or fall behind.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:56
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Bloodnose posted:I mean I knew about Japanese manufacturing. My question is more like why was it good then and bad now? Again, the stuff that was praised and copied about Japanese management in the 80s is still around as far as I can tell. Why was it generating awesome innovative manufacturing techniques then and generating typos on faxes today? What do you mean by "bad now"? If anything it's just neutral now, i.e. other countries have caught up and competition is stiff.
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Nov 11, 2013 05:58
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computer parts posted:It's not so much that they're bad now but that what made them good is now standard everywhere and they haven't further innovated. I think it's this in combination with a big tendency to be conservative and stick to what worked in the past. The consequences are that Japanese companies are able to be innovative, but just need a way bigger kick in their asses before they start changing their ways than Western companies. Sounds plausible, right? So once fresh blood is starting to take over or the economy gets really wrecked we might see a big push of innovation and change.
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Nov 11, 2013 07:25
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Bloodnose posted:I mean I knew about Japanese manufacturing. My question is more like why was it good then and bad now? Again, the stuff that was praised and copied about Japanese management in the 80s is still around as far as I can tell. Why was it generating awesome innovative manufacturing techniques then and generating typos on faxes today? What Japan did was never that innovative, it all got turned (in the 80s/90s) into a grand story about how Edwards Deming developed a non-hierarchical, total quality management philosophy, was ignored in the West but got taken up by Japan in the post war years and now you have to copy what they did/listen to Deming. What really happened was that Japanese manufacturing developed its own style that did certain things a bit better but could be even more stressful and hierarchical than the Fordist methods used in the West. It only looked so emancipatory if you were used to the Fordist methods and didn't look hard enough. Of course what happened was that the useful methods were just copied elsewhere in the world, with the grand managerial philosophy part consigned to history as just another fad.
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Nov 11, 2013 08:09
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Grand Fromage posted:It's an age where innovative technology sectors are a huge part of economic growth and the entire economy is controlled by the iron fists of the 70 year old men who run the companies. Its kind of funny you mention this because one of my friends posted a nice link on FB the other day. Everyone knows the PS3 was very lacking, it caught up in the mid/end cycle but it was weak in the beginning no matter how you look at it. Most of this was driven by internal decisions and ignoring the industry at large. According to this article, Exclusive: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony, Yoshida decided to try something different and hired an American software developer to run the PS4 division this time. Not only moving outside the usual comfort zone of Japanese people running things, but also having a non-hardware guy running things. The success of this decision is yet to be seen, but the support from the consumers thus far has been very strong. One can only hope that if things go well, that this might send a message about opening things up more and trying new things.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:07
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Protocol 5 posted:I'm a translator, and I had a dude pull me up for using the preposition "in" in three consecutive sentences, saying that it "sounded unnatural". Nothing I said could convince him that literally nobody would notice or give a gently caress, and anyway it was grammatically correct, so changing it would mean introducing errors. Never mind that this guy was paying me to translate it for him because of my superior English writing skills as a native speaker, I am obviously lying to him and trying to pass off shoddy work. After passing the JLPT1, I starting doing freelance translation from time to time to supplement my teaching income. Thanks to a contact in a design company, I get a pretty interesting variety of things to work on. The last time they asked me for help was when they were making a PR video for a manufacturing company, and they wanted someone to both translate the Japanese narration and actually provide an English-language voice for it. I've done narration before, so I said I was in. First I made a draft based closely on the Japanese narration and sent it in with a note saying "this is very detailed and accurate, but it will probably need to be simplified in places to make the timings work out. Anyway, just call it a draft and see how the manufacturing company likes it so far." I didn't hear anything back from them for weeks, then finally I was suddenly called in to try recording some lines. In the recording booth, they handed me a revised script to read, and I couldn't believe it. The manufacturing company had clearly asked a Japanese person to rewrite the whole thing, and it was a disaster in every way you would expect. I couldn't even make myself read some of the lines, they were so bad. I told the design company guy that for the love of god, he should at least let me edit the grammar mistakes, which he did, thankfully. It still took a stupid amount of time to do the actual recording, the result wasn't very good, and I never heard a good explanation for why they tossed my draft out. It was accurate and nice, and in spite of not using it they still paid me an unbelievable rate of like 40 yen per word to do it, not including what I got for the recording. Was it lack of faith? Too much pride? Something political within the company? Who knows. In the end, I said they didn't have to put my name in the credits. Privately, I just didn't want my name on anything that bad.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:46
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Samuelthebold posted:Was it lack of faith? Too much pride? Something political within the company? Who knows. In the end, I said they didn't have to put my name in the credits. Privately, I just didn't want my name on anything that bad. On top of this there's a certain amount of patriotism? Jingoism? "Wanting to protect the Japanese economy"? that means that they will always hire a Japanese national if they can. This last bit is the big reason my wife and I left Japan (and she's a Japanese national who was shocked to see some of the responses to me applying for jobs) - Japanese companies, as of 2 years ago at least, were genuinely more willing to hire a fresh grad from Japan for fairly senior roles than a highly experienced foreigner. Zo posted:When I worked at a canadian manufacturing plant as an engineer in 2007, Japanese manufacturing techniques were required reading for example.
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Nov 11, 2013 13:06
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Kenishi posted:Its kind of funny you mention this because one of my friends posted a nice link on FB the other day. This happens in Korea. I live in Ulsan, which is a large town which was literally created by Hyundai and is a huge manufacturing center for them and many other companies. So I know a lot of engineers here. The Korean firms hire westerners as a matter of course to do a lot of the design/troubleshooting/problem solving kinds of things. The Korean project managers straight up say Korean engineers are very good at building things but are terrible at coming up with ideas or doing any creative work, so they hire westerners to do that and the Koreans handle the manufacturing. I think fundamentally it's an education issue. I work as a teacher here and I get to see the education system beat out every bit of creativity, drive, and self-motivation from the kids to turn them into memorization boxes. It's no surprise they take that into their adult working lives.
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Nov 11, 2013 13:20
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ookiimarukochan posted:Japanese companies, as of 2 years ago at least, were genuinely more willing to hire a fresh grad from Japan for fairly senior roles than a highly experienced foreigner. Wait, how is it that they were hiring new grads for senior roles?
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Nov 11, 2013 13:36
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Grand Fromage posted:I think fundamentally it's an education issue. I work as a teacher here and I get to see the education system beat out every bit of creativity, drive, and self-motivation from the kids to turn them into memorization boxes. It's no surprise they take that into their adult working lives. I think you're right. A real common pattern I've seen is either leadership goes around making every decision and micromanaging everything or people sit around waiting for someone to do so. The whole concept of leadership being there mainly to facilitate communication and mediate is markedly absent.
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Nov 11, 2013 13:47
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The emphasis on appearance over results doesn't help either. People spend a ton of time at work so they look busy and diligent, but aren't actually doing anything. My old coworkers were amazed how much work I would get done in a single day, and I was not exactly busting my balls. Long work hours but very low productivity. It's not like people are any different. The education, the leadership style (or lack thereof), and the unproductive work environment combined are a recipe for stagnation.
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Nov 11, 2013 13:57
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I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but do some Japanese schools have America clubs like American schools have japan clubs?
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Nov 11, 2013 14:39
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LimburgLimbo posted:Wait, how is it that they were hiring new grads for senior roles? One job interview I had (and failed to get) was with a Korean engineer and a Japanese engineer. The Korean and I were bitching about / discussing both the racism issues AND the fact that the visa requirements meant that we were pretty much guaranteed to be better qualified than any of our co-workers (plus how irritating applying for the visa had been) and yet that was ignored day-to-day, and the Japanese engineer was shocked to hear a lot of it. There were several times I had multiple job interviews, was introduced to the team, shown where I would be sitting, etc etc with only the meaningless formality of checking with the CEO before being made an offer, and the offer then fell through - in these cases the jobs would sit unfulfilled for months if not years, and some times I got contacted again by the companies months later asking if I would want to work for them after all ("no" being the response here) I applied for one job that required a bilingual developer with fluent English, years of C++ and Java experience, embedded/electronics knowledge a plus - basically a job posting made for me. When I applied I got a response in under 30 minutes saying "Your CV is very good and you are obviously very experienced and able to do this job, but as we are a Japanese company we will not hire any foreigners as they may damage the company culture" (I think that pretty much everyone in this thread who's worked in Japan has either been an English teacher or transferred on an ex-pat package so they're unaware of how much weird anti-foreigner bullshit there is in Japan right now in most fields of work - and this was something that started happening around late 2008/early 2009, before then being a foreigner had been considered a benefit)
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Nov 11, 2013 14:59
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