8.4 はる と あき — spring and autumn — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read five hundred and sixty beats of continuous Japanese without stopping. Follow a sentence of four clauses joined by the form from 4.14. Read past two or three constructions you have not been taught. Say why the two short seasons are the ones people name as their favourites. Prerequisites : lessons 8.3 and 4.14 — the third text, and the joining form. Nothing in this text is needed for anything. It is here because a course that only teaches you to buy things is not teaching you a language, and because the subject is one that Japanese writing returns to constantly — the seasons are to Japanese prose roughly what the weather is to English conversation, except that they are taken seriously. Read it straight through without stopping, even where you do not know a word. That instruction has been given before and this is the text that makes it necessary: there are four constructions in it you have not been taught, and stopping at each one will cost you the text. About this text Five hundred and sixty beats, seven paragraphs, four seasons. Written for this course. The vocabulary goes slightly beyond what you have been given — there are about fifteen new words, listed below — and the grammar goes further than that. What is here that has not been taught. Four things, and you should recognise rather than learn them. A conditional ending meaning when this happens, that follows , which you met in 7.5. A form meaning doing this and that among other things , in the third paragraph. An ending meaning too much , in the fourth. And a passive in the third and fifth, used impersonally to mean it is said . All four are in the second phase. Here they are scenery. Why this is the last text. Because at this point the honest thing to do is to stop controlling the input. Everything in phase 1 has been written to your level; nothing outside this course ever will be. The skill you need next is reading something that is slightly too hard and getting the shape of it anyway, and this text is the first small exercise in that. Read it first, then read this Go and read the text before the next section. It is a separate document beside this one. The notes below assume you have been through it once, and the first reading is the only one you get. What the text does Seven paragraphs: the four seasons named, spring, the cherry blossom, summer, autumn, autumn again, and winter with a turn back to spring at the end. The structure is the year, and the year is circular, which is why the last sentence returns to the first subject. The chains. The second paragraph has a sentence with three clauses joined by the form from 4.14: the days get longer, and the wind gets warm, and the trees turn green. Only the last verb is finite; the first two carry no tense at all. English would need three verbs in the present and two conjunctions. Count the chains in the text — there are ten of them — and notice that only one has three clauses and the rest have two. Three or four is about the comfortable limit in speech; writing goes further. Becoming. The commonest verb in this text is the one meaning to become , and it appears with adjectives in a form you have not been taught: ひがながくなって , the days become long. An adjective changes its last syllable and then takes the verb. It is completely regular and it is the ordinary way of saying that something is changing, which a text about the seasons needs on every line. The blossom paragraph is the heart of it. Three sentences: the flowers last about a week; because that is short, everybody hurries to the park; when it rains they fall at once, and that too is said to be beautiful. The last of those is the one an English reader should linger over — the falling is not a spoiling of the flowers but part of what makes them worth looking at. There is a word for this idea and it is not in this text, because the text shows it instead. The joke in the fourth paragraph. Summer is hot. Very hot. Two sentences where one would do, and the second is three words. Japanese does this as readily as English does, and recognising it is the same skill as the chocolate in 8.3. Reading past what you do not know The instruction is easy to give and hard to follow, so here is the method, in the order in which to apply it. Finish the sentence. Japanese puts the verb last and the tense last of all, so a sentence you abandon halfway has told you almost nothing. Get to the full stop even if three words in the middle are dark. Decide whether it matters. Most unknown words in a text of this kind are one of: a noun you can infer from the sentence, an adverb of degree, or a grammatical ending. Only the first changes the meaning, and often not much. The ending meaning too much in the fourth paragraph could be skipped entirely and you would still know that summer is hot and unpopular. Mark it and move. Underline it, keep going, and come back at the end of the paragraph. Nine times in ten the rest of the paragraph will have told you. Look up at most three things per text. More than that and you are not reading, you are decoding, and decoding does not build the thing you are trying to build. This is the single most useful piece of advice in the volume and the hardest to accept. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Japan has four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter. All of them are beautiful, but many people say they like spring and autumn best. Spring begins at the end of March. The days get longer, the wind gets warmer, and the trees turn green. The most famous thing is the cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms bloom for only about one week. Because it is so short, everyone hurries to the park. In the park, friends and families sit under the trees and eat and drink. At night the lights come on, and the blossoms glow white. When it rains, the blo