Interview with Luca Toma

Good morning, Luca. How are you? Thanks for agreeing to this interview. Hi thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my language experiences with all the language enthusiasts like us. Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about what you have been doing so far, where you have lived, which languages you have learned? What do you do or have you done in your life? Of courseI am Italian, just like you. I am 36 years old and I come from Salento, southern Italy. From an early age I have had two passions art and foreign languages. They have always had a strong impact in my life choices. After graduating from art school, which I chose because of my inclination towards drawing, painting and carving, I decided to enroll at The University of Venice and study Japanese and Chinese. After a short stay in Japan, I graduated from university and went to Taipei, where I spent 8 months improving my Chinese while teaching English at a kindergarten. I had written my final dissertation about Japanese graphic design and was so fascinated by that topic that I decided to do an MA in graphic design in Japan. In the meantime, I was working part-time as an Italian language teacher. I loved that job, so I ended up giving up graphic design and started to teach Italian and English at two universities in Tokyo. I lived in Japan for a total of 10 years. Three years ago, I finally decided to move back to Europe. I wanted to teach Japanese, so I moved to London to do an MA in Applied Linguistics & Language Pedagogy. Now I work as an associate lecturer of Japanese and Italian at a university in the UK. AlsoI forgot to mention my great passion for translation. Over the years I have also worked translating manga. I do this alongside teaching. This is, in short, what I have done so far First of all, lets start from a typical question. Why did you start learning Japanese? What prompted you to do so? What was your motivation? My passion for Japanese began as a child and was influenced by Japanese cartoons. I remember being fascinated by the writing system on TV, especially characters, which I knew were from Chinese. This sparked my interest in them. When I was in junior high school I read a book which was enlightening Chinese Calligraphy: From Pictograph to Ideogram by Edoardo Fazioli. It contained an explanation of the history and meaning of all the 214 radicals through pictures and it was very useful. However, I was interested in Japanese and finding materials in Italian was not easy at that time. I came to a solution during a school trip to Rome. I bought a guidebook of the city in Japanese, together with its Italian translation. This was my textbook for many years to follow, along with a Japanese-English dictionary that I bought shortly after. I used to slavishly copy portions of text from the guidebook in order to compare them with the Italian version. There were time when I didnt know the pronunciation of some words or the meaning of some grammatical structures, but the compared analysis I did over the years helped me acquire an extensive vocabulary Finally, I would like to stress my fascination for calligraphy (shodo) as a marriage of art and words. As soon as I arrived to Japan, I joined a calligraphy school and eight years later I was awarded a master qualification. It was one of the greatest achievements in my life. Copying Chinese classical calligraphy works by brush is a way to fight stress Japanese is one of the most popular languages in the world, but it also has a reputation for being one of the hardest. Which are the most difficult aspects of Japanese for an Italian language speaker (or a speaker of an inflected language)? And what is easy about it? Lets start by saying that we find Japanese very easy to pronounce. It has 5 vowels, all of them very similar to the Italian ones, except for u. Consonants apart from an aspirated h do not pose any problem either. Unlike English speakers, I would say we are very lucky in that respect. In addition to this, Japanese does not have grammatical categories such as articles before nouns, the difference between singular and plural forms, and different verb endings according to the person. Regarding the difficult aspectsFirst of all, I would mention the writing system, which is a mixtures of two syllabaries of 50 symbols each (hiragana and katakana), plus the Chinese characters (kanji). You need to know at least 2000 of these. Another difficult aspect, especially in the early stages of your study, is syntax

(i.e. the order in which words appear in a sentence). Finally the vocabulary is completely different from the European languages. This will slow down the acquisition of new words. I know you are teaching at universityWhat kind of approach do you usually take with your students? How do you go about kanji memorization and the difficult syntax? Also, what kind of approach would you generally recommend to those who wish to study Japanese on their own? Generally, I follow a textbook and focus only on the dialogues, avoiding tedious and mechanical drills. I have students listen to the audio with and without looking at the script, practice role play, but above all, I always let them first guess the meaning of new vocabulary or grammatical structures by themselves. Basically, it is an approach that goes from context to practice through different kinds of activities (in pairs or groups), and the aim is keeping students curiosity and motivation alive. With regard to kanji, the common practice in Japanese courses is to consider them separately, something complicated to be addressed at a later stage. But I dont agree with that approach. They also tend to have students learn them one by one. Knowing that (gaku) means to learn and (sei) to be born is not helpful at all if you cannot recognize (gakusei), the word for student. It would be akin to knowing what tele (far) and phone (sound) mean, while being unaware of the meaning of telephone. Luckily enough, at the university where I teach we have a different approach. By using a spaced-repetition technique, we make sure students are able to recognize the meaning of the basic components of kanji (about 280 divided into different semantic categories) in a matter of weeks. In this way, a core of associati ons between shapes and meanings is formed in the brain. This is extremely useful in the subsequent stage, where we study kanji words, usually taken from dialogues in the textbook or in sentences we ask students to copy by hand. You also asked me about syntaxWell, Japanese is an SOV (subject-object-verb) language, so if you want to say Today, I dont go to school because I have a fever, in Japanese you would say Today, fever have because, school-to go-not. Being able to express yourself in such a way might sound unbelievable at first, but the key to speed up the process is getting used to sentence structure right from the beginning. In that respect, I believe a method like yours based on translation is the most appropriate. At the end of each lesson, I usually give my students a bunch of sentences containing new vocabulary and structures and ask them to first write a word-by-word translation of them, followed by one in plain English. Finally, I ask them to self-correct and notice their mistakes, something which is very important. For those who wish to learn Japanese on their own, I highly recommend using a method which allows selfcheck. Without a teacher for you there, the textbook will be your guide. You just need to find a good book, with interesting dialogues and some grammatical notes, accompanied by a CD. Regarding kanji, I would start out from studying all the radicals first, then switch to learning kanji words in a natural way, as they appear in the dialogues. For the rest, I would apply this fantastic method of translating to L1 and vice versa. You will soon see the results! Pitch accent in the pronunciation of Japanese. Is it important to know about it from the beginning? In my case it was Yes, it is important to know about the existence of different patterns and pitch rules, although this is an aspect which is usually not addressed in traditional Japanese classesIt is about pronouncing the syllables which make up a word with a different height or tone. For example, the difference between a-ME (candy, low-high) and A-me (rain, high-low). It works in a similar way to the English words DE-sert and to deSERT. Moreover, accent changes from area to area, although the Tokyo accent is considered as the standard. In my opinion, letting students know about this phenomenon helps them gain awareness of their own pronunciation and improve it. You lived in Japan for 10 years, so you can provide a special point of view not only on the language, but also on the culture. What matters more in a working environment (being humble, simple)? Would a clumsy gaijin (foreigner) be forgiven for misusing the honorific language? The Japanese usually prefer team spirit to individualism. In many areas, showing off or display ones knowledge or abilities is not a common practice. Being humble is a highly appreciated virtue. Although generalizations should be avoided, they usually tend to hide their feelings by smiling, bowing and controlling themselves rather than showing their point of view openly as we do in the West. Regarding keigo (the honorific style), I would say there is nothing to be worried about. Even Japanese people learn to use it properly only after they leave school and start working.

Are there any particular behaviors you definitely need to avoid in a social context? Sneezing in public, for example SneezingI would rather say, blowing your nose! In fact, while we are used to blowing our nose, Japanese people tend to sniff. I remember that many of my students with a cold would keep sniffing for the whole lessonGenerally, you should avoid blowing your nose in front of other people. It is preferable to use a tissue and throw it away afterwards. Never stuff it in your pocket. Other things that come to my mind are: refrain from eating while standing or walking in the street; do not talk on mobile phones on public transportation; avoid direct physical contact or fixing someone in the eyes; do not interrupt people when they are speaking or formulating an idea. From our meeting I know you also love languages in general, not just Japanese. Which languages you are currently working on? I am delighted to know that you are using my method. What do you think of it? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Yes. I have always studied English at school, but I worked on German, French, Russian and Greek on my own. However, since I did not have a specific study method, I mostly focused on grammar and reading comprehension. That is why I now have a passive knowledge in all these languages. Then, two years ago, I discovered Youtube videos of other language enthusiasts and they encouraged me to start studying languages again. Their study methods interested me the most. Among many polyglots, I was particularly struck by you and the abilities you demonstrate. I wanted to adopt your method, so I tried to figure it out on my own and applied it to Czech. However, after studying for six months, I realized that something was not working. I believed I would get to the end of my Teach Yourself Czech and be able to have a decent speaking ability, but that was not the case I was so disappointed that I decided to get in touch with you and come to see you in Paris. Actually, I am very glad I did. Talking to you helped me to realize that I was following not following your regime correctly. My progress was too fast and I was not allocating enough time to digest the material I was dealing with. I was also too impatient to see results and, above all, I realized I was not sufficiently motivated. I had chosen the Czech language by chance, after a holiday in Prague. After our meeting, I thus decided to apply your method to Spanish. Now, seven months on, I can reap the rewards of my effort and I am really impressed with what I have achieved. If I had to describe your method, three adjectives come to my mind: 1. Natural grammar and vocabulary are absorbed in a natural way 2. Gradual small amounts of information at a time digested without effort and stress 3. Effective different skills are simultaneously developed with tangible results For those who love writing and learning by translating, this method allows you to acquire a solid foundation in the language up to an intermediate level. Once you finish a basic book (Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc.), you can keep applying it to longer and more structured texts. However, in order to develop real fluency in speaking the language, you need to integrate it with more practical activities. For example, you recommend starting to speak to yourself right from the beginning, or talking with natives by using text chat first and voice chat at a later stage. I then added other activities. I did an Italian-Spanish exchange with a native speaker; took part in an English-Spanish meet-up group; started to watch Spanish TV (news, TV dramas, etc.) after 3 months; started to read El Pas, books and magazines after six monthsBasically, it is important to tackle the language from different angles and always choose pleasant and interesting activities. As you always say, you go from a quality work with a textbook, and you add quantity later on. And I must say the results you get are incredible! I cant thank you enough for showing me such an effective method. And I would like to thank you, Luca, for this great interview! You are welcome! Luca has a passion for foreign languages and cultures. He graduated in Japanese Language and Literature at Ca Foscari Univeristy of Venice in 2000. Since then, he has been combining his passion for translation with his quest for new methods for teaching and self-study for foreign languages. He works as a translator from Japanese to Italian and he has lived in Tokyo for about 10 years. Upon obtaining an MA in graphic design from Tama Art University (Tokyo), he worked as an English language instructor for the same university, and as an Italian language teacher for Obirin University (Tokyo). In 2009, he received an MA in Applied Linguistics & Language Pedagogy from London University. Currently, he works as an associate lecturer of Japanese and Italian at Oxford Brookes University.