19 ms·

How the UK found Japanese speakers in a hurry in WW2

50 points by samaysharma 11y ago

rodgerd 11y ago
> and Britain's huge military base in Singapore had fallen. "Had given up so quickly it's a bloody cheek for any Englishman to use that joke from the Simpsons about surrender monkeys" would be more accurate.
repiret 11y ago
The article makes frequent use of the term Sixth-former, which I hadn't heard before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_form It appears to be the equivalent of 11th and 12th grade in the US.
- abritinthebay 11y ago
  Yup, it's the part of UK school that happens post compulsory education (so after 16yrs old). Basically post-16 you can go out and work, or learn a trade, go to a trade-school, or continue with your more formal education at 6th Form level at either your school or a college (and we treat colleges as different to a university).
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    > Yup, it's the part of UK school that happens post compulsory education (so after 16yrs old). *English & Welsh school. It's also used at the top of many UK private schools — both prep schools (at around 13, where historically it was the sixth "grade") and the public schools (which are, just to confuse everyone, not state schools). In Scotland education beyond sixteen continues on at secondary school, with no separate institution involved. (Though many in England and Wales have sixth-form colleges attached.)
  - desas 11y ago
    The new leaving age laws came into force this summer, you can't go out and work pre-18 unless you're spending the equivalent of one day per week in training or education.
  - chrisseaton 11y ago
    Also interesting for Americans is that in the six-form you will start to specialise down to three or four subjects, one of which you may study at university. People say UK degrees are short, and PhDs here are even shorter, but in part that's because at 16 I was already specialising in computer science, maths and physics.
    - davnicwil 11y ago
      On the other hand, this creates an adverse effect of specialising in what you're good at and what will be best for qualifying you for the type of degree you want to do, at the expense of a broader education. I too took Maths, Physics and Computing to A level because I knew I'd want to end up doing a Physics or Computer Science degree, and because I knew these subjects were my safest bets for As. For those outside the UK education system, all As at A-level is essentially the minimum requirement for getting into the best UK universities, so you're under a lot of pressure to ensure you get them if you want to go to one of these. I would have really liked to carry on studying other things - French, in particular. But because there would have been more of a risk of me 'dropping' to a B in French, as opposed to a maths/science subject, though I would have enjoyed it I would have been foolish to do so under that system. Instead I ended up taking French night classes years later, when I was out of University and the general educational funnel where you are strongly incentivised to focus solely on your specialisation of the moment for the best grade(s). It was much harder than it would have been at 16, and I'm much worse at French now than I could have been as a result, which is a real shame. Specialising early has benefits, for sure, but a very real drawback is that you have to sacrifice the development of other skills, knowledge and interests to do it properly. I'm not convinced 16 is a better age than 18 to start doing that, even if it means you're ultimately in education a year or two longer.
      - L_Rahman 11y ago
        I found the American university and its distribution requirements for engineering majors to be a nice counterbalance to my A Levels. My A Levels were in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, and because of my A Levels received credit for Calc 101/102, Bio 101/102, Phys 101/102, Chem 101/102. This left me with 32 credits of electives on top of my biomedical engineering distribution requirements. I used them to classes on art curation with the Walters museum in Baltimore, to explore concepts in philosophy and singularity in a writing class and examine the bioethics of genetic engineering.
- slyall 11y ago
  In New Zealand they used "forms" up until around 2007 but switched to "years" since then. Nice diagram in the link below which includes the type of schools each covers. Commonly children go primary school for 6 years, Intermediate for two and then High school for 5 (Form 3 through Form 7) You could leave school at 15 so it was quite common to do only 3 or 4 years unless you were going to university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_Zealand#Years_of_schooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_Zealand#Years...
ume 11y ago
Another of the SOAS intake at that time was Bernard T Smith, an RAF officer, who was posted to Japan in 1946 to take part in the rebuilding process. Bernard was subsequently involved in the UK computing industry. His paper on a general purpose query language, SPECOL, is interesting to read today given it was published in the 60s. (http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf) (My company published a Japanese translation of his 1946 memoirs and I had the very good fortune to meet Bernard. Sadly, he passed away last year).
- Pamar 11y ago
  Interesting, thanks. Btw I checked SPECOL on Wikipedia and there is no entry (for the query language) - maybe someone can remedy this?
ilamont 11y ago
Based on the accounts in the article, it seems that Britain was unprepared for conflict with Japan, and the crash language program basically failed. Years ago, I read in a book or magazine article that the British Imperial service was actually quite strong when it came to language instruction. In Malaya, as I recall, they were able to teach officers Cantonese, Hokkien, and other Chinese dialects that are quite hard for non-native speakers to master. I assume that the diplomatic service was similarly effective when it came to training their officers in the languages required to carry out their overseas missions. So, British officials were able to learn foreign languages, including obscure Asian languages used in their colonies. Yet Japanese was not considered a priority, even though Japan had been regarded as an expansionist regional power for decades (which every Western colonial power was aware of, thanks to Japan's concessions in China, its puppet state in Manchuria, and other militaristic activities/ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s).
- cafard 11y ago
  Anthony Burgess writes about this in his memoir Little Wilson and Big God: "Colonial functionaries had to learn the major language of their territory at a formidable level. A kitchen jargon, good enough for wives, with bad grammar and a master-race pronunciation, was usually preferred by the natives, who did not believe it was possible for a foreigner with a white skin to learn their language. Colonial civil servants had to disconcert these natives with a linguistic mastery, including a control of many registers, equal to, or greater than, their own. In Malaya, there were many languages, but Malay was considered, for political reasons, to be the obligatory specialisation. You could, if you were mad enough, learn Hakka or Cantonese or Kuo-Yu or Tamil or Hindi or Urdu, but you had to take examinations in Malay. You had to take the Standard One examination in your first year and the Standard Two before the end of your first three-year tour. If you failed, an efficiency bar was invoked, and you were not entitled to annual pay increments." Burgess was by his account unusually competent linguistically, passing Standard Two by the end of his first year (which made him, he says, disliked) and Standard Three by the end of his tour (which made him hated). [Edit: Burgess write of his first boss in Malaya that "During the war he had had the chance to learn Japanesr, and he had been sent on a course with fine amenities, including recording apparatus. He had used this apparatus for recording popular songs. I id not think this funny."]

50 points by samaysharma 11y ago

> and Britain's huge military base in Singapore had fallen. "Had given up so quickly it's a bloody cheek for any Englishman to use that joke from the Simpsons about surrender monkeys" would be more accurate.

repiret 11y ago

The article makes frequent use of the term Sixth-former, which I hadn't heard before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_form It appears to be the equivalent of 11th and 12th grade in the US.

abritinthebay 11y ago
Yup, it's the part of UK school that happens post compulsory education (so after 16yrs old). Basically post-16 you can go out and work, or learn a trade, go to a trade-school, or continue with your more formal education at 6th Form level at either your school or a college (and we treat colleges as different to a university).
- gsnedders 11y ago
  > Yup, it's the part of UK school that happens post compulsory education (so after 16yrs old). *English & Welsh school. It's also used at the top of many UK private schools — both prep schools (at around 13, where historically it was the sixth "grade") and the public schools (which are, just to confuse everyone, not state schools). In Scotland education beyond sixteen continues on at secondary school, with no separate institution involved. (Though many in England and Wales have sixth-form colleges attached.)
- desas 11y ago
  The new leaving age laws came into force this summer, you can't go out and work pre-18 unless you're spending the equivalent of one day per week in training or education.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  Also interesting for Americans is that in the six-form you will start to specialise down to three or four subjects, one of which you may study at university. People say UK degrees are short, and PhDs here are even shorter, but in part that's because at 16 I was already specialising in computer science, maths and physics.
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    On the other hand, this creates an adverse effect of specialising in what you're good at and what will be best for qualifying you for the type of degree you want to do, at the expense of a broader education. I too took Maths, Physics and Computing to A level because I knew I'd want to end up doing a Physics or Computer Science degree, and because I knew these subjects were my safest bets for As. For those outside the UK education system, all As at A-level is essentially the minimum requirement for getting into the best UK universities, so you're under a lot of pressure to ensure you get them if you want to go to one of these. I would have really liked to carry on studying other things - French, in particular. But because there would have been more of a risk of me 'dropping' to a B in French, as opposed to a maths/science subject, though I would have enjoyed it I would have been foolish to do so under that system. Instead I ended up taking French night classes years later, when I was out of University and the general educational funnel where you are strongly incentivised to focus solely on your specialisation of the moment for the best grade(s). It was much harder than it would have been at 16, and I'm much worse at French now than I could have been as a result, which is a real shame. Specialising early has benefits, for sure, but a very real drawback is that you have to sacrifice the development of other skills, knowledge and interests to do it properly. I'm not convinced 16 is a better age than 18 to start doing that, even if it means you're ultimately in education a year or two longer.
    - L_Rahman 11y ago
      I found the American university and its distribution requirements for engineering majors to be a nice counterbalance to my A Levels. My A Levels were in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, and because of my A Levels received credit for Calc 101/102, Bio 101/102, Phys 101/102, Chem 101/102. This left me with 32 credits of electives on top of my biomedical engineering distribution requirements. I used them to classes on art curation with the Walters museum in Baltimore, to explore concepts in philosophy and singularity in a writing class and examine the bioethics of genetic engineering.
slyall 11y ago
In New Zealand they used "forms" up until around 2007 but switched to "years" since then. Nice diagram in the link below which includes the type of schools each covers. Commonly children go primary school for 6 years, Intermediate for two and then High school for 5 (Form 3 through Form 7) You could leave school at 15 so it was quite common to do only 3 or 4 years unless you were going to university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_Zealand#Years_of_schooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_Zealand#Years...

ume 11y ago

Another of the SOAS intake at that time was Bernard T Smith, an RAF officer, who was posted to Japan in 1946 to take part in the rebuilding process. Bernard was subsequently involved in the UK computing industry. His paper on a general purpose query language, SPECOL, is interesting to read today given it was published in the 60s. (http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf) (My company published a Japanese translation of his 1946 memoirs and I had the very good fortune to meet Bernard. Sadly, he passed away last year).

Pamar 11y ago
Interesting, thanks. Btw I checked SPECOL on Wikipedia and there is no entry (for the query language) - maybe someone can remedy this?

ilamont 11y ago

Based on the accounts in the article, it seems that Britain was unprepared for conflict with Japan, and the crash language program basically failed. Years ago, I read in a book or magazine article that the British Imperial service was actually quite strong when it came to language instruction. In Malaya, as I recall, they were able to teach officers Cantonese, Hokkien, and other Chinese dialects that are quite hard for non-native speakers to master. I assume that the diplomatic service was similarly effective when it came to training their officers in the languages required to carry out their overseas missions. So, British officials were able to learn foreign languages, including obscure Asian languages used in their colonies. Yet Japanese was not considered a priority, even though Japan had been regarded as an expansionist regional power for decades (which every Western colonial power was aware of, thanks to Japan's concessions in China, its puppet state in Manchuria, and other militaristic activities/ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s).

cafard 11y ago
Anthony Burgess writes about this in his memoir Little Wilson and Big God: "Colonial functionaries had to learn the major language of their territory at a formidable level. A kitchen jargon, good enough for wives, with bad grammar and a master-race pronunciation, was usually preferred by the natives, who did not believe it was possible for a foreigner with a white skin to learn their language. Colonial civil servants had to disconcert these natives with a linguistic mastery, including a control of many registers, equal to, or greater than, their own. In Malaya, there were many languages, but Malay was considered, for political reasons, to be the obligatory specialisation. You could, if you were mad enough, learn Hakka or Cantonese or Kuo-Yu or Tamil or Hindi or Urdu, but you had to take examinations in Malay. You had to take the Standard One examination in your first year and the Standard Two before the end of your first three-year tour. If you failed, an efficiency bar was invoked, and you were not entitled to annual pay increments." Burgess was by his account unusually competent linguistically, passing Standard Two by the end of his first year (which made him, he says, disliked) and Standard Three by the end of his tour (which made him hated). [Edit: Burgess write of his first boss in Malaya that "During the war he had had the chance to learn Japanesr, and he had been sent on a course with fine amenities, including recording apparatus. He had used this apparatus for recording popular songs. I id not think this funny."]