Education: Japanese in Ten Lessons

A Princeton man has softened up the Japanese language. Using a formula of poker-playing days in college,* balding Burton Crane, 41 (Princeton ex-’22), invented a card game which he claims will teach a speaking knowledge of Japanese (a vocabulary of 800 words) in ten sessions. His game smashes to smithereens collegiate par for the course: 18 months.

Inventor Crane, now a financial reporter for the New York Times, learned Japanese in Tokyo, where he was financial editor of the Japan Advertiser, newspaper correspondent and broadcaster. He made two best-selling phonograph records—Japanese versions of Drunk Last Night and Hinkey, Dinkey, Parlez Vous.

Lingo has go cards, each containing five sentences in English and Japanese (written in English instead of Japanese characters). Players examine all the cards dealt (not more than three to a player) for a few minutes and try to memorize the Japanese translations. Then each player in turn reads an English sentence from one of his own cards to a player at his left, who wins a card if he answers with a correct translation. Stakes are paid off to the player who wins the most cards.

The manual of instructions gives many a short cut to Japanese. Examples:

¶ More than 2,000 words are borrowed from English or Portuguese, e.g., kohi (coffee), naifu (knife), teiburu (table), tabako (tobacco), kakuteiru (cocktail).

¶ All verbs have polite and impolite forms, e.g., nonde kudasai (please drink), nome yo, nonde (drink!). There are also “humble” verbs, used to describe one’s own actions, and “honorific” verbs, used about other people.

Japanese has no singular or plural, no gender. A noun never changes its form.

“Good day” in Japanese is Konnichi wa (literal translation: “As for today . . .”). Another idiom: to say “I want whiskey,” Japanese observe politely Toki-doki uisuki ga hoshii desu (“Now and then whiskey is desirable”).

¶ The letter s is always hissed.

School for Governors

Fifty U.S. Army officers faced a huge map of the world in the University of Virginia’s Clark Hall last week. Somewhere on this map, each man knew, he might have a job some day. The Army was training its first class of military governors for future U.S.-occupied foreign lands.

A picked group of high-ranking officers, from captains to colonels, the class included men who in civilian life had been judges, city managers, engineers, lawyers, police officials, doctors, a movie executive. Their teachers were Army officers, headed by Brigadier General Cornelius W. Wickersham, son of the former U.S. Attorney General, and such eminent political scientists as Yale’s Geopolitico Nicholas J. Spykman, Harvard’s Professor William Yandell Elliott, Johns Hopkins’ President Isaiah Bowman, Williams’ Professor Max Lerner.

The first class will graduate from its four-month course this month, be succeeded by a new, bigger class. Instruction, unlike that in the Nazi schools for Gauleiters of conquered territories, is intended to teach them not to crush but to revive the peoples of army-occupied areas. The Army’s plan: in the wake of advancing U.S. military forces, the commanding general in each theater will appoint a civil-affairs officer with a separate staff, divorced from combat units. Identified by armbands as “CA” (Civil Affairs) officers, they will supersede local governments, set up military courts, keep order until peace is established and civilian officials take over.

To prepare for these tasks, officers in the Army’s school stage mock trials, study military and civilian government, history, social psychology, geopolitics, the experience of the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany from 1918 to 1923. Their studies are not pointed at any particular area.

Meanwhile Columbia University prepared to open an unofficial course next fortnight in “International Administration,” designed for a similar purpose. Unlike students in the Army’s school, each of Columbia’s trainees will specialize in a particular country of his own choice. Their twelve-month course will train them not only in military administration but in relief and economic rehabilitation. By autumn, courses like Columbia’s may also be launched at the Universities of Maryland and Michigan.

*When he was a sophomore, Crane’s French professor one day read a list of names of men who would flunk—unless they cracked the final exam. All happened to be Crane’s poker cronies. Unabashed, Crane devised a card game that taught his companions French so efficiently that they “knocked the exam for a row of ashcans.”