General Yuzuru Chat

[Kat]

Has anyone here ever met or interacted with anyone who could...kind of...be a poster child for why other skating fans look down on Yuzuru or his fans? I did. I had to leave the conversation.

 

Side note: I have been absent way too long and am so many pages behind 😅

[rockstaryuzu]

1 hour ago, Kat said:

Has anyone here ever met or interacted with anyone who could...kind of...be a poster child for why other skating fans look down on Yuzuru or his fans? I did. I had to leave the conversation.

 

Side note: I have been absent way too long and am so many pages behind 😅

yes, once. Most upsetting encounter with a stranger I have ever had, in some ways. It's rare to meet people with that level of delusion. 

[monchan]

A happy ending 

 

[memae]

On 5/20/2020 at 4:00 AM, Sombreuil said:

 I was astonished he did the gala and all those messing around practices - painkillers?  What painkillers?  Must have been good stuff.

 

 

Even more fun! Painkillers + general gala Zuzu + Olympic dream fever feels and hype = an unquantifiable amount of fun and hijinks. No wonder that gala delivered the goods lol

[memae]

On 5/20/2020 at 12:21 PM, rockstaryuzu said:

No, it was the one at the Olympics itself. It was literally the next day after the medal ceremony or something like that. It's infamous for the moderator telling the press that Yuzu would answer English questions in English and his reaction was  , then later . Literally. This emoji is taken from that very moment. 

 

 

Here, I found it:

 

 

If that's not it, then it was the one after the SP, which I can't seem to find on YouTube, 

 

but the Planet has it:

 

 

 

Goodness knows how many times I've watched both of these by now, but watching the first again makes me see that his (productive) English really is far beyond what generally comes across. His vocabulary is really great - he makes very precise word choices. His grammar shows a lot of usual errors that stick around, even for fluent speakers of English as a second language, and he has a bit of trouble with some of the sounds (again, something that very commonly persists, especially in unscripted or spontaneous speech), but neither of those are at all indicative of his level of fluency or comprehension. I think perhaps sometimes he doesn't sound especially fluent because he is so careful and precise in what he says - and that's a difficult thing in a second language you didn't learn as a child. 

[rockstaryuzu]

2 hours ago, memae said:

 

Goodness knows how many times I've watched both of these by now, but watching the first again makes me see that his (productive) English really is far beyond what generally comes across. His vocabulary is really great - he makes very precise word choices. His grammar shows a lot of usual errors that stick around, even for fluent speakers of English as a second language, and he has a bit of trouble with some of the sounds (again, something that very commonly persists, especially in unscripted or spontaneous speech), but neither of those are at all indicative of his level of fluency or comprehension. I think perhaps sometimes he doesn't sound especially fluent because he is so careful and precise in what he says - and that's a difficult thing in a second language you didn't learn as a child. 

There's that, but there's also the fact that even in his native Japanese, his use of language is (so I've been told) advanced and complex. Someone like that, who is used to having a wide vocabulary fluently at his disposal to articulate his deepest thoughts, is naturally going to find it intensely painful to have to stumble along, trying to express those same thoughts with an extremely limited vocabulary that doesn't come tripping off the tongue as he would like. 

 

It's like asking Gustave Klimt to redraw 'The Kiss', but using only one hand, one eye,  and no colours. It's possible, but the results will be questionable. 

 

[SitTwizzle]

Thank you for these opinions as native English speakers.

I had the reverse observation, from a French native speaker who used to read a lot and had been in French schools of a level way above the average and who, after some months in a German high school, found that German language was much more precise and allowed more accurate expression; and was answered French language too... when properly used. (She checked later.)

What is your opinion as to his English accent/way, "music" when speaking? I find it so charming.

[Kat]

7 hours ago, rockstaryuzu said:

yes, once. Most upsetting encounter with a stranger I have ever had, in some ways. It's rare to meet people with that level of delusion. 

i feel your pain, now 😂. I'm thankful the majority of fans I have run into aren't that way at all. 

[memae]

3 hours ago, rockstaryuzu said:

There's that, but there's also the fact that even in his native Japanese, his use of language is (so I've been told) advanced and complex. Someone like that, who is used to having a wide vocabulary fluently at his disposal to articulate his deepest thoughts, is naturally going to find it intensely painful to have to stumble along, trying to express those same thoughts with an extremely limited vocabulary that doesn't come tripping off the tongue as he would like. 

 

 

I have always noticed that English translations of his Japanese interviews/press are always very thoughtful and detailed. A lot of the questions he's asked in English (let alone Japanese) are geared toward answers with that higher level of nuance and precision too, so right from the start he's not given much choice but to stumble along. I don't think his vocabulary is limited - I think it might be a bit unfamiliar in-situ, like he balks at using particular words because he's second guessing himself or he's not sure about how they fit in grammatically so that he makes sense. You can get away with that in casual conversation but with a camera on you or if you're speaking with someone you don't know it becomes a different situation (it's a bit like this paradox we have in linguistics research in that you need to get ethics clearance to do research with people and part of that is informing them of what you're doing but as soon as you inform people that you're going to listen to the way they talk, they talk differently -  usually more carefully). 

[memae]

2 hours ago, SitTwizzle said:

Thank you for these opinions as native English speakers.

I had the reverse observation, from a French native speaker who used to read a lot and had been in French schools of a level way above the average and who, after some months in a German high school, found that German language was much more precise and allowed more accurate expression; and was answered French language too... when properly used. (She checked later.)

What is your opinion as to his English accent/way, "music" when speaking? I find it so charming.

 

My opinion is perhaps less my opinion as a native English speaker and more an opinion informed by a background in linguistics (I'm not currently working as a linguist though, other than a bit of moonlighting in research I can't do while Covid19 has everything shut down).

 

His intonation is pretty good. English isn't an easy language to grasp when it comes to intonation - we have so much meaning encoded in all the 'music' that it's difficult to get the knack for it. In some languages, speaking melodically in a way similar to English comes across as feminine, so it can be a bit of a trying time for guys to learn English intonation. Yuzu's is good. He uses it appropriately for emphasis and for different communicative functions. It's just a bit clouded by his pronunciation - he has trouble with phonemes (the smallest bits of sound - for Japanese speakers /r/ and /l/ are often the most noticeable troubles) and with syllables. Japanese does not heavily focus on a syllable structure so much as another way of breaking words up called mora. I think this might impact where he places the stress on English words with multiple syllables (basically, in long words in English there's always one syllable that's 'bigger' than the others) and that can interfere with intonation at the sentence level a bit but overall his is good. 

 

As a side note on the English intonatation = feminine thing, I find it very interesting that a lot of men who speak English as a second language and an Asian language as their mother tongue, speak English with a higher pitch than their native language. I wonder if it's a mechanism for trying to get that intonation correct and since English is so sing-song, they use a voice that is kind of 'singing'. I specifically say Asian first language because I first noticed this teaching students from Korea and China, and then also noticed it among guys who speak Indonesian, Malay, or Javanese as first languages. It might be a general thing across second languages. It might be more specific to English as a second language. It's just something I've observed over the years and found interesting but never pursued in research.

[monchan]

WOW

 

[FlyingCamel]

Continuing the topic on Yuzu's English: I do think he's actually pretty good at it lol I recall him saying in an interview somewhere "I'm really livid" (probably in kuyashii mode after making mistakes) and was surprised by his vocabulary which is amazing for someone who only picked up English later in life! (I mean like not as a child haha)

[mokjakarma]

55 minutes ago, FlyingCamel said:

Continuing the topic on Yuzu's English: I do think he's actually pretty good at it lol I recall him saying in an interview somewhere "I'm really livid" (probably in kuyashii mode after making mistakes) and was surprised by his vocabulary which is amazing for someone who only picked up English later in life! (I mean like not as a child haha)

The kuyashii fuels the english. Was it GPF or ine of the GPs when he didn't trust the translator to correctly get his message across so he just went a fck this im gonna be my own translator?

[Veveco]

The Beijing organizers are really desperate to have Yuzu, aren't they? 

They're not subtle at all but I kind of love it...

 

 

[Veveco]

1 minute ago, mokjakarma said:

The kuyashii fuels the english. Was it GPF or ine of the GPs when he didn't trust the translator to correctly get his message across so he just went a fck this im gonna be my own translator?

 

It was 4CC. People commented that the translator wasn't the best.