Japan 2

Listen to Japan 2, a 23-year-old man from an unspecified location in Japan. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 23

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1976

PLACE OF BIRTH: Japan

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Japanese

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: The subject was in his third year of university when interviewed.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject had lived in the United States for about four years at the time of this interview. He spent nine months in New Jersey at age 6 and one year in Minnesota at age 17. He came to Kansas after graduating high school in Japan and was in his third year of theatre studies at the University of Kansas when interviewed.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

He speaks of the roles he has played in English-language theatre productions. Some speech training as well as exposure to American English has put some American twang over his otherwise good example of Japanese-American.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in Japan … 1976 and I stayed in Japan till … the age of 6, when I was just 6 years old, uh, my family and I went to New Jersey and lived there for nine months. That’s where I started talking in English, and after nine months I went back to Japan and went to school there, uh, went to junior high, uh, started, uh English education at junior high, high school, and at the age of seventeen I went to Minnesota as a foreign exchange student. Before I went to Minnesota, I went to, hmm, Arizona, Tuscon, Arizona for one month, where I had like a pre-training of, of being high school as a foreign exchange student, and I went to Minnesota, stayed there for one year, graduated high school there, uh, I did some theater there also. I was uh, I acted. I was in Crucible, I was in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and I was in one original play, um, at the Austin Community College. And after I went back to Jap–after I got done with one-year program I went ba–I went–back to Japan and I graduate–I graduated my Japanese high school, and I came back here, Kansas, as a student, and I’ve been staying here for three, this is my fourth year, and trying to get a degree from theater department and….learning English, and right now I’m trying to learn French also.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Faith Harvey

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/02/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.