Studying Foreign Language Proper Nouns

When studying a foreign language, how well should you study its proper nouns? Recall, a proper noun is a name, be it a given name like Michael, Jean, or Tanaka, a city name, a country name, and so on.

I've boiled the answer down to a science, using my experience studying Japanese, where names are very unfamiliar and different.

These are the basic things I recommend learning about a proper noun if you're going for native fluency, but only the first one is absolutely, truly necessary:

• Recognize it for what it is (given name, city name, etc.)
  
• How is it spelled, and conversely, how is it read?
• What are its diminutive forms, if any? (Micheal --> Mike, Mikey)
• Its declensions, if any (Smith --> the Smiths, Smith --> Smith's)
• Is it "common" or "reserved"? (John: Common; Hitler: Reserved)

By "reserved" I really mean "rare outside of some specific examples". Thus "Napoleon" is reserved, even though there are people named Napoleon. A good criterion is, if you were writing a novel, and you gave the name to one of your characters, would it raise any eyebrows.

Basically, most the stuff in this list is actually really easy, depending on the language. Probably the hardest one is the diminutive forms. Plurals, when they exist, are fairly regular. You can usually automatically tell if a name is "reserved" in the target language because if it is, you've probably heard it in your native language. There are exceptions though, like the Spanish common name "Jesus". Spelling and reading are usually no harder than the spelling and reading of anything else in the language. So in a language like Japanese, spelling and reading can be quite tricky, but that goes for almost every word, so it's nothing special.

But if nothing else, the bare minimum is the first item on the list, recognizing the noun for what it is. Depending on how good you are at geography, astronomy, history, and so on, you probably do this shortcut in your native tongue already. If you read a news article which deals with a bunch of cities in Pakistan, odds are you don't know anything about any of those cities; all you need in order to comprehend the article, is the ability to tell what the city names are: city names.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS AREN'T IMPORTANT

Notice that one thing is specifically lacking from the list I just gave: English translations. That's the main insight I've gotten from studying Japanese proper nouns. There's no need to memorize what the nouns translate to in English.

Let's look at planet names, for example. You can be quite fluent in English without knowing any of the "trivia" concerning the planets. For example, if you don't even know what order the planets are from the sun, then that's an astronomy shortcoming, not an English shortcoming. As far as English goes, the only important thing is that when someone mentions "Mars", you can figure out they're talking about a planet (or possibly a Greek god, depending on context).

I struggled for a while with the Japanese planet names, because I was trying to memorize the English translations. But then I realized, that was kind of arbitrary. I don't even know all that much about the less important planets, so assigning English planet names to Japanese planet names is only a little more useful than assigning random numbers to them. The only really important thing is to learn to recognize the planet names for what they are: planet names, not city names or people names or anything like that.

Let's take a look at the names of the months. Here I have a shameful confession to make: I didn't finish learning the order of the months until my early twenties. Does that mean I didn't become fluent in English until then? Obviously not. Now in Japanese, months don't have special names, they're just called by their numbers, so January is "one-month", February is "two-month", etc. The reading is a little weird, but that's what it boils down to. Again, I struggled for awhile here, trying to memorize English translations of Japanese month names. Talk about making things harder than they have to be!!

All this goes just as well for obscure trivia words. Take for example, the names of the dinosaurs. These aren't actually proper nouns per se, but they're very similar to proper nouns. A few of them, like the T-Rex and the Pterodactyl, are actually very useful to know. But the vast majority are trivia. I don't think I could identify five different dinosaurs by picture if my life depended on it. So if, in the course of your language studies, you get as far as learning the freakin' dinosaur names, don't worry about learning the English translations, unless maybe you're one of the thousand people for whom all those English names really mean anything.

COMMON GIVEN NAMES ARE USEFUL TO KNOW

It's easy to underestimate how useful it is to know common given names and family names. I learned this real quick when I travelled to Japan. See the thing is, when you're introduced to someone, it's much harder to learn their name if you don't even know that name. If I told you my name was Tirlsansher, or some other made up word, I'd be pretty impressed if you addressed me by name five minutes later in the conversation.

With names that use Chinese characters (Japanese names, Chinese names, and sometimes Korean names), there's a useful "cheat" if you forget the person's name instantly: ask them to write it for you in kanji. It gives you a second chance to hear/read their name without having to admit you forgot it already. And if the characters are familiar enough to you, you'll have their name recorded on paper for if you forget it again later. It's much less work if you're already familiar with the name to begin with. If some Japanese person told me their name was Tanaka, or Sakura, or Hirohito (hah), I'd be all set.

Of course, memorizing raw lists of common names would be about the most boring task known to man. The best way to learn any language is to read and hear sentences, and the best way to learn names is to have those names be in the sentences. That's one thing I like about Tae Kim's Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, his example sentences often contain common names. It can be frustrating, because it makes the sentence harder without the immediate thrill of learning any more "real" vocabulary. But at least it helps you drill the readings of the individual Chinese characters.

When I took Mandarin 101 in university, the first thing they did was assign everyone a Chinese name. My Chinese name is Aì Shàng Lǐ (艾尚礼), and on a few occasions when I've run into former Chinese classmates, we've referred to eachother by Chinese names.

If you're upset about having to get used to the common names in your target language, just balance it against not having to memorize English translations for all the planets and months and obscure nations and cities. And then realize with the common names, you can actually use them to make friends with people when you travel to that country. Now proper nouns aren't so bad at all, are they? :)


Here are a few other articles I wrote. I gave each one its own special name, but I won't bother sharing them...
Drilling Flashcards Without Music
Western Pimps Vs. Asian Idols
The Language Tradeoff: Learning Language Through Travel