Haru Yamada

The author is a sociolinguist who did her academic qualifying work under Deborah Tannen. She sometimes focuses a little narrowly on what she has seen in research sort of disavowing real life, but the content seemed informative to me.

The book is subtitled "Why Americans and Japanese Misunderstand Each Other." It is about that with almost exclusive focus on business communications (there's a tennis club scene and possibly some others that are not business related).

The American hero is the working man who makes a success of his career. The Japanese hero(ine) is the mother who rears (although I think she says 'raises') her child to be a functioning part of society. Americans are individualistic. Japanese are interdependent. The speech patterns of Americans are in 'Speaker Talk' while the speech patterns of Japanese are in 'Listener Talk.' The book collects illustrations of these elements and builds the case that we misunderstand one another.

If you have an interest in the subject, it is okay.… (mehr)