【English Composition Practice Book】To communicate/to be conveyed, to understand/not understand, to connect/weave memories.

2024年10月22日 08:30

If communicating is the sending of a message (information/meaning, thought/emotion) from A to B (a specific person or multiple people), then what is conveyed is how B received the message sent by A.

In other words, it refers to the content that ultimately reaches (or does not reach) B from A.

For example, the moment that information or thought sent by A leaves A's mouth (body) as A's words, it passes through the inside of B's body (physical senses) and becomes words acquired by B, and is conveyed as new words of B that are woven inside B's body to which the message is conveyed.

Specifically, ① only what A was trying to convey to B (A's enthusiasm and compassion) may be conveyed, ② a different meaning to what A was trying to convey (an implied nuance, A's true feelings?) may be conveyed, or ③ the information A was trying to convey may be reinterpreted by B (taking into account B's experience and knowledge) and conveyed.

Of course, ④ the information or feeling A was trying to convey may also be conveyed to B as is.

In other words, in cases ① and ④, where A's communicating body and B's communicating body are synchronized, the bodily senses of "communicating⇔communicating" move with the same breathing and heartbeat rhythm.

However, when the bodily rhythms of "communicating ⇒ being communicated" are different, B's physical sensations and rhythm of communicating take precedence.

The Japanese word tsutafu (den/傳) is defined in the popular version of Jikun (Shirakawa Shizuka, Heibonsha, 1995) as "此方から彼方へと、何かをつたって進むことで、「つつ（※筒）」「つた（※蔦）」がもとの形。つたって移動することから、他に伝え知らせること、伝え渡すこと、また以前からあるものを伝えつぐことをいう," and it does not merely refer to the act of confirming letters or images with one's eyes or hearing words clearly with one's ears, but rather to the physical sensation of something "passing along" from here to there through a tube, or "passing along" as one runs along a vine with one's hand.

By the way, you can tell if A's message was conveyed by checking to see if B really understood it.

You can try to have B summarize in his own words the main points of the message conveyed by A.

In “What Does It Mean to Understand?” (Chikuma Shinsho, 2002), neurologist and brain scientist Shigeru Yamatori states that in order to understand (or not understand), it is important to think first and foremost.

"We spend our days exchanging things like this:

"Do you get it?"

"No, I don't get it."

"Oh, I get it."

"Hmm, I think I'm almost there."

"I don't understand what's going on anymore."

These expressions “I know” and “I don't know” are words that come to us only when we think.

If we knew everything, we would not have to think.

There would be no need to even use the expression “I understand.

It is precisely because there are things that we do not understand that there is a situation in which we do understand.

It is because we think that we understand what we do not understand that we are able to think that we understand what we do not understand.

If you don't think about it, you don't know.” (Ibid., pp. 8-9)

When I came across this sentence, I remembered a scene in the popular NHK program "Chiko-chan ni Shikarareru" where grown-up adults were scolded by Chiko-chan, who told them, "Don't just go through life like that!"

In an old broadcast, when asked, "Why do your fingers got pruney in the bath?", the guests Okamura Takashi, Asahina Aya, and Nagashima Kazushige gave a series of irrelevant answers, saying, "I never think about that in my daily life," and were scolded by Chiko-chan.

This is also because, although they know that their limbs become my fingers get pruney after taking a bath, they have never thought deeply about why.

When a young child asks us, "Why don't the stars fall in the sky?" or "Dragonflies can fly, so why can't I?", we are left speechless, and we would probably be scolded by Chiko-chan in the same way.

The most important cause of “not getting the message” is that we are only vaguely listening to the other person's “speech (words)” as sound, in other words, we are not listening to it thoughtfully.

Mr. Yamadori also mentions the importance of memory as the foundation for understanding.

""Memory" literally means to "write down" (input) something into "memory" (in ancient Chinese characters, it means to listen to the will of the gods), but among memories that have been input, there are some that can be output immediately and some that are difficult to recall (output).

Memories that are easy to recall to the conscious mind are, to use another term, those that can be visualized (*imagined).

Many of them can be expressed in pictures or words if things go well.

In other words, they can be communicated to others.

This is why they are also called declarative memories.

This memory can be further divided into two categories.

One is the memory of events.

The other is the memory of meaning.

Of course, these two are not clearly separated in the mind as black and white.

We separate them on our own, but by separating them, it becomes a little easier to see what is going on in the mind.

The other type of memory that is difficult to recall to the conscious mind, or in other words, difficult to visualize, is called procedural memory.

Simply put, it is the memory that your hands and body remember.

It is the type of memory in which you can't clearly visualize how to do something, but you can do it when you try. (ibid., pp. 63-65)

The reason why we have taken up the issue of “memory” here is that when the memory of the experience (accumulation of personal experiences) of the sender, A, who is the “communicator,” and the memory of the experience of the receiver, B, who is the “communicator,” overlap slightly somewhere, or are about to follow the same course, tacit knowledge ( This is because we believe that a sense of shared message (information, meaning, thoughts, and feelings) based on tacit knowledge (knowledge based on long years of experience and intuition) is generated between A and B.

【参考図書】
「日本人のための英作文練習帳」酒井文秀(著)GregoryAlanDick(英文監修)