The meaning of your communication is the response you get

It doesn’t do anyone any good for an instructor to assume that their students are knuckleheads who can’t follow instructions. A better way is to assume good faith on their part – that is, assume that the students are really trying to do what they think you are telling them. So, if you don’t get the response you want from your students, you can assume that you are not communicating what you think you are communicating. Change how you are saying it to them.

Be careful how you say what you say because different people have different connotations for any given word. Colin Wee gave a good example in a comment a few days ago. If you tell the student, “step over here,” then they might understand step any old way. They might step as in normal walking (ayumiashi) when what you intended was slide over here (tsugiashi) or even bring your feet together under you then slide over here (tsuriashi). A better way is to explain the difference between these 2-3 types of walking and give them their technical terms. Then you can say, tsugiashi over here, or you can let them know that when you say slide over here you mean tsugiashi.

Another example of careless instructor-speak is something that I have had to try to overcome. I used to see a student doing something wrong and say, “you want to…,” when I actually had two different meanings to this. Sometimes I would mean, “It looks like you want in your mind to do such and such, when actually you should be thinking about it this way…” Alternately, “you want to do so and so,” could mean, “Instructions follow on how to execute this move.” Sometimes I’d get so twisted up as to say something like, “you want to do (are thinking about it wrong) this, when really you want to do (should execute it this way) that.”

Beth Shibata makes the point in her article, that how we name things affects how we think about them, and therefore, how we execute them. She suggests that aikido is overly rife with the term throw, when there is no way in the world you can use a common throwing action as we normally understand the word (like throwing a ball) to propel a person-sized thing. What we are doing is not really a throwing action, but something else. She suggests the term release. So, perhaps, shihonage (“all-directions throw”) would be easier to get across if we called it shihohanasu (“releasing in any direction”). Perhaps iriminage (enter and throw) could profitably be called (“enter and release” or "enter and separate"). Maybe the rotary throw (kaitennage) is more accurately a rotary release (kaiten hanasu).

Or maybe two other alternatives would be to either use poetic language, as in Chinese martial arts or to just rename things in your native language and ditch the exotic-sounding jargon…

Vocabulary revisited

Okay, I've worked over the aikido vocabulary a couple of times here and here, but tonight I feel like trying my hand at another treatment of it (more for my entertainment than anything else). There are (at least) two main sets of Japanese terms for aikido ideas - Aikikai and Tomiki. I don't know why Tomiki named things differently than Ueshiba did - but he did and now a large portion of the aiki world has grown up using different terminology. So, here's a comparison to aid in translation of ideas.

Check out this page for the core of aikikai terminology. In the list that follows, the entries start with Aikikai terms followed by Tomiki synonyms and then by English explanations.

• ikkyo - oshitaoshi - pushing the opponent into an armlock on the ground while holding his wrist and elbow.
• nikkyo - kotemawashi - wristlock bending the little finger toward the ulna (armbone).
• sankyo - kotehineri - wristlock with the wrist extended and the forearm turned inward.
• yonkyo - tekubiosae - nerve attack on the forearm or using the forearm to push the opponent away similar to ikkyo/oshitaoshi.
• gokyo - wakigatame - locking the elbow and leading the opponent into unbalance along the length of the arm. Similar in form to ikkyo/oshitaoshi but with a different grip.
• shihonage - shihonage or tenkai kotegaeshi. wrist/arm lock done by holding a wrist with both hands and turning outward and under the arm to twist the arm behind uke's shoulder and head.
• iriminage - shomenate, aigamaeate, gyakugamaeate, or aikinage - any blending evasion followed by a whole-body strike that takes uke off his feet. Gyakugamaeate is also called sokumen iriminage.
• kotegaeshi - kotegaeshi. Wristlock done by flexing the wrist and turning the forearm outward.
• kaitennage - kaitennage or udehineri. Locking the shoulder by holding it behind uke's back and using the arm as a lever to push uke away. Sometimes similar to the hammerlock in common wrestling.
• tenchinage - tenchinage or sumiotoshi or osotogari. Leading the opponent into sideways offbalance with one of his arms held low and the other high. Sometimes it is a hand throw - Aikikai calls this kokyu (breath throw) and Tomiki calls this ukiwaza (floating technique). At other times it is done stepping in behind ukes leg to trip him.

Japanese vs. English

Subcultures are defined in large part by their specific use of jargon. The martial arts world is rife with this and aikido is probably worse than other martial arts, because it has at least two different commonly-used systems of terminology for naming techniques(Aikikai and Tomiki).

I realize that one of the best ways to irritate my readers is to use terms that only a select few of the in-crowd understand. But the problem with not using the Japanese is that often a complex thing has been given a name that happens to be Japanese. In some cases, I can give the English in parentheses, like when talking about the oizuki (lunge punch) technique, but in other cases, like when referring to gyakugamaeate, there are several potential English translations ranging from literal (reverse-posture striking) to loose (the outside face push), none of which convey the idea of what is being discussed. To stop in each post and write the paragraph that it would take to give an approximate meaning of gyakugamaeate would be onerous.

So, to help out all those who I have irritated by using Japanese terminology, here are a few guidelines that I will attempt to follow from now on when posting on here:

• When something has a widely-used English term that is both concise and evocative, I will use the English, maybe followed by the Japanese in parentheses. For instance - the guard (dojime gatame)
• When the concise, evocative English term does not exist, I'll use the Japanese terminology, often followed by a loose English translation in parentheses. For instance - yama arashi (one-armed shoulder throw combined with a leg sweep).
• When I'm specifically talking about Aikikai techniques or when I think the topic might be particularly interesting to my Aikikai buddies, I'll use both naming systems as I understand them. For instance - gyakugamaeate is roughly the same thing as sokumen irimi nage.
• When I can, I'll provide links to pictures or video to clarify especially problematic terms, like gyakugamaeate .

Thanks to my friends who have told me that my use of Japanese terms bugs them. Please keep reading and leaving comments and let me know if I get better or worse ;-)

Translating between Tomiki and Hombu names

For whatever reason, when Kenji Tomiki put together his system for teaching aikido he called things by different names than did the folks that were to become Hombu/Aikikai. So, in a spirit of fostering some useful discussion between folks of different traditions, here is a super-short course on terminology. There is a set of seven techniques, or tpes of techniques, in Hombu that some instructors refer to as the "Pillars of Aikido." They are, with their Tomiki equivalents, as follows:

1. kotegaeshi = same in Tomiki
2. shihonage = same in Tomiki
3. ikkyo = oshi taoshi
4. sankyo = kote hineri
5. nikyo = kote mawashi
6. yonkyo = tekubi osae
7. gokyo = waki gatame

The first four are pretty easy to figure out because they occur early in both the Tomiki and the Hombu teaching sequences. Nikyo and yonkyo are harder to find in Tomiki until one gets into the Koryu no Kata, typically after black belt level. Although waki gatame appears early in the Tomiki system, it isn't until much later that we see it in a form that appears equivalent to the gokyo seen most often at Hombu classes.