In Which I Returned to Foreign Language and Learned Something Else Entirely

I’ll begin this entry by saying something that the average person (in the United States anyway) might already know:  Learning a new language is difficult. 

That isn’t to say that it can’t be done.  However, if you want the best results, you must start young and you must learn by immersion.  I did not start young, but I began to learn Japanese in high school, I’m estimating around 15 years old.  It’s hard to really call it ‘learning’ though, because I simply wrote down a bunch of common beginner’s phrases and would practice saying them to myself out loud.  Somewhere in my old notebooks, there are pages and pages of all the words I knew and could pronounce with relative ease.  I had nothing to really help me except my own willpower, and since it was 2002, the Internet was still awkwardly blossoming, not really sure where to go or how to organize itself.  For my 16^th birthday, I asked for my first dictionary, and the first thing I did was read it cover to cover, marking words that I thought were interesting.  I thought it was funny that the entire entry for the letter ‘P’ on the Japanese side were all loan words from English (piano for piano), or onomatopoeia (pika pika suru – to glisten). 

While it wasn’t completely useless, as I eventually wrote down the phonetic alphabet of Hiragana and could start to recognize the characters on sight, it wasn’t until almost 8 years later that I got the chance to take everything I had taught myself and would put it to the test.  I moved to Okinawa with the rest of my family and stayed for a year.  The jittery happiness I felt for the 14 hour plane ride was something I’ll never forget.  And that happiness was mixed with a strange concoction of fear and nervousness when I began encountering actual Japanese people, something I had never done before.  Suddenly it felt as if those years and years of memorization and singing J-pop and recognizing phrases from different anime were all for naught.  In reality, it was true.  It’s like that with learning anything; if you don’t have direction or a solid goal, nearly anything you learn is going to be a bit… empty.  It’s kind of like wanting to be a lawyer when everything you know about lawyers is based on playing Ace Attorney.  In short, it’s not exactly ideal.

Regardless, I learned maybe 100 times there what I had learned on my own, and not only that, I got to put it to use nearly every day.  That year passed much too quickly and I returned to the States the next summer.  I spent the next 3 years away from the culture and language, and it wasn’t until 2 months ago when I started taking Japanese classes again.  While I don’t regret the decision to do so at all, I got that same jittery panic that once loomed over me back then.  Rightly so, because I realized how much I had lost in that amount of time.  While many phrases aren’t lost to me, I could barely recognize a lot of the kanji I had learned from my time in Okinawa.  Many of the phrases I had relied on to get me through the day seemed wrong or obsolete.  It was certainly a strange phenomenon to experience. 

One of the projects we had done recently was an oral presentation.  We had to give a script between 2-3 people, as if reading a play, all in Japanese of course, and bonus points for any new words or creativity.  The blue print of this presentation was Valentine’s Day, and it wasn’t until after I had written it and presented it that I had a different realization about myself.  The general script is two girls talking with each other, one chiding the other about her boyfriend not making Valentine’s Day plans with her.  Instead he breaks up with her, leaving her to find solace in her friend.  In the second and last scene, as they are about to get coffee together, the girl’s now-ex-boyfriend calls her and begs for forgiveness, wanting to start over.  Since her friend is there with her, she gets the courage to tell him no, and they leave to go play a game at her friend’s house. 

I said all that to say that foreign language is a strange thing, but it can really reveal a lot about ourselves that we didn’t know about.  I feel as if I had made this script outside of the expectations of the grade, and in doing so, took a peek at what I really wanted out of life. 

I’ve spent a lot of my years in difficult relationships, trying to find that One Special Person.  I’ve failed and failed and failed some more.  But something that I feel like I haven’t failed at is my love for this culture.  It may have not always burned brightly, but it has always been there, a dimly lit ember that has consistently glowed.  My real-life experience living in Japan will always be a testament to that love and the passion I have.  So I said all this to say that maybe the expectations that I’ve held over myself are not where my heart lies.  Perhaps it’s time to hang up the “Family” goal and go forward with the “Japan” goal instead.