Sons of Loki

After an impromptu meeting with Suzuki-sensei at 6pm today, it was established that due to my low mark of 63.9 (C) I will be repeating level 300 instead of moving up to 400 with everyone else. Also, I think I was advised to do all the auxiliary lessons (the speaking, listening, reading and writing classes) and the kanji class too. There goes my free time!

That’s not set in stone. I could still push for 400, I reckon. But, I dunno. It might be best to cut my losses and concentrate on the Leeds exam.

I’m doing joint honours English and Japanese at the moment. I am informed that there is a possibility of applying for straight BA English in May, which would entail basically dropping Japanese and reverting to my remaining two years of English in 2010/11 and 2011/12.

Do I want to do that? Not really. I do want to finish Japanese, but at the same time, in all honesty, I’m just not putting the work in.

Suzuki-sensei asked me today why I’m doing Japanese, and for the first time I gave the honest answer: I like living in Tokyo. I adore this city. I always tell people “Well I liked anime when I was younger,” or “I like Japanese culture”, but the simple truth is I like living here more than England. (In some respects. I do miss home.) No crime, great transport, exciting events, the bustle of a megapolis; it’s everything I want. I mean, you can walk the streets at 3am and never, ever feel threatened. You know how much more pleasant that is than in England? I don’t want to go all Daily Mail, but it’s little things like that.
And I don’t really need a degree to live here: obviously it would help with getting a job but right now, I know enough Japanese to survive here. I realised that when I went to get my bike fixed – just a minor errand, and my Japanese went off without a hitch, and it was sorted. I know enough to get anything done. I’m pretty much illiterate beyond kids’ manga and I can’t really hold an interesting conversation, but I can Get By.

So if I can get by, the question becomes what am I learning Japanese for? I’m not really sure. Obviously if I could be fluent I would. If I had a roadmap for fluency, I’d follow it. But that seems an awful long way away (and it is) and right now I’m sort of okay and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get better, but that doesn’t really bother me, y’know? (And yet it does…)

Here’s your linguistic paper of the day – an analysis of English-Japanese code-switching.

Code-switching is what happens when speakers who share two or more languages switch between them, like if I was to say to you “It has a certain je ne sais quoi“, that would be English-French code-switching. It gets more complex than that, but those of us doing Japanese here kind of find ourselves doing it as a joke, or to better explain something that can’t be done in one language, or even unconsciously at times.
For example, one thing that crops up in the academic literature is the way bilingual speakers will express sums of money in Japanese even when speaking English, and I’ve realised I do that all the time without even realising it: “How much does it cost?” “A return ticket is 五千円。” [Five thousand yen.] As another example, I sent Rob a message the other day saying ”多摩から [I'm coming from Tama], meeting at 吉祥寺中央口 [Kichijoji station Central Exit] at 2130 if that’s cool.” I mean, there you have one benefit of code-switching – it’s easier to type “多摩から” than “I’m coming from Tama”.

With bilingual children, as evidenced in the paper, things get interesting:

Kye (a young boy confident in both English and Japanese, doing origami): エミリ、これ持っといてstick-onするから。[Emily, hold this, because I want to stick on something.)
Emily (his sister, less confident in Japanese): はい。[Yes.] Two more.
Kye: No, that’s enough.
Emily: (realising) かぶと！[A samurai helmet!]

This stuff’s weird, isn’t it? I was thinking about perhaps doing a dissertation in my second or third year of English, if I can do one in joint honours (from the website I think I could, but I’ve heard otherwise). Code-switching is more a linguistics thing, though, and not much to do with English. Still, I might be able to work it into a topic.

Today was really good, in that quiet, unassuming way that days can be. I got my article published in Metropolis (tried tracking down a paper copy, but I think they haven’t hit the racks yet) and finished my second one (fingers crossed it goes in). To celebrate sort of becoming more of a writer, I bought myself a new watch for a disturbingly low price (it’s either a knock-off or stolen, except no one has ever been mugged in Japan). I finished off my homework for once, had a wander around Kinokuniya bookstore, posted off my registration for proxy voting (I’m a good citizen, me) and paid my health insurance bills (apparently despite being three months late there are no ill consequences) at the post office, bought some sandalwood incense from the panhandlers outside Shinjuku west exit, and strolled down the street listening to King Tubby’s prime dub cuts and trying hard not to think about this Onion article.

Okay, I’m not seriously considering giving this thing up. I guess for the sheer inconvenience of it I won’t be quitting Japanese. Plus I would feel really bad about it. But I will reflect on the struggles of learning this damn language.

Stuff I like about Japanese
I get to live in Japan. No, seriously, I love it here, from the vending machines to the punctual transportation to the delicious milk. Obviously speaking Japanese makes it much easier to live in Japan, which is the best motivation I can think of.
I get to use Japanese. That’s kind of obvious, but still, it’s a pleasing feeling. I can sort of read manga and play video games, and engage in conversation occasionally. (Actually getting speaking practice is harder than you’d think.)
The language itself. I guess there’s a certain neatness to the language, a pleasing logicality to it. I like kanji too, sort of, once I’ve learned them, the way radicals combine to create aesthetic and semantic beauty from a few lines.

Stuff which makes it difficult to learn Japanese and leads to frustration
I’m not fluent. Okay, this is largely my own impatience, but I’d thought that after a year and a half (more, if you count pre-uni study) of Japanese I’d be at a point where I’d understand most day-to-day stuff. I do not. Even trips to the convenience store are fraught with confusion because I have no idea what they’re asking me. I like the pretty pictures on TV but I only understand it about 5% of the time. It makes you feel so impotent and useless, to have done so much work for no tangible benefit, and it puts you off further study.
In Tokyo everyone speaks English. Not so much frustrating, but it definitely hampers my actual daily use of the language. Either shop staff will just use English straight off the bat when they see me, or I’ll try Japanese, flounder horrifically, and the assistant will step in with English to sort me out and I’ll be too panicked to do anything but mumble back in English.
I can’t read manga. I think manga is a great way to learn Japanese, but I’m not quite at the level you need to be to get the benefit. I know I said I could up there, and I can to an extent, but it’s a hard slog which saps all enjoyment out of the experience. By the time I’ve finished looking up all the new kanji and vocab on Japanese on my iPod, it’s taken me ten minutes to read a single page and I’ve forgotten the plot. Same for video games.
Everyone else is better than me. Well, I imagine. My fellow students are lovely to a (wo)man, and no one ever flaunts their ability in my face. But when I hear someone else speaking Japanese fluently (or at a level that I can’t understand, anyway) it kills me a little inside. It shouldn’t. I should pay no attention to whatever level they’re at. But nevertheless.
I don’t have the knack. Well, who does? But it feels like a lot of my fellow students seem to find it considerably easier to pick up new vocabulary and grammar than I do. When I learn new words, it feels like it goes in one ear and a few days later out the other.
The classes are… I feel like I may as well not turn up to classes for all the benefit I get out of them. They’re 90 minutes long, and I just can’t concentrate for that long in English, let alone Japanese. And the classes are entirely in Japanese, and I’ve said this before, but I don’t know enough Japanese to learn in Japanese. The textbook is no help, because it doesn’t explain anything, and all we seem to be learning is … Actually, I have absolutely no idea what we have been studying over the last three months. I think we did keigo honorifics, and a million different ways to say は, and … I’m at a loss, I really am.

But as I said, what else am I gonna do?