Sons of Loki

I’ve been feeling pretty good lately. As if everything’s going alright. Like I’m on top of the world. This sort of thing could come from a number of factors:

#1 Undiagnosed manic depression
#2 Undiagnosed love (see #1)
#3 Springtime (it is unseasonably warm (well, not cold) and sunny for late January)
#4 A dramatic paradigm shift in the study of Japanese

Which is to say: I’m starting to get it. It’s rare that one website could make me turn my entire life around, but I came across All Japanese All The Time a few days ago and it was like everything I read rang many, many bells.

The site’s owner is a guy who taught himself Japanese in the US over about a year or two (and soon after was hired by a Japanese software company as a programmer) without classes or textbooks or drills or any of the stuff I hate, but simply by loving the language and filling his entire life with it. 24/7. Japanese music, Japanese TV, games, books, manga. Even when sleeping he had his earphones in. Like any good diet, he simply replaced anything in English with the Japanese equivalent; so,  if he felt like watching Independence Day, he watched the Japanese dub. If he found himself wasting time on Wikipedia, he wasted it on the Japanese version.

And he kept his brain open, picking up interesting sentences and picking them apart to learn grammar and words, rather than using textbooks or vocab lists. Coupled with an SRS and Heisig, he proceeded to become fluent in a year or two.

Impressive.

And it explains so much. Why I can’t be bothered in class, why I find textbooks so dry. Because they are dry. I always live my life by a tenet from David Byrne:

If your work isn’t what you love
Then something isn’t right

and the key to doing anything is working out what you love about it, and doing it. Why do I do Japanese? Because I enjoy tests, flashcards, and filling in blanks? No! I do it because I want to partake in Japan. People, films, books, games, everything. I’d forgotten that.

So I started again. I complained before about not being good enough to enjoy games or manga in Japanese, but I’d got it the wrong way round. I should use my enjoyment of games and manga as a spur to encourage me to want to study, and as a tool to teach me. I opened my brain and played Metal Gear Solid 4 and sure, I only got 10% of the wordy verbosity, but that 10% was valuable stuff. (反政府勢力 – anti-government forces.) I opened my brain and read One Piece and stuff went in. (海賊 – pirate (lit. sea burglar).) I watched Hatoyama in the Diet on NHK. (政治家 – politician.) I studied the lyrics of those ancient and learned Japanese poets, the Teriyaki Boys – rap is so good for learning because the rhymes make words pop out.

やるだけやってあとは交代
じゃ、そろそろみな集めて乾杯!

I’ll do it only what I can do and after that change
Well, we’ll gradually get everybody together and – cheers!

Just concentrating on what I understand rather than what I don’t is such a boost, too. Last night I watched one of MGS4′s famously lengthy cutscenes and though most of the highly complicated technical speak washed over me, I understood most of the opening scene and the ending one, and to the point where I didn’t even realise I was understanding it, I was just enjoying it. That’s the goal. That’s the reason I study.

Also, I should be hopefully published in an upcoming issue of Metropolis with an article on Rikugien in Tokyo and hopefully another one after that, so keep eyes peeled! (If you’re in Japan. Obviously if you’re in Mexico or Sri Lanka, not much point looking out for it.)

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?