Learning a foreign language is hard. I studied French for several years, including while I lived and worked in France, and that taught me how important it is to always keep going. But nothing has taught me perseverance in quite the same degree as learning Japanese. I’m currently studying Japanese full-time at the YMCA Japanese Language Institute in Osaka. It’s a fantastic program, but I’m not sure that any system can fully prepare a westerner for learning an ideographic language: you have to just jump in the deep end and keep your head above water.
For a native speaker of Indo-European languages, such as English, learning the Subject-Object-Verb (“SOV”) order of Japanese seems particularly hard. However, I am surprised at this difficulty: I studied some Latin during my High School years, and, except for some poetry, it generally follows the same SOV order.
Kanji, the Chinese writing system adopted by the Japanese back at about the beginning of the Common Era, is also very difficult to master. There are wild numbers thrown around about how many kanji there are. However big those numbers are, there’s general agreement that you need to know the so-called Joyo kanji list, which is a set of just under 2,000 kanji that are taught in grade school and high school, in order to lead a normal life in Japan—for everything from reading the newspaper to understanding correspondence and everyday writing.
All the complexity of Japanese caught up with me yesterday when we had to quickly write a short essay in class and deliver it in front of our fellow students. Our topic was about our daily life as students in Japan. The speech was written as well as I could – which is to say that it had some defects, but was good enough to deliver.
I’ve given a lot of speeches for work, often in front of large, unknown and sometimes less-than-friendly audiences. I do well at making eye contact, not using notes larger than an index card, and so on. However, it is a humbling experience to make a speech and not be able to think of even simple words. Or to be able to remember the outline. Or, in the case of kanji, to be able to read an important word [see inset, shakai] that I, myself, had written a mere 15 minutes before.
The speech was, in my estimation, a total disaster. I feel as if I became completely despondent afterward and for the rest of the class session.
However, my fellow students are a real source of inspiration. During the break after the class session in question, one of my classmates left a small drawn note on my desk, face down (see image, above), that read “Ganbatte! Daijoubu yo!”, which, roughly translated, is a strong expression of encouragement as well as a way of saying that, while there might have been problems, everything’s OK. “Chin up”, as they say. My classmates’ words of encouragement have been, to me, quite significant. When I’ve felt as if I’m falling behind, they have helped me put everything back into perspective.
Our class is also endowed with several wonderful and professional instructors, including one whose teaching and counseling talent is really great, Aoki Mariko-sensei. After our class had ended that day, Mariko-sensei and I had a conference, during which she talked to me about the speeches we made, the lesson we were covering at the time, and the tangible signs of progress she saw in me. I can’t express in words how much her encouragement meant to me. Whether I will succeed or not in Japanese is up to me, but a bit of positive nudging goes a long way. Keep going!
