2002-06-12 - 9:32 p.m.
Last night when sorting through piles of stuff I’ve accumulated over the past ten months, I came across the Japanese textbook that the JET Program sent me a year ago, so that I could start learning Japanese before I came to Japan. Flipping through the first few pages I saw my first attempts at writing the unfamiliar hiragana script. It was like stumbling upon the uncertain cursive of my second-grade school work, the loops and lines made with discernible hesitancy. Now the Japanese script flows easily from my pen, and I can transcribe something as quickly as I can understand it. Though memorization of kanji (Chinese characters) remains a large and frustrating barrier to complete literacy, in under a year I have essentially progressed from infant to elementary school student.
My linguistic development is far outstripped by my cultural development, the plethora of clues I’ve picked up, often unconsciously, that grease the wheels of daily life. When to bow and when to smile; when to accept and when to defer; how to enter and how to leave; how to ask and how to answer -- I’m continuously absorbing these nuances. Then there are the more tangible skills I’ve acquired, some early on and some just recently: reading train schedules; ordering a pizza over the phone; getting shipping information at the post office; making a good vegetarian dashi (soup stock); using an all-Japanese ATM; making polite small-talk with principals; distinguishing between low-fat and whole milk at the store; understanding train announcements, and using the remote control by reading the buttons, rather than just pushing them indiscriminately. It’s frustrating to know that in two months’ time all of these little accomplishments -- so necessary to my life now -- will be null and void in the States. I’ve been in “struggle mode” for so long that it’s going to be strange to be suddenly literate, fluent, competent and oriented all at the same time.
Meanwhile, my English is showing signs of being picked apart to shreds. I am not a trained English teacher, and furthermore, I’m no grammarian, so I have a great deal of trouble explaining speech that comes naturally to me. The questions I’m asked on a daily basis make me second-guess my English, and the longer I stay here, the more unsure I become. I spend all day rolling things over in my head that I wouldn’t have thought twice about in September. For example:
- Is it incorrect to say “Have you ever GONE to Tokyo,” vs. “Have you ever BEEN to Tokyo?”
- What’s the difference between “She is a friend of mine” and “She is my friend”?
Add this to the fact that the Japanese teachers regularly teach English that is sketchy at best. I’m constantly bombarded with grammatically warped English, so much so that I end up prioritizing what to bring up and what to let slide. Increasingly, I let things slide. Here are a couple of choice pieces of foggy English:
- How long have you stayed in Japan? (Intended meaning is “been/lived in Japan”)
- I was at home to watch the soccer game. (Better would be, “I stayed home”)
Another blow is the self-imposed simplification of my speaking on a daily basis. Working in a Japanese environment, I quickly learned that I’d have to dramatically simplify my English to be understood. Idioms, metaphors, long words, and complex sentence patterns are gone from my vernacular. I can’t just say, “It makes no difference to me,” -- that won’t be understood. I have to say “Anything is OK,” instead. The only people I speak normal English with on a regular basis are Lela and my neighbors, and that’s only for a few hours a week. Often during my weekly hour-long phone conversation with Lela, I’m astounded at the fluidity and depth of our conversation and the breadth of our vocabularies. When I read books I find phrases I haven’t used in nearly a year.
Gotta go -- South Africa vs. Spain is on... I’ve become a World Cup junkie. By the way, the number of foreigners here for the World Cup is much more than I thought -- there are 7,000 Irish fans alone, and that’s more than the total number of JETs in Japan!
