In the new year, I am trying not to lose Japanese. I spent so many years of my young life studying this impossible language, and it would be a great shame to forget it entirely.
I have been plowing through kanji flashcards on Memrise. I vacillate between feeling super-proud of myself for not having forgotten everything and super-frustrated because I have forgotten most of it. I console myself, weakly, with the knowledge that Japanese is often called the hardest language for English speakers to learn.
The frustrations are rife. For instance: I’m re-reading War and Peace now, and a good deal of the social dialogue is in French (preserved by the translators, with footnotes providing the English). I have spent about 3 months of my life studying basic French grammar and vocabulary and I can more or less read and comprehend an entire paragraph in French (but don’t ask me to translate any spoken French).
In contrast, I have spent 15 years, off and on, studying Japanese, and I can’t read more than a few sentences in a simple Japanese news story. (A simple explanation for this is that I can remember only about 200 out of the 2,500 requisite kanji. I literally cannot read most of the words yet.)
But I have been thinking about the pleasures of incomprehension.
I have been watching a Japanese reality TV show for a bit at night, while preparing dinner. Even though I understand about 5% of the dialogue, I am resting in unknowing. I can find some happiness in letting the vaguely familiar sounds wash over me. Just hearing it spoken in everyday conversation (albeit between flirtatious twentysomethings in a Tokyo mansion, Real World style) is beneficial. I put on the Japanese short stories CD that I have had in my car for three years. I am still totally lost in the plots, and I couldn’t tell you anything about the stories aside from a few nouns and key actors, but I am learning to be OK with this lack of knowledge.
You have to start somewhere… even if “somewhere” is building on 15 years’ of forgotten knowledge.
Little Stories 
Yeah, Japanese is one of the hardest. I’ve been studying around 15+ years myself, and still have a long way to go…
Wow the first picture is near the school I studied abroad at!!!
I’ve been learning Cantonese for a couple of years now, and it’s been a bit on again and off again. It’s not only hard to understand but also difficult to read because I have only memorised a few characters myself yet. I listen to Cantonese radio every now and then, and am slowly recognising the odd phrase here and there. Most of the time I don’t know really what’s going on but then out of the blue a smattering of recognition kicks in and it feels fabulous!
[…] had always loved these prints, as a child, because of my study of Japanese, and I was honored to receive them. To protect the frames in the car, Mom had wrapped them in these […]