Early-Stage Language Fears

How often do you think about your language as your mother tongue? How often do you think about how comfortable it is to be surrounded by it?

Talk about things I took for granted. I think about it a lot, now. I think about how this year I'm leaving a predominantly English speaking nation and going to another country with the explicit intent of attending school and immersing to learn their language. Many Japanese people speak English, but that is not the predominant language and--unless they decide otherwise--I should not expect it in my everyday interactions or in the hubbub surrounding a walk down the street or in the music wafting through a shop's sound system. It is their country.

I find irrational fears slithering up. Thoughts like even with twenty years' immersive practice, I will never be able to hold a fluent conversation about deep things like I can in English. Or weird ones like Because of immersion I will drop out of practice using English and my writing skills will degrade.

I know I should be listening to Japanese music and watching anime to accustom my ears more, and moments like that are exactly when I find myself cranking up Flogging Molly and diving into Queen's Gambit and She-Ra and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and all kinds of English language TV shows and podcasts.

I'm in the early stages of learning Kanji on a site called WaniKani, a site that is excellent both in its teaching method and its programming (Sergey raves up and down about its design, a rarity for him). When teaching a Kanji, the site will often give you several sentences to read so that you get a feel for seeing the Kanji used in context of a full sentence. It gives you the sentence in Japanese and then in English.

I often cover up the English half to test myself on reading, pronunciation, and comprehension. I can pronounce everything, but I don't always understand the sentence I read. Even so, I read and understand some sentences correctly.

Kanji is underlined.

Sentence written in Japanese characters: この犬は、チワワですか？

Romanji: Kono inu wa, chiwawa desu ka?

Translation: Is this dog a Chihuahua?

I can read that. I can understand that.

That is intensely satisfying. That is insanely terrifying.

I am afraid of drowning in a sea of sounds I do not understand. I am deathly afraid of misunderstandings and miscommunications, even in English. I am afraid of facing a level of aloneness I have never experienced before; that of language isolation.

日本の二月は中々さむいですよ。

Nihon no nigatsu wa nakanaka samui desu yo.

February in Japan is very cold.

In addition to its lesson on the Kanji for February, this sentence included one kanji taught in a previous lesson and one that will be taught later, but that I'd learned through other means.

I want to go and experience this adventure. I want to run the other way, screaming. I want to change and grow. I want to hide in my corner with my books and laptop and endless mountains of yarn and never move again.

This isn't learning langauge for a lark. I'm not expanding myself on a whim. This is for keeps. We might stay there. I'm almost thirty-five, can I learn Japanese well enough to have deep, satisfying conversation? Will I fall back on the English-speaking ex-pat community like a crutch?

I slept. I ate. I exercised. I came back to this blog post.

There is still a seedling of anxiety when I turn on my tiny Japanese music playlist on Spotify. The more tired I am, the larger the anxiety blooms.

But I am going to keep going. I am going to listen to this playlist and add music to it. I am going to watch more subtitled anime and try to decipher Japanese language manga. I am going to buckle down and learn ten or fifteen kanji (or associated vocabulary words) per day. I am going to work through the Genki textbook and keep practicing my hiragana and katakana writing.

My brain alternates between screaming about how I'll never be able to do this and nattering about how alone I'll be. But my brain has a long history of lying to me and stopping me from expanding in directions I've needed to grow.

あの女の子は天才だ。

Ano onnanoko wa tensai da.

That girl is a genius.

Keep on keeping on. Japan, here we come.