Language

Languages are such strange and complex things. To pick up the basics, and even become conversational in one takes only the sacrifice of a bit of free time, and a modest amount of effort. Yet to become fluent in one, to truly understand one’s ins and outs, one’s idiosyncrasies, the different mindset a different language requires; that seems an insurmountable obstacle.

In a test one of my students spelt “corn flakes” as “corn freak”, and “sightseeing” as “shatseeing”. That’s not really a great problem. But when you can translate “I might be going to the cinema” in about ten different ways in Japanese, all with a subtly different meaning- well, that is. It would be entirely possible to transform the meaning of a sentence, a paragraph, by translating it in a certain way rather than another. That’s why translation seems to me to be an art rather than a science, a subtle process of weighting the literal meaning with the true intent of an authors work. It’s an art that I have to admire as I struggle through Japanese. If translation is hard, and expressing yourself succinctly and precisely in your native tongue is hard, then imagine combining these processes to speak as you mean in a foreign language. The troubles go further than this- to truly have proficiency in a foreign language surely you have to think in that language- not translate from English in your mind, but construct in Japanese. Sure European languages are hard to master, and Chinese is certainly hard to pronounce, but the Japanese language works in an entirely different way to English. Kanji can be learnt- 2,000 of them may take some time, but the complexities of Japanese grammar could be studied for years and still not mastered. Maybe I chose the wrong language to study!

I think of all these things as I struggle to make the step up from "san kyuu" Japanese to "ni kyuu" Japanese- whether I am willing to invest the time and effort in taking this step, whether my efforts will ultimately pay off. In all honesty if I'm not going to return to Japan it may be pointless. But increasingly I'm feeling like I'll come back here for a while in the future, to live in Tokyo, and if that's the case then maybe I'd better get cracking.

Goethe once said "he who is ignorant of other languages is ignorant of his own". At the very least trying to become half-decent at Japanese has made me realise how insanely difficult English is!