Turning Japanese? Not yet anyway.

Gabe and I started Japanese 111 at the Community College yesterday. It snowed today. Gabe is playing PS3 with Matt. I am studying Japanese. Gabe, the anime buff, thinks he will be helping me with Japanese homework. Time will tell.

We’re not to chapter 1 yet. We’re still in the “pre” chapter...the little bit at the beginning of language texts where you get your intro to basic greetings and a smattering of other niceties. And this I can say definitively: Japanese is like brain yoga. And I’m not talking downward dog. Nope...one of those asanas where your hand’s on the floor, your foot’s in the air, and you promptly fall into the nightstand and knock a lamp over.

Kind of makes you want to crawl back to French, Spanish, or German with a penitent air, saying all is forgiven! I didn’t mean it when I said querer was an inextricable knot of conjugations! And here’s the thing: In the pre-chapter--the baby chapter--you don’t even conjugate anything. But you also don’t get the comfort of an alphabet you recognize. Merci, gracias, danke... Oh, sure, anybody can say that, and write it too. And maybe you can say arigatoo, even though there’s probably nothing in your basic western educational background that the word even remotely resembles. But don’t get too puffed up about that. Because you’re cheating. It’s not really written “arigatoo,” it’s written ありがとう, and therein lies the problem. It’s going to be quite a while before I can look at ありがとう, and register it as a word. And sadly, my entire Japanese textbook looks pretty much like that.

Frankly, I do not know if I will ever look at Japanese characters and see words, as opposed to seeing a code that must be cracked, using the handy chart found in the back of my textbook, or online. Can a brain be that plastic at 47? Interestingly, I find that the experiment of discovering the answer to this question is almost as interesting as the language-learning process itself. Can my brain get it? Let’s see.

It has been quite some time since I traced the lines of word-parts in a work book, taking care to draw the horizontal crossbar before adding the slash and the curlicue. I’m sort of feeling like someone should give me a fresh new extra-fat pencil, and a stick-on gold star at the top of my paper. And there’s the semi-appalling truth that the hatches and swirls I’m struggling to copy are second nature to any Japanese 7 year old.

Even so, I’m finding it more fun than chore...I was just a little unprepared for the reaction my brain is having. Huh? it says. You want me to do what? So I show it a flash card featuring what appears to be a fish hook dancing with dagger and say “soo desu.” Or, more precisely, そうです. (cheat sheet: "That's right.")