I am not watching the Superbowl

My brain is about to stretch to the point of flipping inside out. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy studying Japanese. Indeed, it is pleasing me in a way that I had not anticipated. But the process has evoked a couple of minor seismic shifts in my thinking.

See...I was a little concerned about how I sort of know some French, and I sort of know some Spanish, but neither one--when push comes to shove--is going to allow me to converse fluently at the drop of a hat. At all. At all at all. I can merely take comfort in the notion that if I’m unexpectedly airdropped into Lausanne, or maybe Bolivia, I will be able to combine my base of knowledge with the total immersion experience such that I may become conversant in a relatively short time. But my internal argument went something like this: Why add a language? Why not, instead, improve at the ones I already know? And now my answer is this: Because I can’t. At least not much, short of the aforementioned airdrop. Hence, why not expand my base of places where, if airdropped, I will have the framework on which to build?

So, ok. I’m apparently not that hard to convince, because I’ve completely bought that argument. But I’m still left with this concern: I enrolled for Gabe--so, unless I succeed in helping him succeed, I will have failed. So I wave my annoying little wipe-off board drills in his face, and leave Word docs on his PC with phrases to translate before he launches 
“Kitty-face Girl,” or whatever the heck animes he watches. He is immensely tolerant, thank goodness, but not--I observe--as quick a study as I am. It seems. So I have to remind myself: a) the kid has LDs. b)I bested Eric Winter in the NSA language-translation qualifying exam, where they give you an invented language and you have to figure out the rules. Eric Winter, otherwise, beat me in the “It’s Academic” qualifying trial.
c)I am obsessive like Hermione Granger. And then, just as I’m feeling ahead of the game, Gabe throws a few anime-derived expressions at me, about whose meanings I’m clueless, and I say “no fair! It’s not in the book!”

And, to be sane about it all, we have not had a chapter exam yet. It is perfectly plausible that class expectations are lower than my self-expectations. So let us wait and see.

And yay--I just looked it up, and it turns out that AACC does offer 4 semesters of Japanese, so I can go on and on and on...and then maybe reactivate my German synapses which went into hibernation after the one year of German they offered when I was in high school. From which I retain the following: Oje, der schwamm ist nicht nass. This is a very useful statement that you might employ any time you need to inform someone that the sponge is not wet. But I think it needs beefing up with a few additional expressions.

Last night, in the interest of further cultural enlightenment, Rachel, Gabe, Jeff and I went to Joss Japanese Bistro in Annapolis. Yum. In general. Once we got Jeff straightened out so that he was holding both his chopsticks right-side-up he did just fine. And even had this to add to tonight’s exchange of Japanese phrases: “Hoots man, be thrifty.”