Get Good (at Japanese)

In order to get good, you have to get comfortable being bad.

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A tiny portion of the many, many Japanese learning texts and tools I own.

A few weeks ago, I asked my 13-year-old son, who is also learning Japanese, to check over my Japanese homework. At my request, he dutifully stopped what he was doing and in perfect-pitch Nihongo mumbled めんどくさい (mendokusai) - which loosely translates to “bothersome” - under his breath and with an audible sigh, proceeded to point out every single mistake I made on said homework. With enviable speed and a dramatic flourish of his Frixion erasable pen, he proceeded to make my paper bleed blue and then went back to playing Roblox with his friends. I’d labored overly long, and had felt relatively good about my homework until he made me wish I hadn’t asked him to look it over in the first place. And not for the first time, I asked myself if attempting to learn Japanese at my big age was nothing but a pipe dream.

With enviable speed and a dramatic flourish of his Frixion erasable pen, he proceeded to make my paper bleed blue and then went back to playing Roblox ...

I’ve lived in Japan for over five years now. When our family moved here in 2019, we’d planned on staying for only two years so I wasn’t overly concerned with learning the language. I’d had a few months of Japanese lessons but Covid upended all of that and I was happy enough to toss around a few key phrases, content to rely heavily on Google Translate for everything else. Besides, way back then, Tokyo was preparing for the 2020 Olympics and in anticipation of people the world over descending on its shores, English and other foreign languages were easier to come by in civic life than ever before. The crowds never came of course and revenge travel was still a future concept, but the prevalence of foreign languages while welcome, compares in no way, then or now, to my experience growing up in New York City where on any given day you can encounter people from all over the world, hear any number of languages spoken at any given time, and everything from utility bills to subway maps can be easily had in Cantonese, Tagalog, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, French etc. What it does mean is that if I so choose, I can live my life in Japan without learning Japanese at all. But to truly live somewhere and build community, learning the language is a must.

And yet, learning a new language has never come easy to me. I studied Spanish in high school, and took almost a full year of American Sign Language as an adult, but I remain pathetically monolingual. The only time I got even remotely good at Spanish was, unsurprisingly, during a brief period when I spent a lot of time hanging out with a group of friends who almost exclusively spoke Spanish. And despite having had approximately one solid year of continuous lessons, and logged hundreds of anime (always subbed, never dubbed) and other Japanese media hours, I panic anytime I have to speak in Japanese. I struggle to remember simple vocabulary words, mangle sentences structure, and butcher tenses and conjugations.

But here’s the thing. Japanese is hard. It has three, yes three, writing systems - Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana has 46 characters and is used for native Japanese syllables and sounds. Katakana also has 46 characters and is reserved for borrowed words or sounds not native to Japanese, onomatopoeia, or to indicate emphasis. And finally there is kanji. 😱 Kanji are logographic characters that represent concepts or words adapted from Chinese script used in Japanese writing. There are literally hundreds of thousands of kanji. 😱😱 Approximately two thousand of which are recognized by the Japanese Ministry of Education as the standard for functional literacy. Furthermore, just as we use capital and lowercase letters in English to cue the reader for change, a different sized character in Japanese script can determine if a word is spelled with double consonants or pronounced with an almost imperceptible for non-Japanese speakers to pick up on pause between syllables. (Oh, hey chiisai "tsu" 小さい「っ」.) 🥴 I’m not even going to begin to talk about the many, many, many different levels of politeness and different word choices that must be used depending on with whom you’re talking to. Or counters ... IYKYK🥴 🥴

In one of my first group lessons, one of my classmates remarked that she noticed that many of her female classmates would spend lots of time perfecting the written portions of their work but rarely spoke up in class. By contrast, a majority of her male classmates seemed more likely to try to speak the language even though they’d yet to master it. These are of course the observations of a single student (who happens to also be multilingual) but it lines up with my own experience. Fear of sounding foolish has kept me from trying to speak -and I’ll admit my written Japanese is not too shabby.

Later that evening, after he checked my homework, I asked my son if he had any advice for me to improve my Japanese. He smiled at me and said simply, “Just get good, mom.” I think of his comment often. It reminds me that in order to get good, I have to get comfortable being bad. That said, I’m committed to going all out at being really bad at Japanese in 2025! がんばります! By my calculations, I should be fluent in about 10 years 😌.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

Newsletter No. 25 was a reflection on 2024 and a clear-eyed look at the year ahead through an unexpected lens.

The Thrill of Possibility

A FEW THINGS:

• I watch a fair share of anime and recently embarked on two series in part because of the theme songs performed by Japanese hip-hop duo Creepy Nuts. Their single, Otonoke, is used in the opening sequence for Dandadan - a manga turned anime about two high school students: a girl who believes in ghosts but not aliens, and a boy who believes in aliens but not ghosts, who team up to fight and exorcise ghosts and aliens. It’s super referential and the animation and art direction is high level. The other, Mashle: Magic and Muscles, is so ridiculous it’s kind of fun. It’s a sort of mash-up of Harry Potter and One Punch Man (imo) about a kid born without magical powers in a magical world who instead develops his physical strength to superhuman levels to compensate for his lack of magic. He’s also obsessed with cream puffs. 👾 👻

• It took a couple of false starts to get into Butter by novelist Asako Yuzuki but by the third try, I couldn’t put it down. Set in the recent past in Tokyo, the book centers journalist Rika Machida’s efforts to get an exclusive interview with a woman accused of causing the deaths of multiple older, wealthy lovers. Loosely based on real events, it explores contemporary issues of gender, food, fat, work culture and interpersonal relationships. One of the highlighted quotes used to promote the book is a quote attributed to the killer: “There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.” 🧈

• Did you know that the state of California depends in part on incarcerated firefighters to battle blazes? Here’s a look at some of the state’s female inmate firefighters, some of whom earn less than $2USD per hour. 👩‍🚒

• Here are two ways to help victims of the Los Angeles, California wildfires! Go Fund Me has a dedicated area of verified fundraisers and the California Fire Foundation Wildfire and Disaster Relief Fund directly supports surviving families of fallen firefighters, firefighters, and the communities they serve. ❤️‍🩹

TELL ME:

Do you speak another language? Anyone watching Dandadan? Let’s talk about it in the comments. 💁🏽‍♀️