So, excuse me for not posting as much. Between going to classes, watching Polar Bear cafe, making little trips to places here and there, I’ve found that I haven’t made time to blog as much (that and sometimes the urge hits me and the blog turns out shitty so I scrap it). Since there’s no real cohesive topic I wanna talk about I’ll just tell a few stories.
So actually the blog posts I’ve scrapped are usually centered around me learning Japanese, and the reason for that is that the experience changes from day to day. One day I’ll successfully complete an exchange at the supermarket and feel like on top of the world, the next day I’ll be talking to a friend in Japanese be so overwhelmed by the gap between what I want to say and what I can. Some days I’m just really confident and ready to talk to people. Some days I skip lunch because I don’t want to deal with ordering food in Japanese. It’s always a mixed bag of emotions and a good comparison would probably be Brownian noise, there are always ups and downs and I’m just hoping that the bigger picture is that my Japanese is improving.
I think this is the most multilingual community I’ve ever been around. All the foreign exchange students come from different countries (duh) so they speak their mother tongue, the exchange program is conducted in English, so most people can also speak English, on top of that, everyone’s doing their best to learn Japanese. It’s pretty incredible and it makes me feel lucky that I haven’t had to put much effort into learning English.
Another thing I’ve realized is that my Chinese is honestly not up to snuff, until recently I could get away with substituting words I didn’t know with their English equivalent, but being here makes me feel kinda lacking. It’s not a bad thing, for the first time I feel motivated to learn more Chinese. My mom always said that I would one day regret not paying attention in Chinese school, and yup, she’s right.
So the Japanese language has three main tiers of politeness: casual language (which I can’t for the life of me find the Japanese translation of), polite language (teineigo 丁寧語), and super polite language (keigo 敬語). Casual language is what you would typically use with your friends, family, or people who are younger than you. Teineigo is what you would normally use with acquaintances, people who are older, or in a higher position than you. I actually have a pretty hard time switching between casual and polite forms when I’m talking. Usually it ends up with me sounding emotionally distant with friends and unusually friendly with people in power.
The third tier, keigo, is something that you’d use with really really important people, or customers. So the thing with keigo is that when people speak keigo not only is it very beat around the bush (so it ends up making sentences really long), but also they’ll use politer versions of the words that you would typically hear. Since a foreigner would probably not have to use it in daily life (unless you’re in the service industry in Japan), it’s not really taught early on, I’ve had Japanese friends tell me that even they find it difficult to learn to speak.
So anyway, I went to the bank the other day to try to pay some bills, and since I’m the customer the lady taking care of me used keigo. She was trying to explain something about how I couldn’t set up automatic transfer through the branch bank and I could not understand a single thing. Since keigo makes everything longer it was just a slur of words that was spoken very fast with words I didn’t know mixed it. They must of thought I was an idiot or something, and honestly it did not occur to me until after the fact that I should of asked them to not use keigo.
Recently I’ve found myself developing a taste for matcha (抹茶). It’s a Japanese green tea that I personally find very different from the green tea that I’m use to. I was told (but not entirely sure if I’m correct) that matcha is a higher quality of green tea leaves. Usually it comes in a powder form that you would then mix with water, but I also think it comes in a teabag form. It’s also a very popular flavor here, it’s in things like Starbucks matcha lattes, matcha kitkats, matcha ice cream, and it’s a very interesting taste which I think goes really well with sweet things (which makes sense since drinking tea and eating sweets is a very Japanese tradition). I think the best part of matcha is the smell, I can’t really put it in words but it has a very distinct sweet smell. Anyway, I would recommend that you guys try it.
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