[Japan 2015] Why should I continue learning Japanese after I leave?

So the reason why I started learning Japanese a year ago was probably cause I knew I wanted to study abroad in Japan. The reason that I’m learning Japanese now is because I’m treading water, trying to keep myself from drowning in what I don’t understand. I’m now approaching the midway point of my semester abroad and it’s made me think about what my purpose would be for continuing to learn Japanese when I get home

I can’t say that I planned for that at all before I came here. If I open the excel spreadsheet containing all the classes I need to take during my four years of college, Japanese is completely missing from junior fall and the entirety of senior year. What what I’ve come to realise though is that learning a language is hard and right now I’m still on the uphill.

There’s a ton of vocabulary left to learn; I suck at understanding Japanese people when they talk; I can’t express things that are more abstract. But once I get over that hump: when I can guess a word I don’t know based on the context; when I can ask and receive explanations of things I don’t know in Japanese; then I’ll have stopped treading water and started swimming.

If I decide to not to continue Japanese after these two months are over, it’ll be an unsatisfactory end. Since I’m still running uphill, all that's left for me when I stop is to slide all the way back down. What a huge fucking waste of all the hard work I’ve put in. So I’ve decided, when I go back, I’ll continue, and one day I’ll get get over that hump and from there I can only go forward.

When I first got to Sendai, I felt pretty guilty. I’d spent some time before that in China visiting my relatives when I came to the grand realization that my Chinese sucked. When I spoke Chinese at home, it was always a mishmash of Chinglish, any word I didn’t know was smoothly substituted in by English. There was no huge disconnect between what I wanted to say and what the other person heard.

But in China it was so hard communicating all that I wanted to say, to fill my relatives in on how much I’ve changed in the years since I’ve last been there. I beat myself up a bit wondering why didn’t choose to spend a semester in China instead; why I was spending my time learning a foreign language instead of my own mother tongue.

I think we get stuck in this belief that learning languages is something that you can only do when you’re young. Kids that get taught multiple languages when they’re young do seem fare much better than their adult language learning counterpart. Increasingly we’re seeing language classes being taught in school at a younger and younger age. And somewhere along the line I’ve convinced myself that it’s already too late. That the only thing left to do is to hate my younger self for not taking Chinese school seriously enough for the rest of my life.

But being here in Japan this semester has really just motivated me to not only continue learning Japanese, but to also pick up from where I left off in Chinese. There really isn’t an expiration date on your ability to pick up new languages, and yeah it’s a long journey and you’ll constantly be wrong,  but the only thing really stopping you is yourself.

Anyway, since the longer spiel is over here’s just a few things that I’m doing right now/will continue to do in the coming future.

1. Right now I’m watching Nodame Cantabile the live action on netflix in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. For a little background, it’s a romcom about this serious dude who wants to be a world class orchestra conductor and his weird neighbor next door who’s a pianist. I’ve read the manga before in english a few years ago and it’s actually immensely entertaining as a live action. The live action doesn’t span the entire series so I’m considering trying to read the manga in Japanese. I normally speed read manga in english (16 volumes a day?), so I’m a little worried about how snailer pace would make me feel.

2. I’m doing this kanji program called wanikani. For those who don’t know kanji are the Chinese characters that Japan has over years integrated into it’s own language. It’s a  specially formulated SRS based kanji program that sells the hope of learning 2000+ kanji in a time of about two years. Which honestly sounds way too good to be true seeing that Japanese kids spend at least 6 years in school doing that. But I’m kinda hopeful, it is a subscription based program though so it’s not free, but I mean it’s promising something I would consider on par with the elixir of youth.

3. I’m going to keep playing go. Which I had the intention of anyway, but Olin’s go club hasn’t been very beginner friendly and learning oriented, so I’m going to try to change that. But I also think I want to keep playing go after college too. And when I’m an old lady I’ll be like pokémaster strong.

4. At some point when I get comfortable enough with my level of Japanese I’m going to try to connect Japanese kanji to Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Granted they aren’t really one to one but all I’m really going for is to be able to read Chinese and to learn new vocabulary words.