Last weekend I picked up Japanese for Busy People II at Barnes and Nobel. This is the new and revised edition of the same volume that I completed while living in Japan. I still have the old edition but I felt the need for the new and updated version. Actually, the new one has some conversational constructions that I never learned--or at least I don't think I had. Who knows I have forgotten so much.
Why the renewed interest in Japanese. I don't have a clue. I don't have any plans to go back to Japan. Maybe the weird dreams I started having about 3 months ago where I found myself back in Japan working has had a residual effect. I think the dreams are the result of the shattered economy. I ended up in Japan the first time not only because I wanted to travel but also because there were zero jobs at the end of the eighties for liberal art majors such as myself.
At any rate with my morning coffee, I have started reviewing the stuff I have already learned. Realizing full well, that the problem I already have with mixing Japanese into Spanish is probably going to increase.
Japanese is my foreign language now and all those years of Spanish lie under the Japanese. I can still read Spanish OK but that is a passive skill. Speaking is an active skill so I have to dive down deep through the Japanese to retrieve the Spanish. If I am not careful, I am just as likely to knee jerk into with a Japanese reply. The result is almost comical. A patron says something in Spanish, I give a stilted Spanish reply, patron says something else, Japanese escapes my lips. Patron looks very confused--it's not Spanish and most definitely not English. I must be speaking alien. Patron starts sidling away from me much in the same way one would a previously friendly dog that has started foaming at the mouth.
I blame Fran(k), Victor,and my other Latino friends in Hiroshima on this problem. When we would all get together and I was the only anglophone in the group, our conversations would go something like this: I would say something in English or Japanese, people would respond in Japanese or Spanish. They would say something in Spanish or Japanese, I would respond in English or Japanese. Fran(k) and Victor were perfectly polyglot--fluent in Spanish, English and Japanese. But the other guys like me had mixed abilities. Depending on what we wanted to say we would use our native language when necessary. Fran(k) and Victor picking up the slack through translation. So it is perfectly natural for me to hear Spanish and respond in Japanese. How Whacked it that?
2 comments:
Spanish was my first foreign language I studied, French my second, and Japanese my third. We'll ignore German and Danish... Now I never said I was fluent in any of them, but when I started learning French I thought in Spanish. When I started learning Japanese I thought in French. And now that I'm back in a town with a *HUGE* hispanic population and my Spanish learning is passive, when I try to study it I think again in French. C'est la vie!
I only speak English, even though I studied French for a few years in junior school. The key to learning a language well, as you point out, is to speak it regularly. I've heard two people say that if you dream in a language then you've learnt it properly. By the way, thank you very much for the review of my novel. I appreciate it. It's true what you say about the typographical errors.
Eliminating them is a major problem. Thanks for your encouragement. Best wishes.
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