ext week I take my finals for Japanese 101, thereby concluding my formal step in thrusting myself into conversation with a new language, place, culture, way of being. As I look back over the semester, I can’t help but compare my experience with Japanese to y experience with Chinese and French. I learned the 3 in vastly different contexts, with vastly different results, and the analysis I find at least somewhat useful.
My best foreign language is Chinese. I’ve studied it for little over 2 years now and in that time I’ve gone from learning “Hello” to writing essays on pragmatic philosophy’s influence on student movements and democratization in China post 1911. I guess this is all to say that I’m confident with my Chinese and proud of what I’ve achieved with it.
After Chinese is French. I studied French for 5 years beginning in 8th grade and stuck with it up until graduation. I never really was interested in French culture or history or even food, so I wasn’t a particularly hardworking student. Despite that, however, after 5 years of more or less passively absorbing the language, I found myself fluent in conversation and much written material. Sadly, most of that has gone since I left for Taiwan and then college. Without much non-academic interest in the language, I haven’t made time to keep it up.
Finally, after one semester of intro classes, Japanese is my worst foreign language (which is to be expected, somewhat). Compared to French and Chinese, it is significantly harder, and I’m studying it in a much busier environment than my high school or Taiwan. As a result, progress has been disappointingly slow, esp. when I compare my Japanese progress to my Chinese progress over an equivalent length of time (this is silly comparison, I realize, I learned Chinese in Taiwan when I had nothing else to focus on). Despite this, I am lucky to say that I’m more interested in Japanese culture than French or Chinese, and there’s motivation for me to work independently outside of academic structures.
During this course I set the goals of augmenting my Japanese through watching anime. It was a technique that helped me in my early days of Chinese, even though I picked up a somewhat feminine accent (I mainly watched Sailor Moon). However that has been almost impossible at Princeton due to the sheer chaos of time and space here. Later in this semester I resolved to meet with teachers to practice more individually (which I didn’t really do either). This I think is the best way for me to speed up my studies. It’s a formal contractual structure with another human being that I can’t cancel or skip because I have a lot of homework or want to nap. Perhaps in the future I can arrange to meet with a teacher at the same time every week to practice. Even more so than writing a plan down, making plans with others gives them substance.
Language is one of the few things I really get fired up about. It’d be a shame to short-change my experience with Japanese because of silly things like for other classes and poor planning. My progress has been slow so far; there’s nothing to say that my progress must be slow in the future.
Monday, January 11, 2016
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