Learning Japanese is a daunting, at times embarrassing, always challenging endeavor. There are two alphabets, ? letters each, along with thousands of Japanese characters. In Japanese writing all three of these are used together to form words and sentences. Right now, as beginners we are reading and writing everything written out using the first two alphabets, but our days of memorizing the Kanji characters are just around the corner. Actually Nick’s Kanji classes began this week.
The word order to Japanese sentences is complex and so different from English, I can feel my poor English brain fighting feebly at the seeming nonsense of the word order. We have been learning directions, and so spent an hour in class one day making sentences like, “There is a coffee shop in front of the grocery store.” The Japanese order of the sentence is something like this: “The grocery store, belonging to the in front of, a coffee shop there exists.” Getting the order wrong can result in embarrassing mistakes, as when I tried to form the simple, I thought, sentence, “Women go do shopping.” My teacher held up her hands, fingers crossed in the now familiar “X” meaning “wrong, or you can’t do that,” and told me that I had said something about “Going shopping for women.”
The words and sounds of the vocabulary are so unfamiliar I find myself often struggling to make my mouth form the sounds or my brain to keep adding new words. My silliest mispronunciation so far happened the day I was answering the question, “What did you do this weekend?” Thinking I was making the response, “I took my family to the park.” I was surprised to find my language teacher doubled over laughing (this is totally acceptable for the teachers to do, apparently. I have checked with other students who have other teachers and they all have had the experience of the teacher finding hilarity at their language attempts.) When my teacher caught her breath from laughing, she told me I had said, “I took my pirate sword to the park.” I didn’t even know I knew the word for pirate sword, but it must be kind of close to word for family!
Coco and Owen spend three days a week at the Japanese daycare just around the corner from our language school. Their own experiences adding Japanese words and phrases to their vocabulary has been fascinating to watch. They are absorbing it as they go about their days there, both from interacting with the other kids and from the wonderful teachers there making concentrated efforts to help them learn. At unexpected moments they have answered us in Japanese, though we asked the question in English. I heard the two of them arguing over a toy the other day, both clutching the toy, saying to one another in Japanese, “Yamata!” “Don’t do that!” After Colette wowed us one morning a few days ago, rattling off the numbers one-ten, Nick told her, “You are doing such a good job with your Japanese, we are so proud of you.” In response Coco tossed her hands in the air and sang out, “I am so good at Japanese because I LOVE it!”
Her response gave me pause, made me think that perhaps there is something there that I am missing. Something even besides her obvious enthusiasm and courage to go for it in learning this new language. Perhaps the something I have been missing is love. I couldn’t say honestly that I love learning this language. There are times when I am discouraged, or embarrassed, intimidated, or just plain tired in my times of studying and trying to use what I’ve learned. I recieved an amazingly timely, and wise, email just the other day from a dear friend who served as a missionary for 14 years overseas. In her email she said this about language learning, “All of the time and effort you spend learning it will be a gift of love for the Japanese people for the rest of your life…” What a difference to see this as a “labor of love,” to have love as motivator and inspiration. Love for our great God about Whom we want to share with the new friends we make here. Love for the Japanese people and culture and this place that we are making our home. I am praying that my love will increase and I feel like God is going to be at work, growing that love in my heart right here in the middle of the hard work of vocabulary lists and new alphabets and making my language teacher laugh as I fumblingly piece together Japanese sentences.
