Learning to feel silly

Here's a post I wanted to write already a long time ago. The all-time "otaku" (geek) for Japan that I am decided to finally commit to my ten-year-long wish of learning the language of the great nation that daily sees the sun rising ahead of anyone else, apart from a few other less-notorious minor islands. I soon realised I wasn't alone in this endeavour, and that I'd entered a group of people I'd always been on the periphery of. I'm talking about the real Japan enthusiasts. It's a fairly odd bunch, you get the extreme people who spend all their time watching and reading Japanese cartoons and comics, want to get married with a Japanese person, and those who are more balanced, just interested in the culture and who want to experience learning a completely foreign language. I'd say I fall in-between those two, but I'll write about that some other time.

Having grown up in a multilingual context, or bath as the French say, it is easy for me to forget the difficulties of learning a language. I experienced those difficulties just like everyone else, growing up. Learning grammar was tough, but we took it on (some more succesfully than others), except that I learnt French and Italian at school, but English at home. In secondary school, when we attacked English, it was so natural that I had no difficulties with the grammar. I picked up Spanish through multiple conversations and never really picked up a grammar book, though I remember flipping through my elder sister's textbooks when I was 10 maybe.

It is thus fairly hard to understand what a learner is going through when you start explaining grammar points to them and expecting them to integrate them at the speed of your class. You often don't realise that, though they're adults and intelligent, they can't just integrate everything. On top of that, they're not just learning language for the first time, but they have a whole linguistic framework as a filter, whether it is French, Italian, Japanese or other. Each language has its structures and its badly borrowed words (like "panini" in English, or "fitness" in French, or "tension" in Japanese). Pronunciation problems also have a big impact.

So when I started learning Japanese, I finally discovered what it feels like: incredibly stupid. The feeling of trying to express something in a language not one's own, of putting together complex sentences when you only know basic structures and of gagging on one's own speech... Starting a conversation only to realise you only know the sentences you said and can't actually understand their responses, or that people get excited about speaking their native language abroad and deliver an uninterrupted stream of words to which you can only start waving your hands and saying "N... no! Wakarimasen!" ("I don't understand.") You suddenly feel... Dumb. And what's more, you realise that a whole culture you only looked at from the outside has incredibly complex systems of thought and plenty of things to teach you. Language and culture are indissociable. The more you study them, the more you realise it.

This experience (now long gone, since I've mastered the language quicker than you can say "オタク!", NOT!), has taught me a LOT about knowledge and pride. As an adult, once you've acquired the knowledge, the skills you need, or if you follow a particular philosophical stream, it becomes very easy to get puffed up and think you don't need to learn more than the odd update, whether that means reading a book or watching the news. It is also common to regard people who do not have the same knowledge you have as less intelligent, or inferior in some way, small as it may be, but the feeling's there. Learning a language from scratch makes you feel like a child, since even the things you do know, you are not able to express properly and people struggle to understand you.

I therefore highly recommend the experience, since one can never know too much, and it truly is a fun and extremely interesting experience, once you get past the frustrating challenges. The method I've been using has since become extremely popular and multiplied to multiple languages. It is, as they say "the fastest, easiest and most fun way of learning languages", though learning a language is a lifelong endeavour and challenge. (I put their website here for reference, to those who may feel like taking the plunge into a language of their choice: http://www.innovativelanguage.com/)

This point was drilled home to me when I started my master's degree in translation and heard comments from some teachers such as: "Are you a francophone?" after having done all my schooling in the French system. The offense became a challenge and I laboured to separate my languages in my mind and create what I've called "linguistic mental centres of gravity" or something like that, in order not to fit the stereotype of the multilinguist who cannot speak one language properly, and to defy the system by becoming a multilingual translator, which they say isn't possible.

I remember when I moved to England and started writing essays in English for university. The first ones were apalling in comparatives terms with today. But I was so desperate to write, and spent years developing a universitarian level of expression in English. Suddenly, as a French translator in Geneva university, I was being treated as a kid who's just out of secondary school. Incidentally, that's where I'd left my French and Italian. Since then, I've probably written close to 200'000 words in French, through translation, university work and creative writing. We're talking about higher levels of language. Here it is fine-tuning related to style and the odd grammatical pitfall (French is full of 'em!). Italian is the language that has been most neglected, but I'm working to develop my own style in my father's language.

All this to say, there's always more to learn. I never ends. And ignoring that doesn't serve any purpose but that of feeling good about oneself to look down on people who don't know what one knows. For some people, on the other side of the world, you're an absolute ignorant, a baby who can only babble. And I'm trying to learn that lesson, all the while integrating more knowledge.