Catching Up Part 2 - April

I started to cook traditional Japanese dishes via cooking with dog. This has been good way for me to learn the names of food and where things are located in my grocery store. This　also helped a lot with reading menus, which was something I struggled with when I first came here. It has also helped a lot for being a conversation topic with new Japanese friends. Most people I show are impressed and usually follow up by suggesting restaurants I should try and sometimes taking me to them. I highly recommend it as a fun way to improve your Japanese in a specific area.

This was also the month for Hanami season (花見-flower viewing). I went to a bunch of hanamis and made a lot of Japanese friends, most of whom are pretty much fluent in English. It has been great having them as Facebook friends since they will comment on my mistakes and make their own posts in Japanese. A lot of people recommend reading some Japanese Twitter accounts, but I feel more motivated to read posts by someone I know rather than a random person.

Also at one of the Hanamis, a gaijin I met convinced me that to try and aim to pass the JLPT Lv2 and looks for an Engineering job in the Tokyo region. So here is where I stopped sitting on the fence and officially decided to write the JLPT Lv2 in December and gamble my future plans on whether or not I pass that. If I do, I’ll look for a job here. If I don’t, I’m not sure what I will do. I don’t want to teach English too long and make it too hard to get back into Engineering. Another friend in my home city who works in Tokyo was happy to hear I was going to try for it. She helped me realize that I was being a wimp about it before sitting on the fence. Time to be hardcore!

About this time is when I started to learn my first Japanese Kareoke song. It was Karma by Bump of Chicken which was the opening song for the Tales of the Abyss game I had enjoyed so much.

Shortly after, I was hanging out with a Japanese friend in my home city and I used some expressions I had learned from Pimsleur audio course. She couldn’t understand what I meant and said that the book was probably wrong. I found I was overly defensive of the course. I should naturally believe a Japanese person over a book made by non-Japanese, but I resisted it for some reason. (Looking back now with my much improved grammar and vocab knowledge I still can’t understand how my Japanese friend could not understand it. 失礼(excuse me) and しなければならないんで (I have to) are commonly used so 失礼しなければならないんで (I have to excuse myself) should have been easy I think.) I’ve also used this phrase with other people since then, so I think it must have just been my poor pronunciation.

Another interesting thing about this same friend is that she always speaks with relaxed grammar and slang which makes it much harder to communicate. I was still stuck in the always using –masu(-ます) form. For example one time she used “nanika ga aru no”(何かがあるの) when we were talking about me going to another city the following day. I now know that she was asking “Is there something there” as in “Is there something specific/special to do/see there?” but at that point I would only have understood “nanika ga arimasu ka”(何かがありますか) which is basically the same thing but in teineigo (丁寧語-polite form). From this and some other experiences I have learned to really dislike a lot of the courses that I have done for only teaching polite form. This includes Rosetta Stone, my own university course, Pimsleur, etc… I understand why they do it. Most of those courses are designed for people who expect to use what they learn only in a business setting, not a live in Japan and master the language setting. So if you could only learn one, then polite form is the way to go, so you don't go around offending clients and elderly. But for anyone who actually wants to learn and understand the language I highly recommend learning verbs in the order that Tae Kim does it. (I’ll speak more on Tae Kim later). Not only do you learn all of the levels of politeness, it’s also a an easier progression to move from normal to polite than the other way.

By now I had now been in Ashikaga for about 3 months. I went with some Japanese coworkers to dinner at their uncle's ramen shop. The food was great but several times they did not hold back on the Japanese and I got completely lost. Up until then I could usually follow a conversation well enough to know the gist of what was going on, but here I had no idea. They were talking way too fast for me. At the time I felt a little offended, but it was definitely a good thing. I realized most of the Japanese people I talk with speak more simply or slowly to accommodate me and had been giving me false illusions of where my skill level really stood. Another night I hung out with the first Japanese friend I made. She forced me to have a whole conversation only in Japanese and refused to help me. Usually I do my best and just switch to English for words I don’t know or things I think would be difficult to explain. Again I felt a little annoyed at the time, but I soon realized that's what I really needed. I think she knew what I was going through and was trying to help me since she probably went through a similar experience of having an inaccurate view of her own English skills until she moved to New York.