This little clip makes me so incredibly happy and inspired. Pretty extreme reaction to a one and a half minute clip from a cartoon, but I’ll explain.
Two of my friends on Facebook posted Japanese status updates literally within days of each other. So casual-like! Then there was me checking and re-checking one simple sentence for the subject of my last post. Incidentally, this relates directly to my オタク writeup.
Both the chaps on my FB are pretty big anime/manga/videogame aficionados, and both have Japanese friends and even non-Japanese friends who are obsessed with Japan. They’ve been visually and aurally ingesting kana, kanji, and 日本語 from a young age when their interests began. Hence their cavalier attitude to the early basics of communication in Japanese, and their lack of intimidation.
My fretful status updates on FB are baffling to them (mercifully, I don’t think they know about this blog), and really to anyone in the same ship. Who in their circle of friends doesn’t know how to snap out dozens of phrases in Japanese at any given moment? No big deal.
As I said previously, my pedestrian interest in any of the above topics has proven a massive disadvantage in learning Japanese. There’s no running away from it; if any of these younglings were to trot up to me and begin speaking the language, I would have the same petrified/hysterical reaction as the girl in the Youtube video. ‘Hahahaa!! I am fluent!! Fluent fluent fluent!!’ Now sod off, you damn smartass.
I am neither so damaged nor paranoid that I actually blame the オタク culture for my isolation. Current affairs, politics, sociological statistics, and grammar rules have never, and will never be considered cool. They are my interests and my joys however, and it is only natural that I have to follow ‘I’m learning Japanese’ with ‘but I’m not into anything cool – I just want to read the DPJ manifesto without a translation’. Does not compute.
I know that I should feel reassured that I am approaching the language and culture in totum, and that when I am 60 years old I will have a deeper and more intuitive relationship with Japanese than if I learned solely through popular culture. Which is why the above clip makes me happy and inspired: fluency in Japanese is an incredibly long measuring stick, and only the greatest advantages (being born/raised in Japan) or hardest labour (like mine) will eventually attain consistent success.
Honkey-san up there could easily be speaking actual Japanese, but that by no means ensures that a native speaker will understand him. Much to the dismay of some foreign speakers whose blogs/websites I have read, speaking Japanese earns them almost no brownie points with natives in Japan. And cocky self-assurance or lack of polite form in foreign speakers can often repel natives, as the video illustrates.
As Tomo Akiyama (linguistics expert) tweeted recently:
Many high-intermediate learners of Japanese write emails in less polite Japanese than they are supposed to. Overcompensating?
I am deliberately placing more emphasis on trying to understand the Japanese perspective on their own language and culture – as well as their views on gaijin like me. 日本語 forms the scaffolding that holds my diverse and somewhat scatter-brained research into place. Not being passionate about anime or manga, I can’t see it helping me in the same way that it does serious fans.
Yet human nature craves belonging and society, so I’m mostly just grumpy and envious of those bastards and their swollen brains…not fair…must be freaks of nature…
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