Talk that talk.
one of my policies,
I love foreign languages. I’m not sure if this due to my mother being a jet setting chick in here 20s and 30s or due to the fact of having a foreign father or even due to consuming media from all over the world. In reality it’s probably something petty, like the ability to eavesdrop but I’ve always been multilingual.
My first language was Spanish which is amusing to me as my Spanish now is akin to that of an eight year old. I can’t imagine how many hours I spent watching cartoons in Spanish as a kid, which is oddly enough where I got my first taste of anime. Japanese animation was cheap to purchase and dub over in Spanish so a lot of kids in Latin America grew up watching random Japanese series that aren’t popular in the US, but the seeds were planted just in time for the big American Anime boom.
Oddly enough that isn’t what got me into studying Japanese. I’m kind of a reader and I adore historical fiction. In fifth or sixth grade I read The Samurai’s Tale by Erik Christian Haugaard. I then became obsessed with feudal Japan and started pouring over every nonfiction title I could find at my local library.
I loved this but at the same time as i did more research I found more roadblocks. Quite often I would see a woodblock print that would have lines of kanji on it with a pithy description underneath. I knew that these works had to be saying a lot more than just the brief lines of text underneath were telling me so I found a Japanese dictionary at the library and started learning one of their phonetic alphabets printed in the appendix, hiragana. My grandfather, ever my supportive fan noticed this and signed me up for lessons at the buddhist community center in Japantown. That set me on a path of years of Japanese language study, I even went for a summer! I’m dying to return, and I think I’m going to in the autumn of 2021.
My experience with Japanese also allowed me my first teaching experiences. I’ve privately tutored all sorts of people and still have one pupil currently! I love that it’s a constant refresher for me as I’m not as immersed in Japanese culture as I was in California. I still watch a couple Japanese shows and listen to some artists (namely Gackt) but it’s really exciting to share this with people, especially the writing.
I continued my Japanese tutelage throughout undergrad but I wanted more! I had so many options, I tried Arabic and Chinese. I remain convinced that Arabic is for masochists and Chinese was great but I couldn’t pursue it beyond a semester due to scheduling. One that stuck however, was German.
In my singing lessons I always looked forward to learning German pieces, I know people think it sounds harsh but I thought it sounded wonderful to the music. I had some idea of words, not only for their similarity to English here and there, but because I’d often have to learn the meanings to properly portray them in sung format. I found German to be really fun and studying it’s grammar helped me take notice of things in English that I never considered prior of or completely understood in the first place. I think I’m out of practice, but I at least know enough to bullshit with German tourists and bother an alliance mate in Bavaria in one of my video games.
Now with apps I sometimes go wild; have a trip to France? Binge duolingo for 6 months. Italy? 2 months! I know time is money, but if I had all of the time in the world and money was no object, I think I would sit around and try to learn as many languages as possible.