Update on how learning Japanese language is going. It’s hard. Muzukashi. That means difficult. I wonder when I will look at a word and see a word instead of letters or pictures. Right now if I’m lucky or if the word is one of the 10% of Japanese words borrowed from English, I can sound out each character, and repeat the sounds over and over in my head until a word with a meaning comes to mind. Otherwise, I am just seeing Windings out here 24/7 “!*@&$%^#*(@#” if you catch my drift. I am studying, I am challenging myself to use words instead of point or gesture. I am asking Japanese people who seem willing to help. But it’s slow. I think my retention rate is only a few words a week. When I do learn a new word of course I start seeing it literally everywhere, hundreds of times a day, which makes me wonder how I hadn’t seen it before. But I still have way fewer words than a three-year-old, maybe as many as a not-very-well-trained dog.
One thought I had is that language is just a code, very much as Lacan said it was. I am experiencing this consciously for the first time. You can really feel how little words are connected to meaning and how little of language is about ‘self-expression’ or ‘identity formation.’ Like, I have no words, yet here I am, as real to myself and others as ever. Speech right now doesn’t feel like language. It feels like reciting an incantation that sometimes works. You can judge on the other person’s face if you have said the spell just right or not.
For example, one of the first and more frustrating quirks of Japanese we learned was that the way we’d learned to count in Absolute Beginner Japanese would not be useful when ordering at a restaurant, (which is mainly when we have occasion to use numbers, I’ve realized). “One, two, three” is supposed to be “ichi, ni, san.” I had known how to count this way since I was five, thanks to a children’s book about Japan I had. I felt so confident with “ichi, ni, san.” It was a few weeks in before I understood ‘ni biru’ doesn’t mean ‘two beers’ even if sometimes two beers will appear after you say this. That’s because the word for two when counting food and drink is actually ‘futatsu.’ Ni…futatsu, the words are so different from one another, (although not more different than ‘two’ is from ‘second’). When I first heard about ‘futatsu’ it seemed hard to process that this word would work better than the word I already knew. However, from the first time I tried it the difference in comprehension was palpable. The person’s face immediately lights up in recognition and responds. It’s like ‘Ok. Futatsu it is!’ The flash or recognition and communication in the other person’s face is always the goal, the puff of smoke telling me the spell I recited actually worked.
The code-like quality of language is probably true for all languages, but I think is especially true of Japanese. Japanese has certain phrases you need to learn which are spoken constantly and seemingly without purpose, in a ritualistic way throughout the day, to establish certain situations and relationships. The first one you would notice even as a tourist is ‘irasshaimase!’ as a greeting from a worker to a customer in a store. Another one I learned quickly as soon as my job started is ‘otsukaresama deshita’ which is ‘thanks for the hard work.’ Not only do we say this to students after every lesson in a way similar to ‘good job’ or ‘nice work!’ but when you pass a colleague in the hall or just see another person at work, you can use it as an all-purpose greeting. As I mentioned I work in a department store, so when the workers from other departments pass one another in the hall, they always greet each other this way.
These phrases have no real purpose—it’s not like you’re asking for any response, verbal or otherwise—but they elicit that ‘flash of understanding’ legible on a person’s face that feels good and important (especially when you have no friends and can’t communicate with anyone). Other phrases are call-and-response greetings for different situations. There is one for eating, one for leaving a place. One is for returning. The person who returns to a space says ‘tadaima’ and the person who greets them says ‘okaeri.’
So every time I finish a lesson (8 times a day) and return to the office, the Japanese staff all greet me with a resounding ‘Okaeri!’ (welcome back!’). Every time. The proper response to which is ‘Tadaima!’ (I’m back!). At first it was strange for me, especially because it sounds a lot like ‘ta-da!’ So it feels like I am saying ‘ta-da! here I am!’, like I am expecting applause or something. Also, it’s like…you know I’m back. Isn’t it just redundant to announce ‘I’m back’? It feels like if I’m going to make a big show of my entrance I should also have a theme song and do a little dance…
‘Tada-iiimaaa!…. (jazz-hands, jazz-hands)’
I finally asked one of the staff to explain exactly why and how to say it, and if I really had to each time. She explained that the purpose of ‘tadaima’ is as a response to ‘okaeri.’ Like the response to a sneeze is ‘bless you.’
‘Should I say it if I leave for two minutes and come back? From the bathroom, let’s say?’
‘No, it’s ok. You don’t have to say it after the bathroom.’
‘How about if I’m gone for ten minutes? Or fifteen?’
‘Then yes, you should say it.’ She goes on to explain, ‘It means ‘I’m back.’ Just like in the US, when you come home, you say ‘I’m back.’’
I told her, ‘It’s funny. We don’t say ‘I’m back’ in the US every time we come back. I mean, if you needed to announce you were back to someone in another room, who hadn’t seen you come back, you could say it. As in ‘HONEY! I’M HOME!’ But you could also just say ‘hey’.’
She was shocked, especially because she had studied abroad in the US and would always announce ‘I’m back’ to her host family. She said she would feel strange to enter a space and not say anything.
So I say ‘tadaima.’ It still feels awkward for me. Just like it might feel awkward for a foreigner in America to say ‘bless you’ after they hear a sneeze, especially if it’s not done in their culture. (It isn’t done in Japanese. There is no perfunctory polite response to a sneeze here that I know of). So a Japanese person in America might feel somehow fraudulent saying ‘bless you’ to an American. They might wonder if the American can somehow suspect this phrase means nothing to them, is a nonsense word, and they are just parroting what they heard. It doesn’t feel like true ‘language,’ as we like to think of language, which is as a means to express ourselves or convey meaning. But, as Americans, we would never think twice about a Japanese person saying ‘bless you,’ because it’s so natural to our ear. So, I have to get past that and remember to say “tadaima!” every time I return to work after a period of ten or more minutes.
I’m learning the script. When I was back in New York recently, I spoke to a friend who is fluent in Japanese and lived here for five years. I was telling him about how difficult I’m finding the language and we talked about this ‘social script’ aspect of Japanese. To him, it was quite freeing. He pointed out that in English, we are so preoccupied by the thought of ‘what should I say? What is the right response? How can I best use my words to seem appropriate, polite, or smart, or cool?’ In Japan there is no need to worry about any of that because of these prescripted lines for every situation. There is no need to ‘find the right words,’ because there is only one possible thing to say.
And to a certain extent, English is the same way. We might allow for more flexibility, but when we were babies first learning English, it was all just recitation. We didn’t learn the definition of words, we just looked to the people around us for the right reaction. And even now, we can only draw from the limited available grammar and vocabulary of English that we have slowly learned to parrot over the course of our lives.
When I was teaching English in New York I remember seeing my students feel the same surprise and confusion I have now. When I told them about certain expressions I could see them have the same thought of ‘but that doesn’t make sense… I really say that?’ For example, I once explained to them that ‘I’m good’ can mean ‘no.’ In a restaurant, if the waiter asks if you would like wine and you say ‘I’m good’ it means ‘No, I don’t want any wine.’ They were shocked by this, especially one student, who worked at a restaurant. He said he often heard this phrase when refilling water glasses, and had taken it to mean ‘yes, they would like more water.’
At least in Japanese, they use an equivalent expression exactly in this way. ‘Daijoubo’ which means ‘all right’ is very often used to mean ‘no.’ In fact, in checking the spelling of ‘daijoubu’ just now, I found an article entitled ‘20 Ways to Use Daijoubu in Japanese,’ which I should probably go and read now. So I leave you here. And if you are interested you can read it too.