Learning Japanese!

After three months it finally looks like I might be able to learn some Japanese. You might be interested to know that yes, even when you are surrounded by a foreign language, you can absolutely fail to learn it. In fact, you can quickly backslide in your language abilities. Seriously, my Japanese has been getting pitifully bad.

Why is that?

As it turns out, I spoke more Japanese in Oregon that I have been speaking here. In Oregon I had an hour of Japanese four days a week. Here, I get the set conversation at the convenience store for about one minute a day (which I can now successfully navigate even though I don't really know what they are saying). I do get a lot of listening. I hear my students using Japanese all the time, and I try to understand as much of the study abroad lectures that my coworker gives as I can - but otherwise I pretty much speak English to my students, English to my co-workers, and naturally English to Russell.

Hopefully, that will now begin to change. I have several good prospects starting up for real Japanese practice. First, I offered to give Kei (the friendly cafe owner down the street) English lessons, and I am hoping she will exchange Japanese lessons with me. She is not Japanese, she is Korean, but her Japanese is far better than mine. Maybe she will teach me some Korean too.

Next, I just started my free Japanese lessons today. They will go until December. My teacher is a web designer who is about my age - maybe just a tiny bit older - who speaks very good English but is happy to chat in Japanese. Our two hour lesson flew by. It was nice to meet someone so friendly and outgoing. I will try to organize the lessons to make sure I'm learning grammar, too, but hopefully this will help me learn vocabulary and speaking fluency.

Just using Japanese again feels really good. I was starting to worry that I would become one of those lame foreigners who spends years in Japan but can't say a darn thing in Japanese. It could still happen, but hopefully things are looking up.

Gambarimasu