Frustration

I want to call Japanese a "clumsy" language, but maybe that's more of a reflection on my own proficiency and not the language itself. I think the more accurate description might be "hideously impractical".

There's not just one Japanese, there's any numbers of Japaneses to watch out for and switch between, beyond just the super-polite forms that made up my previous rants. Success at reading academic materials is determined largely by kanji ability, just memorizing characters. When new compounds show up, I can often imply the meaning through familiar characters even if I have no idea how to read it aloud. Writing (at least for class) is a test of the complicated patterns of grammatical particles. Speaking in class is mixing the rigid rules of particles with one's ability to draw out vocabulary smoothly on the fly, but speaking to people my age completely abandons all the rules of 丁寧語 and 上司. Because the rules of "proper" japanese are boorishly clunky, casual speakers ignore all them altogether. And of course, listening is a struggle to apply the template of what I've already learned to the speaker's own patterns. Voice and pitch and speed and enunciation vary more from person to person than I ever would have expected in English. I struggle to comprehend old people, young people, most males... all in all its a pretty limited field. I've still yet to understand a full-length sentence spoken by my host sisters. (We did play 人生ゲーム，or the Japan'ified version of the classic Game of Life tonight, though. They took one of my children out of the car and explained something in their caffeine squirrel voices that I didn't understand. I think my son died of dysentery?)

Each of these feels like a separate language dominated (or perhaps its better to say limited) by its own skill. And right now, I can do none of them. What the F, Japan?

Unrelated to anything else, over the break I got an Ainu (the native population) instrument called the Makkuri. I call it the TwangerDanger, because you twang it and manipulate the sound with your mouth.

After spending last weekend with Japanese college students my own age, I was suddenly so comfortable with the comparatively grammar-less, direct, simplified style of speech used in casual contact. Yet my feeling of satisfaction was short lived, as any advances made there did nothing for the other skill sets required for the majority of everything.

There's so much of Japanese language that I can't justify beyond "that's the way its always been". As a foreigner looking in from the outside, it's hard to view these challenges as anything other than outright shortcomings or flaws inherent to the language. I know that trying to "fix" a language can never really happen, short of going dangerously into 1984 territory. Streamlining the language into an ideal of "efficiency" limits the range of expression it has- double plus not good. Efficiency is the death of nuance and expression and poetry. However, please note that in Japanese poetry such as Haiku, they also ignore the formal rules of grammar and particles, because in polite Japanese absolutely nothing can be said in a grand total of 5-7-5 syllables. Irony, because efficiency kills art but art demands efficiency. How are you supposed to hold both simultaneously?

Signs with cute faces
Canines, please no pooping here!
Only in Japan

I'm doing immersion, right? But what does immersion actually do for adults? I'm far beyond the point where my pre-adolescent brain could have learned Japanese just by being around it. And since then, my brain decided all those extra neurons weren't actually very important and shore them off, (thanks puberty), forever limiting my capacity to learn new things as an adult.

I think I'm just grumpy from not enough sleep. I think I would get more if I didn't live in a house with three incredibly high maintenance children. For instance, there's an upright piano and a digital keyboard in the house. The girls much prefer the keyboard. When I sometimes play it, I set the volume to one third, or maybe half. Something small. They play nothing but full volume. They play Menuet in G set to the keyboard's pre-recorded rock beat at 7 am. And then they stomp and scream and run around naked. Do not want.