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Waiting for a miracle I (eponymous)

Click to play [My all time favourite male singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, covered by my favourite female singer-songwriter, Anna Ternheim]

Dream on...

The miracle—miracles, if we're thinking of achievements as events—is (are) language acquisition, mine and Justin's.

It's been nearly 4 years since we moved to Japan, and I'm still waiting for the miracle, the day when I stop hearing Japanese as familiar noise in need of translation, and simply hear the message itself, and can respond reflexively, the moment when I don't have to summon every ounce of pragmatic inference, and common sense just to make a weak probabilistic stab at what Justin's nursery teacher might possibly be telling me about his day, or about what needs to be brought with him on Monday next (temporal adverbs, I'm good at...).

It's all a far cry from my situation in the winter of 1981 when I first arrived at a German boarding school (Landerziehungsheim Gut Honneroth, Altenkirchen/Ww) to spend six months as a language assistant before going to university. I was, I'm sure, a pretty hopeless Helfer, in as much as the students knew no more English after my stay than before—and could have cared less—but the experience did wonders for my German. The first few weeks after I arrived—in possession of a German A-level, a sound grasp of Heine, and near total ignorance of how to speak to other teenagers let alone German ones—I  might as well have been deaf: if I understood anything that anyone said to me, it was only minutes to hours after the message had expired. In any case, I wouldn't have known how to reply, since the only vocabulary at my disposal came from occasional verses of Rilke or the associated LitCrit jargon. Not a promising start, then. And yet, about six weeks in, the miracle happened: the fog lifted, the cacophony became a symphony, the lens found its focus, choose your favourite metaphor. And since that time—though I need to refresh the connections from time to time—German has no longer been mir eine Fremdsprache.

Japanese is different, sadly. After so much input, despite the clear social and professional advantages that would accrue to me from knowing this language well—from inhabiting it—Japanese continues to elude me. If I wasn't a universalist at heart, I'd just give up and blame it on the unique character of this language, or my age, or laziness, or the alien culture. Except that this—except for Sprachgeist—doesn't explain why I was still able to learn Vietnamese 10 years ago when I wasn't much more indolent, and when I had no external motivation to learn either. So I guess I'd better go on waiting for the miracle, hoping against hope. (There again, I could try using my rubbish Japanese in department meetings, and try to live down the shame of sounding like a 4 year old. Or not).

I'll talk about Justin's hoped-for miracle in the next post.
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