so i go home in the morning, i need to decided weather to keep working on my massive luggage or to write a year in review blog,
I can sleep on the plane, ok I'll do it.
to save time, I'll copy and paste you something i wrote somewhere else about learning japanese this year, forgive me if its vulgar in anyway or unspellchecked. i dont have time to reread it.
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so many different things would go so many different ways if just certain little things went differently, but they go the way they do and they went the way the did, and there you are.
i have seen people whove lived in japan for twelve years forget the katakana character for mu, people who have lived in japan for four years for japanese study purposes and could still barely speak, and of course the thousands upon thousands of ALT english teachers who live here for a 2-5 year stint and never get anywhere, but I have also seen kids go from zero to natural in a year, and this is something I have not done. I have come full circle, from sitting on the subway wondering if people are talking about me, to sitting on the subway listening to what people are actually talking about, (sometimes me), but really, loads of times a day I have to ask what a word means, and although i can read the hiragana and katakana alphabets at the same pace as english my kanji(chinese characters) level, although it will probably be so impressive to you westerners, its not very good, mediocre to borderline embarrassing for one year of study (mind you not for credit). I didnt put japanese language as a priority until very late this year, especially kanji, I sat around waiting for me to get good at japanese, for months before I realized I'm one of the people who has to study language to learn anything complex, I've met the types who can pick it all up with their ear. Once i did want to study I had a long good patch and some kind of transition from survival communication and skeletal conversation~ to proper grammar and really talking and understanding things.
I suppose this is pretty standard for foreigners living in japan (aside from maybe completely nonenglish speaking types who study before coming) but I hung out with a lot of foreigners and English speakers in the beginning which ='s all through the year. I lived with japanese and spoke japanese at home, but at school almost all english, pulled out of class 2-4 hours of the day to go to the study center and be with the other foreigners with the english speaking teachers.
so I can speak japanese, and depending on how you define fluently I can speak it fluently. in japanese speaking a language fluently is called being able to speak perapera (sometimes peraperaperapera) which means like words flying out of your mouth, theres a hand motion that often goes with it but I can't show you that on here. I can do that, I can have a normal speed conversation and say anything i want, if i dont know a word for something I can describe it well enough for them to know what i mean easily, and vice versa with me not knowing a word, only getting stuck when an abstract indescribable thing needs to be said, but such things happen enough times each day that I dont know if you still call that fluent, i guess you can, maybe. I can speak it with good pronounctiation but then thats another problem, japanese is a language with very few sounds, all but maybe 6 of which are in english, (hu/fu, and la li lu le lo/ ra ri ru re ro [remember kids the japanese L/R is kind of something in between english Land R and maybe kindofa D]) and of course theres a lot more to it than that, but i've been here listening to the real deal since day one so my pronounciation is good, "natural" and i use idioms and sayings and all that lovely stuff, not to mention the endless stream of praise I get for how good i got at japanese in 11 months...
but i've seen people who've gotten so much better, and the exchange programs turn out however many kids each year for however many decades before me, and I know without knowing that plenty of them went home with better Japanese than me.
...I dont know, I got pretty good, the point of this is not to boast or prove it, but to admit that I could have done better if I tried my hardest from the beginning and kept the pace, Just like I could have in high school, and with every instrument or sport or woman that I have ever gone for. and that Is something this year has taught me, and something japanese people have taught me, and something I can take with me from here on. this didn't Just come to me tonight, i've been thinking this way since that realization period I talked about earlier in this, and it has made all the difference.
I have other things to do and other things to see, but I'm not done with japanese study, with japan, or with the japanese.
I can see how much space there is in my head now.
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so there you go me trying to defend myself from my own guilt about not making the maxium effort with japanese,
This year i saw every single thing i could, and did every single thing i could and took every oppurtinity given to me, I havent written about this yet but i made a goal at the start to say yest to anything offered to me unless I was already booked with something offered before, so even if something sounded boring or i couldnt be bothered i said ok to it and i did it, I went to bhuddist church services, dozens of classical music concerts, ok no time to list them but things that I were worth experiencing even though i thought i would have rather sat at home. Of course there were times where this backfired and i did really want to be back at home doing nothing, but this way i know i didn't miss any chances i was offered this year. im sure i broke my own rule once or twice but i cant think of any times.
I got on the plane knowing not a single soul in all of japan or this continent, and i dug out a life for myself, and i like it a lot and i dont want to leave it behind, i think it hasnt really hit me yet that im actually leaving tomorrow, the reverse culture shock will be more short lived than the original but i think it will be just as rough. its part of the experience too though.
I really wish my camera hadnt broken, i love taking pictures, and my host mothers camera although shes a saint for letting me use it all this time, its terrible.
japanese friends are hard to make, people make fun of you or talk aloud about you when youre walking home, people might not want to talk to you on the grounds that you have a "scary face" all kinds of things like that, and on top of them, the language barrier and the culture barrier, I obviously made friends from the very first day with the boys in the class who liked to study english and therefore could communicate with me, i dont know if ive talked about them before, we slowly went from english conversation to a mix of english and japanese to just japanese over the course of one year, i can call them close friends, I also made good friends with most of my class and a few kids from other classes and on the rugby team, then I had countless hordes of dudes who just had a oh theres that hilarious foreigner lets hi five him kind of friends, or guys who would just come up to me every morning and say a different dirty word in english that they had lookedu p in there dicitonary, me and those guys had some laughs but i wouldnt call them lifelong friends.
anyway non english speaking friends were hard to make back when i couldnt speak any japanese, and i sometimes want to slap myself for not studying before I came
this is sounding a bit depressing but it shouldnt, in review it was hard and im not finished but i learned how to speak japanese, and it was hard and im not finished but i was able to make real lasting friendships with japanese.
I saw all of hokkaido, every single place except for hakodate, the city to the south, really, everything. not just stuff in tourist guidebooks but like weird places japanese people dont even know about. i love it.
I also went all over japan top to bottom, most major cities but only for short times, i spent a lot of time touring kyoto though, so if you ever need a tour guide for there call me.
and i experienced japanese culture, new and old,
i met people from all over japan, young and old, I talked to people who had never met a canadian, or even a white man. Not to mention lifelong friends from dozens of countries around the world
oh also
i learned about the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and met people who were alive then, even in the blast zone. I used to think those bombs were a good decision to stop japan in the war, but i've seen a lot of pictures and things and heard a woman who was there talk about hwat she saw and i dont know if i agree anymore, but its the past and cant be undone and i guess i can just join the japanese people who say that no country should ever use bombs like that again no matter what.
anyway, mission accomplished, it was as rewarding as it was challenging, i now have 5 families and 30 something uncles and plenty of new friends.
i can come back on my own anytime and travel alone all over japan, and i plan to.
I would say that there are a lot of big differences between us canadians/western countries, but there are a lot of similarities, and that we are essentially all thinking the same things.
thanks everyone for everything.
I can't wait to see you,
