Listening to static

Have you ever turned on your favorite radio station in your car, but all you heard was static? Or what's worse, you turn to your favorite radio station, and you can hear the music despite all the static? Without actually knowing Spanish, have you watched the Spanish channel on TV?

Last night, as I sat on my couch without legs, (hopefully I can get pictures up soon) watching highlights of the Olympics, I started to contemplate what it would be like to truly understand everything that was coming out of my TV. Because I am watching the Olympics, something so familiar to me - universal if you will, I am able to ignore the commentators and still enjoy the programming. All of the words coming from the TV sounds like static to me, but the image is appealing, so I don't turn it off. However, I don't turn down the sound due to the mere hope that they will say something I will comprehend. When that rarity happens and I comprehend the Japanese for a quick moment I think I am awesome! Very soon that feeling fades into hearing and understanding nothing but static again.

I have a new appreciation for people learning a foreign language. Yes, I was a formal student of Japanese many years ago, but at that time I was a wide-eyed high school student with an unquenchable desire to learn absolutely everything possible about the Japanese language and culture. I cannot take complete credit for this youthful motivation, the desire was really the direct result of having been the student of the most motivated and inspirational teacher I have ever met. I always wanted to know more and my sincere interest and desire to perform well for this teacher made learning the language, easy. My only saddness is that I was a student of his for merely two years.

How can a subject I once found so easy and exciting now overwhelm me with the ominous feeling of dread and failure? It is because this is where the tangible meets the intangible. The mere comprehension of words and phrases is not enough. Language is so much more than we tend to give it credit. A language relays information, but also is the verbalization, embodiment of a peoples' culture and tradition. Things like cliches are not born of literal situations, but of culturally accepted humor or philosophy. Intonation is an extremely delicate facet of language that can add new meaning (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) to an entire conversation; maybe even redefine the entire relationship of two people if used incorrectly.

These intangibilities are not something that can be taught in a classroom or from a book. They must learned through daily life and activities - suffered through by new students. I believe that learning a new language is more difficult for adults due to pride and ego. We all learn language beginning from the time we are infants. We are spoken to differently, we are given special consideration while we are learning. People speak around us, and we don't understand, but as children we lack the inhibitions that, as adults, keep us from trying. Adults are very capable, I would argue more capable than children, of learning anything, given their ability to reflect and reason.

They claim our brains are fully formed and learning new things becomes almost impossible because our brains are no longer expanding and growing. I believe this phenomenon is something less biological and more a learned state of being. As adults we are taught that change and growth is not necessary for us; it is acceptable to be stationary and we are freed from the "need" to adapt. And as adults we have a tendency to view people trying to teach us as disrespectful; especially if they are our peers or younger. In this sense we shut down our brains and almost refuse to learn something new, blaming it on our age or circumstance.

With this insight, I want to head off my own degredation into "stubborn" adulthood and relearn my Japanese in order to stop the static I hear all day. The JET Programme offers its participants free language courses complete with compulsory testing and evaluations. I have decided to challenge myself and instead of opting for the beginner course in Japanese I have decided to jump into the Intermediate course. This course requires that I know all the kana (hirigana and katakana), can recognize at least 100 kanji (of thousands!) and have a vocabulary of at least 800 "common" words. When I was in high school this would not have been a challenge for me in the least, but now it is something which makes me nervous. I am capable of learning this, and in the end I believe I will score well on my Japanese language aptitude test; I have decided that there is no other option for me.