Easy Peasy Japanesey?

Stand by for some rambling.

Conversation of the Weekend, with the miss'z, about her dog, named Robin:

This is a picture of my dog, Robin.

Robin eh?

Yeah. He's a boy, but I named him Robin.

Robin Williams is a boy.

Hmm, That's true.. Anyway, Robin is really smart.

Dogs aren't smart, we just think they are because if they were humans, they'd appear to be doing smart things. Things that we would want them to do.. In English we say it's to "anthropomorphize". I don't know how to say that in Japanese, but it's like...to give something non-human human features..

Oh, I see. But Robin's really smart though.

Why?

He masturbates.

He does? Like humping people's legs?

No, with his paws. He puts his paws between his legs and does it, like this. *pantomime*

Wow, that's pretty neat. And this makes him smart?

Yep.

Interesting.. Well if that's the scale we're using to determine intelligence, then I am the smartest person on the planet.

I don't know what's cooler -- that I found a girl that thinks shit like that is funny no matter how much I say it, or that the ease at which this conversation happened is the result of four years of college, a fuck load of studying, and thousands upon thousands of dollars spent at bars.. The worst part is that even after all that studying and nuking brain cells, I am still borderline illiterate in Japanese. Being "literate" in Japanese is really tricky though, because even though I know a word, I won't know what it looks like, i,e. I don't know what every word that I know looks like. There is a large disparity between the meanings of the words in my head and how they're written. In some contexts I can rock out and read just fine, and in others I'm totally lost. It sucks, and I simply can't be bothered to try and improve my abilities.

That's right, I'm just that lazy. If I could read everything, I wouldn't be able to say "something something" when reading out loud, which is fun for me. "nantoka nantoka nantoka...." Or better yet, to purposefully mis-read a word and say something really dirty, then act outraged and call the person a pervert when they ask me if I just said [whatever dirty word].

A problem with language learning in the advanced stages is this: What to learn next? After you've got the grammar and whatnot out of the way, all you can do is refine your grammar and learn idioms and vocabulary. I had someone explain it to me like this in college:

The first two years of language learning is like walking down a hallway with doors every so often. You come to a door, open it, learn the stuff, and continue down the hallway, learning whatever is behind the doors. However, once you reach the end of the hallway, you open the door and you have a huge, vast wasteland. From there on out you wander the linguistic wasteland learning stuff with no direction and wondering when it's all gonna end.

The wasteland is rough, because all you do is read newspapers or articles, trying to decide which obscure words to retain and which ones you'll never see again. You spend 10 minutes trying to figure out a word that ends up being totally inconsequential, then skip a word that you think is unimportant, and soon realize that the entire article is hinged upon its meaning.

As a student in Japan it was funny -- we'd learn a specific group of words, then go out to the bars and engage people in conversations about stuff like population densities, famine, political bullshit, etc, and then be completely stumped on something simple like explaining how to make a bed or make a dish of food.

"Um, cut the vegetables and the meat. Then you cook em. Yeah. I can't explain it but I know how to do it."

"Well, I'm not sure verb you use to throw the sheet on or put on a pillow cover."

Bottom line: It never ends, and the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Some days you feel really good, like you've figured the language out, and then the next day you feel like a complete retard and don't understand anything.

I'm hoping that it'll just happen -- one day I'll be able to fly through a book or a newspaper, no problem.

But any student of Japanese knows that this is a complete pipe-dream, though I find my vocabulary swelling little by little, usually with words that I don't really need to know.

Word on the street is that it doesn't get any better -- people who are like 10 times better than me get that look on their face; the look that says "I don't fucking know, and I can't be bothered with this."

That's OK though; I'm content with what I know, and I do try to figure new stuff out. I've heard that taking on freelance translation jobs helps a lot, but I don't really want to be on someone else's clock/have to worry about a deadline.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining -- again, I'm happy with my Japanese ability -- I can do pretty much anything I want to do, get in arguments with women and lose them just as well as I could in English, etc.. Still, one problem being a foreigner speaking Japanese is that your Japanese abilities are often viewed as a parlor trick rather than something to be taken seriously. In more out of the way places it's hard to engage people in a conversation other than where you learned Japanese and how you learned it, like it's some mystical and impossible thing, along with using chopsticks. Just taking care of business can be difficult sometimes, because often times Japanese people see a foreigner, don't listen to what they're saying, and only respond with,
"Sorry, no English."

"I know. I'm speaking Japanese."

"Oh! Sorry, what can I do for you?"

Or, like I said before, you play linguistic tennis, where they refuse to speak anything back to you but broken English. It makes it hard to get things done sometimes.

Still, it's about small victories. In the greater scheme of things, do we really need to be having conversations about anything other than chihuahuas named Robin that display their superior intellect by masturbating like a human?

No...I didn't think so either.

Study hard, now..