Japanese

Finnish is now open for me - a broken language, and we look each other in the eye. This doesn't mean that I have a mastery over it. Far from it. My vocabulary is laughable, my knowledge of the grammar rudimentary and mostly theory. But the language is broken, broken open, and what I mean by that is this:

When I look at a page of Finnish text, it is foreign, yes. Foreign and yet not nonsense. My mind accepts it as language, and scans over it seeing not an impenetrable wall of barely pronounceable symbols but words. Words I may not know, but which I can nevertheless look up in a dictionary or even guess from context because I know enough about the language to wrestle the words down to their searchable form, identify singular or plural and cases, and I even have possession of a surprisingly large though still modest collection of root words and components, some of which I don't fully understand but which nevertheless occasionally manifest as intuition. The words, the sentences, they fall apart in my mind - and even when the meaning is hidden to me, I am fully confident that the meaning exists and can be found. Before the language broke, they didn't, I wasn't.

Someone once said, after a week or two of intensive effort with some language or another, "I have learnt enough to continue to learn more." Perhaps I am making it sound as though the breaking of a language is some single moment, one turning point. There are more turning points than that, of course. At some point, perhaps the next big leap for me in Finnish, the language begins to yeild itself from primary sources. A little closer in there is confidence, and new words come more swiftly, attaching themselves to a growing structure in the mind which is the grasp of that language, instead of hovering weakly and tenuously in midmind.

The very first stage, the first crack, when you learn enough to continue to learn more - the language retains it's foreigness but suddenly, magically, gives up it's utterly impossible and alien quality - you look over the landscape of the language and, gasping at the breadth and depth of the challenges ahead, but accepting them, looking the language in the eye - that first crack sounds, and changes everything, opens those doors that at first seemed impenetrable and are now, startlingly, not.

Japanese broke tonight, just that first tiny crack. Yes, after years of halfheartedly circling it, coming in every once in a while for the softest and weakest of attempts: a charge at the hiragana, perhaps, as I forced the syllabary's 46 characters into my head for a brief time before letting them leak out again. I would learn to say, "I am learning" half a dozen times and each time almost magically forget it the moment it became untrue.

It has to be said that I don't really experience this breaking with the Indo-European languages. (Maybe a tiny bit with Faroese, but starting after the first crack, perhaps? :)) Finnish was the first, and a self discipline I rarely find drove me to that second stage. I had a timeline, and a long, empty summer, and every morning before temptation set in I'd pack my bag with Beginner's Finnish (hehehe), nothing else. If I failed - tossed in the newspaper, Anna Karenina, my calculus book (jk), almost anything... alongside it, then I failed. Suddenly Finnish was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to learn Finnish, but I didn't want to study it. It was hard.

Then that first layer broke, I heard that first crack, and it became a joy. The language was mine. It was broken. It didn't yet have much to show for it, but I felt it and I knew it!

Three days at Kiser's. Danny, a television, a pantry, two crazy dogs, and Colloquial Japanese... Colloquial Japanese won about 1/4th of the time. Hours passed as I fed myself phrases. But I didn't want to learn them as phrases! I wanted to learn them as words. I wanted to build that first structure in my mind that the rest of the language could build from. But it was hard. I swallowed the words, but they were alien and didn't want to mean anything, or be remembered. I told myself the langauge would crack, like Finnish. It would give me a glimpse of it's landscape so I could face the road ahead. It bent, and bent, but didn't crack...

I came home today and I had to pack for the move. I packed and packed and out of nowhere, searing hot, crimson, a hiragana character would blaze through my mind. I would suddenly feel に (ni) so strongly that I could hardly keep from calling it out. I wanted to write に, type に, paint に... then it was gone. Talking to my mom I almost said, か (ka). "That was weird," I thought for a moment, my true puzzlement stillborn as か began to emerge onto my mental field.

After the rest of them went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote Kanji to the sound of the washing machine. 男 - Otoko - Man. I kept getting the stroke order wrong when I just wrote it 'naturally'. I filled a page with little 田's, determined to form some muscle memory around it. I filled a page with them. A college ruled page, with ten on each line.

I heard a crack. A long time in coming, if you count all those half hearted years. But I buckled down on Monday. And tonight I heard the first crack.

I know exactly 25 Kanji. I am on chapter 3 of a beginner's book. I'm only halfway through Katakana. And it doesn't matter one bit.

No spaces. Three writing systems. Counters. Particles.

It's not lunacy. It's not alien. It's merely foreign. Merely as-of-yet unknown. It's waiting for me. I know that now. And for the next three months, as often as I can spare a snatch of time, it shall be my pleasure to rip the secrets of the language limb from limb. And be humbled by it. Alternatively. It has begun.