"I could feel the Japanese words slipping like droplets of sweat from my brow."
- Page 7, Turning Japanese, David Mura
The Japanese words, yes, and the German, the Finnish, the Spanish, the Norwegian, the Faroese, the Italian, the Latin... isn't it startling how quickly it abandons you, especially right after a trip? When you go from living and breathing a language to forgetting it ever happened? Eventually the rate of evaporation does slow down, leaving you a sort of thick, sludge like remainder of words that, you think, you are unlikely to forget as long as you know your own language. Still, the speed of the disintegration, the helplessness of it, is striking...
A month ago I could identify close to 200 Kanji. Two months ago the number was about 100, and I could write nearly all of those. Yeah, during my three intense and in-Japan weeks, the rate was too rapid to be sustained, and even in the weeks of preparation I was half learning and half cramming.
How many Kanji can I recognize now? Perhaps one hundred. Perhaps less. How many could I write? Perhaps fifty.
So it goes.
September 15, 2009
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2 comments:
Very interesting how you describe the demise of your language skills. It is a sad, and true thing, nonetheless. Do you have any strategies to keep it from happening?
Well, the passive skills disintegrate much more slowly, and they're tied together of course. So watching a movie or reading a newspaper can remind you of a lot of words. It's really your ability to produce quickly that disappears first.
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