What a Difference a Year Makes…

One of the many reasons that I am learning Japanese is that I have a friend who wants to learn Japanese*. 

But the specific friend that I am thinking of, I attended Anime Weekend Atlanta with last year, and they once again said that they wanted to learn Japanese.

I had heard them talk about it before, and never really thought of doing it myself.  I  said to them that I heard that that is meant to be a very hard language to learn, that there’s no way I could learn that, and that I would be terrible with the accent.

She replied that the accent is the easy part, that she’s got that down pat, and then rattled off a long string of Japanese at high speed that sounded very authentic to my uneducated ear…

This year when I went to AWA with her, and co presented a couple of panels with her again, when we were preparing our powerpoint and organising our content to discuss some representative anime shows for our topic, I had looked up the name of the author that did the original manga the current one  was based on, and said we should include it.  

She looked at the name, and then said “Yeah, I’m putting you in charge of pronouncing that, you’re our resident expert…”. 

What a difference a year makes!! 🤣

* It actually turned out that I have several friends that want to learn, once I started talking to them about it, but apparently none of them have the time. Or are off-put by its reputation for being difficult to learn, which I can totally understand. Some of them have wanted to learn for years, which if terrible. They could be halfway to fluency by now!  

Worse still, from my point of view, I mentioned to someone at awa that i was learning Japanese and he said that there was no way he vould learn that, he’s too old. I cautiously asked him how old he was, and he’s barely thirty! 🤣🤣🤣. He was shocked when I told him my age and that I’d only started learning it this year. 

I confess, I do occasionally wonder if some of the vocab or the grammar isn’t sticking because of age or if it just normal difficulty and need for repetition and practice, but I mostly believe it is that need for repetition and practice and actual use.   I think it also helps that I have learned languages before, even ones unrelated to this language - my brain has gone through the exercise of learning a different, parallel, language (or three ;)) before - even one with a different script.