#second language

i need russian friends to practice speaking with

there’s a russian student association at my school, but a few too many of the guys there are… questionable to say the least, so i need new friends

i’m curious how jokes revolving around someone’s intonation translate across languages…

like i was rewatching that clip from catfish and i was dying laughing at how the guy said “you got me there”, and i’m just wondering if a non-native english speaker would find it as funny as i did or not

It took me some time to find my voice during my exchange to Chile in 2013. I decided during my first week in Santiago that I’d try to speak as little English as possible, forcing me to improve my Spanish. The consequence of my choice was that I often spoke hardly at all.

In English, I’m chatty to a fault. I have a prepunderance for cheesy wordplay and often interrupt people. In Spanish, by the time I connect my thoughts to the words that express them, the conversation has often leapt past me and onto a new topic. I was grateful for the patience of my Chilean friends, for their generous efforts to tease meaning from my garbled sentences.

I often explored Santiago in a drifting, introspective way. If I didn’t apply an extra mental push to bring form to the words spoken around me, I could exist in white noise. Then a scrap of English- Robin Thicke on the radio, subtitled reruns of Friends on TV- would slice through, remind me of how easy and inescapable understanding can be.

I think English is a uniquely inescapable language. In the seminar sessions of my physiology course, we had to present scientific papers to the class. All of the papers were in English. For a moment, I thought my classmates might secretly speak my language, but no. They just accepted that part of their science education required that they parse sentences about “the effects of maternal melatonin on gene expression in the fetal primate suprachiasmatic nucleus” in a foreign language. I tried to imagine a professor at Waterloo assigning readings in French to a second-year biology class; I doubt it would go well.

As the weeks of my exchange washed by, I felt less nostalgic for the ease of English. My voice in Spanish grew more confident. New phrases rose out of the city’s white noise. I jumped into conversations with my friends in time to earn a laugh. I can’t say that I feel fluent in Spanish, though. I still feel like a different person when expressed with its limitations, someone more quiet and less clever. Yet, what a privilege to have learned about this other person I can be.

I wrote this for my school’s blog after they requested something about exchanges, but they never posted it, so I’m putting it here instead!

I’d now like to briefly explain how I got to a point where the girl I went to karaoke with forgot that I wasn’t Japanese until I started singing Ed Sheeran. (don’t worry my ego gets a fair beating) To be fair she comes from Okinawa, people mistake her as a foreigner sometimes.

“Had I known that restaurant was so expensive, I wouldn’t have gone.” Before you read this, @ Japanese learners, have a think or even write down how you’d say that in Japanese.

Sometimes you’ll start saying a sentence and realise that you don’t know how to say the thing. WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN and go ask a native speaker. Trust me this is exhilarating stuff. As a language learner, there’s no better feeling than smashing down those barriers to having fluent conversation. Scratch that, there’s no better feeling as a human being. Maybe I just like language learning too much. So I’d like to give you a right and proper case study for how to study how to speak like a native. Trust me, they don’t teach you this is school and you for sure cannot learn this by yourself. 

In Japanese there is no future tense, allow me to draw out the chart.

Did した | Am Doing している | To Do する | Will do する 

Yesterday I studied = 昨日勉強した

I’m (currently) studying = 今勉強している

I study Japanese = 日本語を勉強する

I’m studying Japanese tomorrow = 明日日本語を勉強する

Bonus tip for Japanese learners. I’m going to study Japanese is still 日本語を勉強する。I see a lot of people use するつもりだ and する予定 which native speakers tend not to use unless they actually mean. I intend to study, like you have to really intend to do the thing to say つもり、if you’re just gonna study, stick to する。Also for 予定, your textbook will probably say this means “plan to” or “have plans to” and while this might make it seem like you can just create the future tense, this creates the sense that you’ve made a schedule and you’re studying tomorrow. In fact, while I’m at it べき gets used a lot more than it should. It textbooks it means “should” but it’s not just a “what should I do now”, it’s more of a “what should I have a sense of responsibility to do at this point in time”. It’s a little heavy so maybe refrain from using it too much. Here are a couple of alternatives. どうしたらいい？どうすればいい？

So now that we’ve established that verb conjugation in Japanese doesn’t allow us to make the future tense, how do I say the following sentence in Japanese?

“Had I known that restaurant was so expensive, I wouldn’t have gone.”

Let’s break this down. We’ve got two phrases separated by a comma. The first phrase can be translated as: あのレストランはそんな高いと知ってたら which isn’t that complicated but in the second phrase we run into this problem where the present me is lamenting and action that, in the past is in the future. You might need to read that last sentence a few times. Chronological order:

past me  |  paying money at the expense restaurant  |  present me, complaining

So to make it clear: Relative to past me, paying money me is in the future and that’s where we’re gonna run into a problem. If Japanese can’t conjugate verbs, how am I supposed to express something that I would or would not have done. 

あのレストランはそんな高いと知ってたら、行かんかったのに。Is what my Japanese friend said they would say in that situation. Let’s clean it up a bit.

あのレストランはそんなに高いと知っていたら、行かなかったのに。My first reaction is that the second phrase wouldn’t work because by itself it means something like “aw man, I didn’t get to go” But with the context of the first phrase and our knowledge that in Japanese, future and dictionary form are the same, so it kinda makes sense that this could be “I wouldn’t have gone” and I guess that’s just a thing that we’ve gotta accept mean what they mean. 

So now that I’ve had my ego put in check by not being able to say something seemingly everyday and simple, I’ve decided that the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Also another pro-tip, if you have phrases that you couldn’t work out how to say during the day, have a real go at solving this in the shower.

Also if the answer was blindingly obvious to any of you let me know so I can question where I spent all those years of studying Japanese over a conbini pudding.