{"id":8519,"date":"2019-08-27T09:39:39","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T00:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/?p=8519"},"modified":"2019-08-27T09:42:43","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T00:42:43","slug":"found-in-translation1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/en\/2019\/08\/27\/found-in-translation1\/%20","title":{"rendered":"Found In Translation 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Found In Translation 1 by Peter<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Watashi no name wa Peter desu.\u00a0 (My name is Peter.<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Anata wa totemo yasashii desu.\u00a0 (You are very kind.<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Onaka ga peko peko desu. (I\u2019m hungry.<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Before I sat down and actually, genuinely tried to learn Japanese a couple of years ago, these were the very few phrases that I had learned and lived with for the longest time.\u00a0 The first, from a poster at a sushi restaurant that I had visited one afternoon back when I was at university, and the second and third I picked up from a friend that was learning Japanese when she was attending school.\u00a0 Every now and then I would bust these phrases out and trick people into thinking I was a pro.\u00a0 I even fooled myself every now and then.<\/p>\n

For over fifteen to twenty years, that was pretty much all the Japanese I knew, aside from the usual \u201cDomo arigatou, Mr. Roboto,\u201d or the simple \u201chai,\u201d \u201ckonnichiwa,\u201d or \u201csayonara.\u201d\u00a0 That was all the Japanese I knew, and that was really all the Japanese I needed.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, before my summer break started (I\u2019ve been an English ALT, or assistant language teacher here in Japan for the past year and a half), I was able to give a Q&A session for nearly an hour with some of my students on their future careers and my own personal experiences, speaking anywhere from sixty to seventy percent in Japanese, albeit still quite broken and rudimentary.\u00a0 After I had finished, I had just realized what I had done, and was a bit shocked and quite proud of myself.\u00a0 It was just cool, thinking of where I had begun and where I am now.\u00a0 Yoku dekimashita, Peter!<\/p>\n

So what brought me here?\u00a0 As a Korean-American who just finished up seven and a half years in Korea, why move to Japan next?\u00a0 Why try and learn Japanese?\u00a0 Why aren\u2019t you married with kids already?<\/p>\n

Sorry, that last one was from my parents.<\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019d say that it\u2019s because of my experience of learning Korean and eventually moving to and living in Korea that I\u2019m here now.\u00a0 Prior to that experience, I had never attempted to learn a language to that degree.\u00a0 Although Korean in ethnicity, I was very much an American kid, loving all the American ways and all the American pop culture.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t have cared less about anything related to Korea besides the food and the girls.\u00a0 It was Marvel comics and MTV; Star Wars and Harry Potter; Friends and The Lakers, The Dodgers\u2026America, America, America.<\/p>\n

My Korean vocabulary was probably limited to anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and ten words.\u00a0 Okay, maybe a hundred and twenty.\u00a0 But I couldn\u2019t have a conversation longer than five minutes with my folks, and to be honest, I didn\u2019t really care to.\u00a0 As long as I could express my hunger, dissatisfaction, or rudimentary desires, I was at peace.<\/p>\n

But then one day, someone at the \u201cKorean\u201d church I was attending back in 2009 asked me if I wanted to learn Korean.\u00a0 I had been helping out with the Junior High group there, and her daughter was one of the students.\u00a0 Maybe she wanted me to learn Korean so I could understand better when she wanted to tell me I was screwing up her kid\u2019s life?<\/p>\n

But I said yes, and unbeknownst to me at that time, it was the initial dive into the rabbit hole that would take me all the way to where I am now.<\/p>\n

Little by little, I was learning new words and phrases at a preschool level.\u00a0 I found out how to say \u201clion,\u201d or \u201clake,\u201d or \u201cf@&k off.\u201d\u00a0 (Hm\u2026I\u2019m pretty sure I learned that last one somewhere else.)\u00a0 But it gave me a basic foundation to start with, and more importantly, it made me realize that I could still learn new things as an adult, and it made me hungry for more.\u00a0 I was good at it, and I knew that I could get better.<\/p>\n

My appetite to learn grew at an alarming, near-zombie like rate.\u00a0 It was brain, brain, brain\u2026knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, everywhere, all the time.\u00a0 Colors, foods, animals, adjectives, nouns, abstract ideas\u2026there was just no end.\u00a0 And after being introduced to Korean dramas, after much refusal and a lot of convincing (I had grown up with my mother watching Korean dramas where someone was always shouting at someone else, or crying because of someone else, or being slapped because they were shouting or crying from someone else, and I couldn\u2019t stand it), I did nothing else in my spare time.\u00a0 I found that there was a large variety of different types of dramas, and almost all of them with very attractive girls.\u00a0 I surrendered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI give up!\u00a0 You win!\u00a0 I\u2019ll watch these pretty girls do stupid things and fall for rich boys with terrible mothers.”<\/p>\n

But this introduced me to an incredibly powerful concept in learning a language: context – visual, cultural, situational context.\u00a0 Watching a scene and how and when a phrase or word was used multiplied my learning rate, not only because it was entertaining and kept my attention, but also because it reminded me to do something that every child does when learning a language: imitate.\u00a0 What should I say in this type of situation?\u00a0 Okay, got it.<\/p>\n

It also taught me a method that I use to this day, even with Japanese.\u00a0 Watching dramas with subtitles, I found myself drawn to certain words or phrases.\u00a0 I would replay those scenes and pick out the parts I was interested in, and then using an online dictionary, I would write out the words and their meanings, as well as the example sentences (Example sentences.\u00a0 SO IMPORTANT!)<\/p>\n

I would then practice writing and speaking as often as I could.\u00a0 Whenever an opportunity would arise, and even if it didn\u2019t, I would just throw it into the conversation, as random as it would be, just so I could test out my new knowledge.\u00a0 This actually led me to tell a kid to \u201cf@&k off\u201d by mistake, and I was told that that probably wasn\u2019t the best thing to say.\u00a0 I would agree that they were probably right, right?<\/p>\n

So all the basic building blocks were in place.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t just about learning a language, but about investing in a culture.\u00a0 It was about learning to appreciate new concepts and nuances, and finding that there\u2019s much more texture, color and flavor to enjoy in the world than your weekly Big Mac, large Coke and fries.\u00a0 And truly, my menu was about to get larger than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Found In Translation 1 by Peter Watashi no name wa Peter desu.\u00a0 (My name is Peter.) Anata wa totemo yasashii desu.\u00a0 (You are very kind.) Onaka ga peko peko desu. (I\u2019m hungry.) Before I sat down and actually, genuinely tried to learn Japanese a couple of years ago, these were the very few phrases that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_locale":"en_US","_original_post":"8517","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8519"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8526,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8519\/revisions\/8526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/evergreenhostel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}