My biggest barrier to learning Japanese (or any of the languages I've studied) is my own personality. I'm not going to say I'm shy, because that word carries too many negative connotations and it isn't entirely accurate. Rather, I'm a very private person. In a public setting among strangers, I tend to watch quietly until I get a feel for the situation. Once I feel comfortable in a group, I'm pretty vivacious. In fact, I can be quite a chatterbox (some might say, an overbearing loudmouth.)
When I began my Japanese class, I felt a little nervous. I am twice as old as the average student. Some of them have studied Japanese before, but many have not. So this first month of class has been very, very basic Japanese. I resisted speaking out even when I knew an answer because I didn't want it to look like I was showing off.
Luckily for me, the best student in class, L-san, sits right behind me. He is Korean, lived in Japan for two years, and recently moved to the US. Both his Japanese and English are excellent and it is not at all obvious that he has been in the US less than a year. The first hint that I had was when he was called on to say, "Eraser wa nihongo de nan to iimasu ka." He knew the Japanese, of course, but he didn't know the English word for eraser. Later, he told me that learning English has been much more difficult for him than learning Japanese.
What impresses me about L-san is that he seems absolutely fearless in class. Whether he's speaking English or Japanese, he doesn't hesitate and he speaks up. When we are repeating after the teacher, his voice is loud and clear over the mumblings of most of our other classmates.
So it dawns on me that L-san can speak three languages because he isn't afraid of what anyone might think of his efforts--or if he is, he doesn't let his fear hold him back. So I started speaking up in class, too. After all, the only reason I'm taking this class is to practice Japanese. Why do I care what other people think? (Okay, the fact is that I do care and I can't seem to change that. But I am resolved not to let it stop me.)
The same week, I read Trevor Hill's inspiring essay on how he learned Japanese. Then I reread Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy about his experiences teaching English in China, where his students were enthusiastic and eager to learn.
Yes, I'm getting a little old to let shyness keep holding me back. So what am I going to do about it? Well, inspired (and encouraged) by Kiyo-san and Eri-san, I'm going to try writing a blog in Japanese. Of course, since I've been in school for only a month, my powers of expression will be limited to simple declarative sentences and a very slim vocabulary. (I get up at 7AM. I go to school at 8:30.) However, at this point in my study, even these simple sentences require an effort, require that I stop and think before speaking.
I'm working on setting up the blog in Movable Type. So far, I've gotten it to display Japanese characters (by declaring the charset="shift_jis"). However, I can't get IE to let me type the characters directly into Movable Type's Main Entry field. (I have to copy and paste them from BBedit.) It's not a Movable Type problem, though. I got it to work with OmniWeb. Anyway, I have to play around with it, but I'll let you know when it is ready. Before I can play, I need to finish my homework for Monday's class!
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
September 28, 2002
Comments
M-- way to go! I've been toying around with the idea myself, but no time, no time.... Using MT with Mozilla, I can input Japanese characters, and when I publish the post, it looks fine on the site (my test blog). However, after saving in MT, the post in the Edit Entry text box reads something like: これは 日本語 の テスト。大丈 So you pretty much need to save only when you're sure about your post, and forget about editing it later. Does OmniWeb do the same?
Comment by: Kurt. Posted September 28, 2002 10:29 PM.
well, nevermind, the character codes I was trying to show got re-interpreted back into Japanese when the comment posted! Basically what I was trying to say was that in the entry screen field, after saving, the Japanese characters turn into a bunch of &# + 5-digit number symbol codes. Also one other problem is that the text is extremely small, so certain kanji (like for "go"/language that I used above) can be quite hard to read.
Comment by: Kurt. Posted September 28, 2002 10:33 PM.
The funny thing is that when I read your comments (in the MT interface, not on the site) the characters were displayed & # 26085 ; (without the spaces). That's unicode, right? I'm using the Mac's kotoeri interface to enter the characters. The result does not seem to be unicode...but something that looks like A??@e.
When I first save an entry and it posts it, it converts the characters. As you guessed, I can't edit an entry because of the gobbleygook. But neither can I append the entry with new text. The second time I save it, it turns into a different kind of gobbleygook and that is what is displayed on the site as well.
Mr. Wizard, my own personal IT department, has promised to look into it for me.
Comment by: M. Posted September 29, 2002 08:55 AM.
M-- in the interests of those others who might want to try this, i'm using Windows, with Microsoft's Global IME to input characters. With that, and using MT's application with Mozilla, I can go back and append to a post using Japanese characters (what's above is in unicode), and it'll post to the site. But once the past is saved, the newly added text reverts to unicode like the rest. So almost a workable situation except for not being able to edit the posts after saving.
Comment by: Kurt. Posted September 30, 2002 01:23 AM.
M- I dug around a bit in MT's support forum and it seems the key lies in editing one's mt.cfg file (if you're using Movable Type of course!), the last line about NoHTMLEntries 1 (basically un-commenting out the line). However, I tried that and it didn't fix the problem of the text in the edit screen going to gobbledygook, and that's about all the time I had to fool with it. I will try again after MT releases their upgrade (soon, I hope) and I add search and a bunch of other minor changes.
Comment by: Kurt. Posted October 2, 2002 10:44 AM.
Share Your Thoughts
What impresses me about L-san is that he seems absolutely fearless in class. Whether he's speaking English or Japanese, he doesn't hesitate and he speaks up.