Did you know that I speak Japanese? I totally do, and fluently. I first started learning it in my sophomore year of high school, and I went on studying it in one capacity or another all the way through high school and college.
Before I started with Japanese, I studied German (which I've mostly completely forgotten, outside of the basics). In seventh grade, like many Americans, I was given the choice of studying Spanish, French, or German. The scuttlebutt around the school was that Spanish was the easiest, and German the hardest, which made it an easy choice. I wanted to be challenged, darn it, not mollycoddled! And I did really enjoy learning German, but I learned it in kind of a strange way. After a year of studying it, I realized that I had more of a feel for the language than any real understanding of its grammatical structure. It seems that I was learning the language as a child does, naturally and through simple immersion; this made me pretty good conversationally, but pretty terrible when it came time to explaining things on tests. I could conjugate in a sentence without thinking about it, but I couldn't actually tell you the proper conjugations of a verb without the sentence. It was kind of a mess.
Still, I soldiered on, and my special memory for vocabulary meant that I was able to very well in class (and German's modal verbs meant that I only really had to learn three or four verbs' worth of conjugations to get by). But by the end of ninth grade, I was looking to the future and realizing that German just didn't interest me enough anymore.
High school offered several more linguistic options: Latin, Japanese, and Chinese were all on the list. However, I had little interest in Latin, and Chinese only offered one year. Japanese, on the other hand, had a full two-year program; in addition, I had always had an interest in Japan. In first grade I did a book report about the Japanese train system. For some reason, what I learned from that report always stuck with me, marking Japan out as a fascinating place. Big Bird in Japan didn't hurt, either:
That's the whole movie. Have fun.
And, of course, I played a lot of games made by Japanese companies, and I was beginning to develop an interest in Japanese cartoons, and several of my friends were already into Japanese stuff and planning to take it as well. And, most importantly, everybody said that Japanese would be extremely difficult, perhaps even the most difficult language on offer (that was wrong, though; Chinese would have been way harder). AND I NEEDED THAT CHALLENGE! So there were a lot of good reasons to leave German behind. But none of those are what convinced me.
I was wandering through my house once, some time in ninth grade, just thinking about where I was going and what high school would be like. Suddenly, I heard a voice, quiet but insistent: Take Japanese, it said. And I decided to listen. When you hear a voice like that, why not listen? How bad could it be?
Well, it turns out it was awesome. I was great at Japanese, all the more because I fell in love with the language. Any interest I had in Japanese culture was utterly dwarfed by how entranced I was with the fun of speaking and writing it.
I still love Japanese, although now that I'm fluent, the burning drive to get better has mostly faded away. Now, I spend most days idly trying this or that, hoping to find a hobby that will rekindle the spark that once set my soul alight, quietly but desperately seeking some interest that will instill enough passion in me to send me all the way around the world in pursuit of a goal.
Perhaps that kind of motivation and energy is something we are only permitted when we're that young. With my life mostly settled as it is, I simply can't drop everything and pursue whatever dream I come across. But I can't stop looking for dreams. What will I do when I find one?
Nuts. This wasn't that short. Sorry for missing that target.
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