Communication

I mess up in Japanese a lot, like A LOT. Sometimes it's funny, like when I accidentally said my hands were "shit" rather than "stinky" after my first day wearing the Kote in Kendo. Sometimes it's really frustrating and I want to give up, so angry that I can't make myself understood properly Usually though, at that time, we pull out a dictionary or start miming things, and it gets fun again. No matter how much I mess up, everyone here knows that it's going to happen and nobody holds it against me (not that I ever expected them to, but it is nice to know.)

Somehow all this confusion has got me studying more languages. I practice English a lot, using the little prompts given out for discussions in the International English courses (a group of students follows this course separately from the others for their entirety at school and most of them go on exchange) to write essays everyday. Sometimes they're AP Board worthy, sometimes they're just words, but it keeps my brain exercised. On top of this practice, I started to take up French again to fill the time between my breaks in Japanese and reading and trying to figure out what is going on in class, and it's been wonderful. My French is so limited now after a year without practice but I work on it little by little, and when I hang out with the other exchange students in my chapter we switch between Japanese and what we know of each other's languages, which gives me a chance to talk to Rose, from southern France.

Last week I popped out some stuff about my little sister and how good she is at French, but laughed at my own weird sounds and finished with "Je parle tres mal francais." Rose laughed and said my French was cute, and we switched back to Japanese.

Most of the time when we are together we speak in Japanese, sometimes we use english when our tongue fails us or Ko-chan (from China) wants to practice, but we speak to each other in the tongue that is new-ish to us all. It's fun, it's hard, and it's got to be weird looking in from the outside.

Now I am studying French and Spanish in my free time, not for any particular reason, but they are some of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn and that keeps them from being too distracting from Japanese (one of the hardest.) It's fun, I'm enjoying it and I want to keep going. Who cares whether it'll be useful or not, I'm just playing and words are the best toys.