Since April, I’ve been taking an online Japanese language class through the local community college. In the beginning, my choice of language was more or less random, based on scheduling—if timing was different I could just as easily have landed in ASL or Somali or French—but it’s November now, and I’m committed.
There’s just one other student besides me in our level, a good-natured and deeply normal man whose goal is to communicate with his partner’s elderly relatives. My goal is, I don’t know, to have fun? To learn? To use my brain for something different. “Aha! Intellectual stimulation!” the teacher cries.
She’s a rascally seventy-five year old full of stories about growing up in Japan and semi-questionable pronouncements about What Japanese People Think of various western personalities (Liz Truss, Mr. Bean, Russian opera singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky, KISS). Once her tiny grandchildren Zoom bombed us from Tokyo. Once she showed a video clip of Mads Mikkelsen dancing because she thinks he’s hot.
It’s consistently the most fun I’ve had on Zoom. The actual learning, though, goes slowly. Class meets just once a week, and we’re rarely assigned homework. Seven months in, I know maybe a dozen verbs. Next week we’re finally going to learn some adjectives. In the past month, we’ve finally started learning how to read.
Japanese has three writing systems; we’re working on two of them. It’s hard! And fun specifically because it’s so hard. My classmate and I are at the stage now where we can read a sentence aloud—sort of, haltingly, filled with mistakes equivalent to reading “house” as “mouse,” “nine” as “mime.” This week my classmate sent our teacher into hysterics by trying to read the word for “gym,” and coming out with one for “brothel” instead. “Oh,” she laugh-gasps in these moments, “I love being a teacher!”
The best thing in this class isn’t not to make a mistake. It’s to make a comical one, an interesting one, or best of all, one common among Japanese children. Because English speakers and kids make different kinds of errors. One is about inserting our existing mental structures into a context where they don’t work, one about approaching the material on its own terms but muddling the execution. It’s not that either one is exactly better or worse—I am am English speaker, of course I’ll make those mistakes—but I feel unreasonably proud when I make the baby variety instead.
In a beginning language class, you don’t have to—you can’t—express thoughts that are striking or smart or unique. You do not have to be interesting. Within the tiny context of our weekly Zoom chat, it’s practically a miracle if I can say “I went to my friend’s house.” And if I accidentally land on “I went to my friend’s horse,” well, that’s nearly as good. Mistakes make the whole thing fun. If you can manage to make the same mistakes as a kindergartener, that’s even better.
For a long time now, writing has not been fun for me. I used to have the joyful, clueless confidence of a baby, but now I know too much—about the rotten industry, about the mean and fearful brains of other people in it, about my own limits. I wrote the exact same stuff for so long, I began to doubt I was smart or interesting enough to do anything else. The only thing anybody wanted from me was astrology content—that was my special hook, my unique little thing. I am trying not to care anymore. I’m trying to make toddler mistakes.
In A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks has that speech about how baseball is hard. “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” Being hard is also what makes my Zoom class great, but for a completely opposite reason. Learning a language is hard, but everyone does do it. Babies do it. Kindergarteners learn to read and write every day. 125 million people speak Japanese. I’m not special for learning how to sound out the alphabet. There is no way to set myself apart here as some unique genius. I’m just trying to learn stuff that toddlers also learn.
Anyway, this Substack is the clueless zone for me. I’m still doing horoscopes, just none of that in here. No astrology hook, no brand-building. I’m not trying to be a professional, I’m just trying to remember how to enjoy myself again. (And I won’t even have to worry about What They’ll Say On Twitter, lol, rip.) No idea how much I’ll use this space, but hopefully some. See you soon.
Something Different
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