The Hurdle

I've been living in Nagano for a month now, Japan for a week more. Little has changed over this time in most respects. I am used to my job now, though it is still in a moderately transitional phase as I try to normalize all of my lessons. I am planned about a week ahead. I eat sushi for multiple meals a week. While I can order drinks with relative ease and mangle my way through placing a food order (generally with the gracious assistance of my index finger and an extensive pictorial menu), my Japanese has improved at the stalling crawl of a weekday rush hour on Hwy 101 out of San Francisco. The most important recent addition to my "vocabulary", for lack of a more aptly diminutive word, is "to" (pronounced toe), meaning: and. Now when I want more than one item from the menu, which I invariably do, especially at izakayas, which are a sort of appetizer restaurant/bar (it's almost like they knew me before I was here), I can fill the confusing silence while I flip pages with this little morsel, making me (and my ever-patient waitperson I'm sure) eternally less uncomfortable with the extant hideous communication gap. A very small step, especially remembering that in this moraic language, to, as one sound, is depicted by a single character from the syllabary.

I have picked up a few other words here and there, but by and large when I am spoken to in Japanese my brain freezes over, my vocabulary is quartered and my ears cease to relay information properly to the icy mess between them. It doesn't help that it is most commonly spoken at roughly twice the speed of sound, allowing for the conversion to km/h. Zannen. What a shame. Another useful catchword, particularly when playing pub games.

I have procured a copy of a Japanese textbook that is the text for a free twice-weekly class I'll be attending once a week as of this Monday. It will be a good low pressure place to practice using what I have learned, since no matter how comfortable I am with thank you, please, yes, no, OK and my numbers, they can only take me so far conversationally. So since I've had the books for about two and a half weeks now, I just have to study 3 more chapters before starting on chapter 5 in class on Monday. Some things don't change.