I titled this blog Watashi no chichi wa samurai desu because that was, until I started taking this class, pretty much the limit of what I could say. A guy named Kazu with whom I traveled in Tibet taught it to me, and I've been using it to make Japanese people giggle ever since.
I started taking Japanese for the same reason I started taking Chinese, for the same reason Kinky Friedman wanted to be the governor of Texas: why the hell not? I like languages. They come easily. If we count Chinese (and more and more, I feel entitled to), I only speak three: English, French (already bilingual) and Chinese. At one point, though, I spoke Italian, too (I can still speak some, but can't understand a word they say). There's also enough Spanish there to get by in Madrid. At various points, I've made abortive efforts at learning ancient Greek and Old English as well. My feeling is, as a irredeemable English major, I might as well suck down all the languages I can if I want to do anything but bartend when I get out of college. My goal is to speak three foreign languages fluently by graduation: French, Chinese and Spanish. Japanese I would like to be competent in, but the fact is that to try to take a full course of Japanese at the same time as Chinese is qualifiably insane behavior. So I'll settle for basic functionality.
The interesting thing about this class is, I've never started learning a language in a class without at least some background in it. With Chinese, Italian and Greek, I'd already taught myself enough to pass out of any introductory course by the time I actually took a class. All New Yorkers speak some Spanish, and French, which I learned as a child, makes any Romance language almost unfairly easy to pick up. Even Old English does contain a few recognizable English words. But when it comes to Japanese, well...I remember when I visited Tokyo for 48 hours en route to China. It was remarkable: I have never been unable to do anything with quite the same thoroughness and totality with which I was unable to speak Japanese. I had "thank you" and "yes." That was it. And it was terrifying. And so I suppose, in the end, that this class is more about revenge for those 48 hours of unutterable uselessness than anything else. Rock on.
