Tomorrow is officially halftime for my stay here in Japan, and I want to reflect on my journey so far and where I want to go from here.
My biggest goal for the next quarter is to use more Japanese. While this should be easy, seeing as I work for a Japanese company with very few fluent English speakers, I have to make huge efforts not to revert to using English. It’s truly a bittersweet problem, because my close friends all speak English decently well, and my desire to communicate with them fluidly always hinders my will to use Japanese. It’s difficult because these people are not just Japanese practice buddies but my increasingly close friends. Don’t get me wrong, I love practicing Japanese, but I still have to use English if I want to have a conversation involving anything deeper than simple thoughts and ideas. My plan for the remaining months is to beef up study time, so that I can learn enough to no longer depend on English. This means I have to motivate myself to study, which can be difficult after a long day of hearing nothing but Japanese. My hearing abilities have improved exponentially more than my speaking abilities, so I have to focus more on vocabulary, which is truly the largest beast to conquer. I’ve found that I can be understood if I forget a verb form or some bit of grammar, but there is nothing that can combat a lack of vocabulary, except maybe a fondness for charades.
Surprisingly enough, I think that the easiest way to learn the language is by simply watching movies, or hanging out at a bar. If I want to practice listening, I watch a Japanese movie with English subtitles. If I’m daring and want to practice reading and listening at the same time, I watch a movie that I’ve seen many times before, except with no English. My friends have also said that keeping the T.V. on in the background is a great way to increase ambient hearing. It’s still hard to motivate myself to take these steps, but it’s more a result of my laziness than anything else. Recently, I’ve been getting back to the dorm extremely late, so I usually just go to sleep, but if I can just convince myself to study during the 30 minutes before work and 30 minutes during lunch, that’s one hour more than the 0 hours that I spend studying now. It isn’t helping that work has become extremely monotonous. Essentially I do the same project over and over again, with each case being just a little different than the last. It’s hard for me to find the motivation to complete a task when I know that it will just be replaced by something that is essentially the same. The only thing that really keeps ne going is a slurry of coffee and energy drinks, along with the promise that 5:00 will eventually come. I’m afraid that I’m now completely immune to caffeine.
Fortunately for me, I do get to practice Japanese quite a bit if we go to Tanoshoku or during company events, so I’m still learning despite my lack of self discipline. I think that this is partially because of my school habits. It’s been so long since I’ve actually been motivated to do hard work that I think I’ve forgotten how. With school, many of the assignments are so uninteresting or irrelevant to me that I find it impossible to be passionate about anything. This started to change when I took Japanese, but I’m still just beginning the battle to regain dedication, or an attention span for that matter. Now that my co-op job is losing its initial shine, I find myself falling into the same patterns, which results in me not using Japanese when I know I could and just doing my best not to fall asleep. Granted, I’m not blaming school or work for a problem that can only be solved by my willingness to try. I wish that I had no choice but to use Japanese. Seeing as English is probably the most popular second language to learn, it’s so easy to get by with just using English. If I were a native Spanish speak, things would not be so easy.
So basically, the word for the second half of the co-op term is “willpower.” It all comes down to whether I’m willing to try or not and fight through the boredom/fatigue. It’s also funny that now I need to start studying for the GMAT, which means I have to start practicing analytical writing, sentence correction, and the other irrelevant things that someone deems necessary for me to begin my MBA journey. This means that I have to study English and Japanese, something that my friends find quite amusing. Imagine trying to explain to your Japanese friend that you have to study English because yours is not good enough to receive a passing grade.