But why, why is the rice riding the scooter?
I’d had two hours of sleep the night before. Later that day, I would sway while walking down the steps to the subway and nearly fall asleep leaning against a column as I waited for my train to arrive.
But this wasn’t an exhaustion-induced hallucination. The rice was definitely riding the scooter, right there on my midterm paper: 迷.
Yep. There it was, clear as day. 米, the radical for rice, and 辶, the radical for “advance” or “road” (so, basically, scooter). I wracked my brain, trying to remember some nonsensical story that would involve the rice, the scooter, and whatever meaning they were actually supposed to have. But I kept coming up empty, and the clock kept ticking down the final seconds of the midterm.
Yet even in my test-induced panic, some little corner of my mind was observing the sheer absurdity of my thoughts and chortling with delight. Why was the rice riding the scooter?1 Who knew! How ridiculous! How amusing!
The path of kanji-learning is filled with many strange moments like these. In a perfectly normal conversation that I had with a classmate yesterday, they said “y’know, the one with two fires stacked on top of each other.” I knew exactly what they meant: 談, a kanji that means “to discuss.”
We learn six kanji per day in class, along with a few vocabulary words for each one. In practice, this means that we’re learning about fifty new words per week. So every other week, we have a kanji test that covers a hundred new words.
Learning so many words this quickly means I can feel the gears of my mind turning constantly. The kanji that I find easiest to remember are the ones that have a story attached, like 幸, the Narnia lamppost. Or 季, the kanji for season, which always reminds me of Persephone.
Other words have more visceral sense memories attached. Each time I write the kanji for study, or 勉強, I remember sitting in my dorm in Minami Kasai, the light reflecting off curtains that were an odd shade of mint-green, my desk covered in eraser shavings.
I find myself thinking regularly about something that Cathrynne M. Valente wrote once, about how Japanese is like a series of Rorschach blots to the foreign mind.2 She wasn’t wrong.
A common language-learning tip is to put words into context when you’re memorizing them, so when I’m making flashcards, I try to come up with sentences that I would actually use in my daily life. But when a word doesn’t have an obvious everyday application, I’ll translate thoughts that I often find myself having in English.
So when the word for hope (希望) shows up in a kanji lesson, I find myself wondering what sentence I should put down when my subconscious offers: Hope is the thing with feathers.
I have a very specific memory of that poem. I was in college during the 2016 election, and the day after the vote, everybody in class was shell-shocked. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to say as we all cast about for a way to adjust to the new world we were suddenly living in. But after class, I stayed behind and wrote out the first lines of that poem on the whiteboard.
Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
I guess I was hoping that the next class would find it. Or the janitor. Someone. That it might matter, maybe, to somebody.
Now, I learn:
希望は羽毛もの –
In class a few days later, our kanji textbook presents the word 羽毛, or feather down. I’m pretty sure that I’m supposed to associate it with down jackets or pillows. But the little language gremlin in my brain grabs the word and holds it close, insisting that it, too, means hope.
A friend who’s a computational linguist visits me in Tokyo and I spend an evening at an izakaya pestering her into explaining linguistic concepts to me. It turns out that when a language has a word for something, the very act of having the word means that people in that culture will experience it more, whereas people in another culture will experience it less, or even not at all.
Sometimes, this means that a concept is truly untranslatable. (I find this wild, the idea that there are entire facets of the human experience that are lost to us, simply by dint of growing up in one culture and not another.) But sometimes, once another language gives us a word for a phenomenon, the Bader-Meinhof effect comes into play and suddenly we see it everywhere.
In Japanese, there’s a specific onomatopoeia for the sound a whiteboard pen makes: kyuki-kyuki.
Looking back, I wonder what sound that pen actually made when I was writing Emily Dickinson on the whiteboard. I don’t remember if it squeaked, or if it was dull. I don’t suppose it matters either way, and yet the fact remains that I simply didn’t have the words to describe such a thing at the time. And so I didn’t notice.
There are so many words that I don’t know here. Just the other day, I was sitting in a record bar — watching two incredibly talented humans compose something on the spot, but that’s a story for another day — and when they finished up, one of them shrugged self-deprecatingly and said “ただの思い付き.”
“思い付き？” I parroted back, tilting my head.
He frowned for a moment, before saying in British-inflected English that it meant something along the lines of “just a thought,” or “inspiration.” Now a word that I’ll always associate with a tiny record bar in Shimokitazawa and a song that sounded like water in a forest.
If you asked me how much Japanese I know, the technical answer would be that I’m intermediate (somewhere between N3 and N2, for those keeping score with the JLPT). But most days, I can’t help thinking that I only know enough Japanese to get myself into trouble.
I’ll regularly start a sentence with confidence, only to realize that I don’t know how to end it. It’s like being the Road Runner, pitching myself off a cliff at top speed, not even realizing that I’m in danger until some missing noun or verb alerts me to the lack of solid ground beneath my feet.
It’s a strange, disorienting feeling — truly like falling, my stomach swooping as I try to take a step and feel my fragile language skills give way, plunging me into the thin, thin air that exists between thought and expression. And of course, this is all happening in front of another person, who is relying on me to make my meaning clear and who will bear witness to my desperate, clumsy attempts to haul myself back onto communicational solid ground. Just in case there’s any doubt in your mind: it’s excruciating.
So why do I do this to myself? Well, first of all, some part of me recognizes that even feeling this disorientation is a sign of progress. At least I know enough to know what’s missing. Compare that to when I first started learning Japanese, when getting through any interaction in any way was cause for celebration.
I still remember sitting in class during that very first summer in Japan, after a lunch break, and the teacher asking each of us what we’d had to eat. The guy next to me enthusiastically said that he’d eaten something delicious, but when the teacher asked him what it was, he shrugged and said that he didn’t know.
“Well, where did you have it?” She tried again.
He didn’t know that either.
“Do you know what it was made of?”
”No idea!” he said cheerfully in Japanese.
The teacher looked flabbergasted; horrified, really, by the utter naivety of this American college student. But he was wearing the biggest grin on his face. He’d had a great lunch! He’d somehow ordered it, eaten it, paid for it. Cause for celebration!
All the rest of us in class laughed, because we knew the feeling. When you don’t know a language, truly don’t know it, even the most basic interactions become a gigantic trust fall with a foreign society.
And so when your dive off the cliff actually works, when you land at the bottom and realize that you’ve somehow done it with all your bones intact, it’s an incredible high. Even more so when you manage to stick a landing that you know you couldn’t have survived a few weeks before.
This is how I found myself announcing with giddy excitement to a new acquaintance (who’s lived in Japan for fifteen years and speaks fluent Japanese) that I was having a great day because I’d called a restaurant to adjust a reservation and it had actually worked.
He smiled. “I remember that. It’s exhilarating, isn’t it?”
The second he said it, a feeling of recognition hit me. Oh, this was what I was trying to say, when friends back home asked me how learning Japanese was going and I laughed and said something about cliffs.
I love this feeling, when the semantic tumblers turn and click into place: Ah, yes, that’s the word I was looking for. Exhilarating.
My favorite words in Japanese are deau, ibasho, and hanare-banare.
My favorite word in English is besmirch.3
I’ve never been so conscious of the speed of my thoughts as when I’m trying to express them in Japanese. It’s like a game of Tetris that I’m constantly losing, the blocks falling at a rate that feels at least three times faster than I can formulate sentences. Every second that I spend stuck on a conjugation or grammatical particle feels like a second wasted.
The number of times I’ve thought “But there’s nuance here! Context! It depends on this, and that, and-“ is too many too count, when I’m often stuck conveying just the barest outline of what I’m trying to say. (A new friend looked at me the other day and said, “There’s a lot of relativism going on with you, huh?” Which I can’t exactly refute.)
In English, this isn’t really a problem, because I’m used to being able to get words to say what I want them to. I like rifling through my mind for the right word, and I have a magpie-like fascination with finding new ones. One of my favorite compliments both to give and to receive is “Oh, that’s a good word.”
I even like it when I realize that there’s not a word for what I want to express, that language is failing me, because those tend to be the moments that I’m drawn to writing about. “I don’t know how to put this into words” is a thread that begs to be pulled.
I think Tony Hoagland put it best when he said that language:
“will stretch just so much and no farther;
how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything.”
I like the challenge of trying to circumscribe a thought, using every metaphor or relevant bit of imagery that occurs to me to paint a picture of what I’m trying to say.
But in Japanese?
Oh, my friend. In Japanese, the game is different.
In Japanese, I’m working with the words I have in the same way that I might work with the letters I’ve been handed in a game of Scrabble. The question isn’t: what’s the best way to express this? The question is: given what I’ve got, can I express this at all? Or at least get something close?
Yet this constraint can lead to some interesting moments. In class recently, we were asked what sort of person we’d like to marry. The teacher called on me first, not giving me time to formulate an answer beforehand, and my brain spat out:
世界の美しさが見える人。
Someone who can see the beauty in the world.
In English, if you’d asked me this question, I probably would’ve said someone kind, or someone I can talk to. But in Japanese, my subconscious mind collaborated with my language skills, sifting through the words and grammatical structures I knew, recognizing important pieces and putting them together before my conscious mind could catch up.
The second it left my mouth, I was surprised. Really? That was so important to me?
And then I thought about it for a moment and realized: of course it was.
This is actually a known phenomenon in the world of linguistics. When you learn another language, it lives in a different part of your brain than your mother tongue, and research suggests that the words have a different emotional weight as a result. Sometimes this means that someone feels more able to be themselves in another language, because the risks associated with admitting the truth are dampened. Or sometimes it means that they’re less themselves, because the human brain is funny like that. There are some fascinating studies about how it can impact the perception of financial risk, love, and moral judgement, among other things.4
In my case, I find that by having to focus so hard on the mechanics of communicating, the social anxiety that can surface when I’m speaking in English often falls away in Japanese. Partially, I think this is simply a matter of brain space. There’s no time to worry about how I’m coming across when I’m far more concerned about getting any meaning across at all.
But I also think it has to do with the way that speaking a foreign language lays bare a truth that I theoretically knew in English, but that’s glaringly obvious here: a conversation is an inherently collaborative act. As if both people were acrobats swinging towards each other, trying to clasp hands in the space between their minds.
Whenever my Japanese fails me, people rush in to fill the gap with a willingness that can catch me off-guard. Did you mean this? they try, offering me words like jewels, holding them up so they catch the light. This? This?
That, I say, nodding vigorously. That!
My classmates and I sometimes joke that we’re not learning Japanese, we’re learning the language of hand gestures. We can describe a shocking amount with our hands, finding ever-increasing ways to fill in the gaps in our knowledge as we bend our wrists and curve our fingers around the empty space.
It brings language back to its fundamental roots, exposing the fact that we don’t simply want to learn Japanese. We want to communicate, to reach mutual understanding by any means available to us.
Don’t know the word but can pantomime it? Make a sound? Draw a picture? It’s all fair game in our perpetual attempts to build the bridges of meaning that connect us to each other.
On Valentine’s Day I saw this put into practice outside the classroom, when I was sitting in a cafe with a friend. Our server started asking us questions, but she didn’t know much English. My friend didn’t know much Japanese, but she gamely volunteered that she could do French or Spanish, if they’d be any help. A couple nearby leaned in close, overhearing, and the wife said that she could speak a little Spanish.
And so, simply with the desire to know a little bit more about the fellow human beings around us, we all entered into a chaotic but objectively joyful conversation in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The only rules of the game were to get your point across, with whatever words you had available to you. Someone would pick up on your meaning and carry it the rest of the way.
Even if for nothing else, I think I’d study Japanese all over again just to have that moment. To remember that there’s an inherent curiosity, and generosity, that exists within so many people in the world. A desire to understand that transcends language, that looks at someone else and says: I want to know about you.
When people ask me what my goals are for learning Japanese, I often say that I’d like to use it for work, or that I’d like to read The Tale of Genji in its original language. Both of these are true, but they’re not quite right. I’m hedging, because the truth feels too vulnerable — too naive, in a way, to say out loud.
Quite simply, I want this language in order to have it. To possess it, the same way that a dragon possesses a precious stone. I want to be able to express myself and to connect with others. I want to be able to pick up on shades of meaning, on nuance, and to learn things about people as a result. I want to fill my bookshelves with books in Japanese and English, and to actually be able to read them all. I want to be able to relax on the couch on a Sunday with a Japanese magazine, not because I’m studying, but just because I want to read what’s in it.
It’s this dream that makes me stick with Japanese even on the days when I feel like I’ve tripped and fallen off a linguistic cliff, even on the days when it’s less exhilarating and more just… bruising.
But there’s something that my ballet teacher used to say when we practiced sautés, a move where you’re basically just jumping in place repeatedly. “You’re not hitting the ground over and over,” she’d tell us. Then she’d pause, demonstrate the plié again — how our toes were supposed to push off the floor, launch us into the air. “You’re going up, again and again and again.”
Footnotes
- In an ironic twist that I swear I couldn’t make up, the dictionary definition for 迷 is “astray, to be perplexed, in doubt, lost, err, illusion.” ↩︎
- It was in The Melancholy of Mechagirl, which is a weird and fascinating collection of short stories, poems, and metafiction inspired by her time living in Japan as a naval officer’s wife. ↩︎
- I promise I’m not insane! I’ve got reasons! First, I love the absurdity of it. Second, I love how it’s spelled, as if it hasn’t changed since Chaucer’s time and likes it that way. And third, I defy you to say it with a straight face. (Isn’t it more fun to say that something has been besmirched than that it got dirty? Come on. You know it is.) ↩︎
- Just in case you also wish to geek out over the connection between language and emotions, here are some papers to get you started. ↩︎
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