For shame. I am terribly irresponsible, and missed the deadline for my monthly Japanese correspondence course test. I can submit it late, but only once. If I do it more than this one time, I lose the ability to drop one of the grades. I don’t think I’ll do badly enough on any of them to need that leeway, but it’s nice to have the cushion.
What I really feel bad about is that I’ve pretty much given up on doing all the lessons. I still try to do some of them to pick up what I can, but I’m so far behind in the actual grunt work that I don’t think I’ll catch up without some serious cramming. And really, while it might benefit me somewhat, I just don’t have the time or patience for it.
See, it’s not that the lessons themselves are very hard. Most of the material and grammar is stuff that I already know. What complicates matters and drastically inflates the time required is that all the instructions are in Japanese. I think it’s good for me in the long run, though, as I’m at the point where I should really try to cut out the ‘translation’ step as much as possible. There are simply some things about languages that cannot be translated effectively, and trying to understand them from a foreign perspective is only going to prevent me from moving beyond the ‘foreign language’ stage to the ‘language’ stage.
I yearn a little bit for the school days, when everything was graded, evaluated and corrected. When actually using a secondary language to communicate, there’s always that nagging worry that I’m not really getting my point across. Then again, I get that feeling occasionally when speaking in English, so hoping to conquer it in Japanese might be a tad too ambitious right now.
Thinking back on it, being truly understood is probably one of my most important desires. One of my bad habits of the past (and undoubtedly of the present) was to persist in endless clarification. I never thought I was arguing when, to anyone else, I was. To me, it was always my own failing, my own inability to acutely convey my perspective. I believed that, if I could truly make a person understand my perspective, they would certainly agree with me.
And go figure, I end up focusing on foreign languages and working overseas. Clearly I’m a glutton for punishment.
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