For the Love of a Language

My first week at college, one of the other students invited me to watch some anime. "Anime?" I said. "What's anime?"
"Japanese cartoons," he said.

Great. Just great. I really had no desire to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strange boys (strange in that I didn't know them - not strange as in hentai/pervert) watching cartoons . . . but, then again, my mother had left me with the helpful piece of advice that I should accept any invitation that was extended during my first week at college - as a great way to try new things and meet new people.

Wow. Getting hooked on drugs would have been cheaper. I am willing to bet I have over $5,000 in anime videos . . . on a college kid budget, nonetheless.

Friendships were made (with the boys). Love blossomed (anime, anime, anime) - and the next person who says "So, uh . . . you mean, like, you watch Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon?" is going to get slapped so hard that the mere echo will stop birds in full flight.

The natural progression for this obsession was a fervent desire to learn Japanese. Honestly, I tried to run away. One of the many male acquaintances I had made - we'll call him "Toony" - since that used to be his Internet call sign, turned to me one evening and said "Hey, do you want to take Japanese?"
"Are you crazy?" I said. "That's one of the most difficult languages in the world. Of course I don't want to take Japanese!"
Toony thought about it for a few minutes.
"I'll do it if you'll do it," he said.
And so we ended up in three years of Japanese - with a lot of harried business majors, diplomats in training, and folks with military careers - ALL of whom looked at us as though Toony sprouted a second head - or I suddenly developed a figure similar to that of every busty anime heroine . . . take your choice - when they found out we weren't taking Japanese for the money, the challenge, or the doors it would open on a very long and involved career path . . .
We were taking Japanese for the sheer love of the language . . . to learn how to say things like "the cat is in the box" or "may I have fries with that?"

I miss my Japanese.

Not surprisingly, after graduation I had no one to practice with . . . but now a few ladies in my writer's group are considering whether they potentially want to study Japanese (which seems like a sentence with an extra piece . . . but, trust me - if you want to study Japanese you first consider whether you can devote the time and effort - and the sheer amount of brain cells to the task - before you even begin to debate about the language itself). The spoken is cake. It's the written that twists your brain into tiny pretzels. It's like training your mind to recognize a lollipop as being pronounced "ah."

Then again, what other college level class gives you 5 credits and requires that you practice drawing small pictures every night? I haven't had that much fun since, well, Kindergarten.
I think it is time to pull out the dictionaries (all five of them) and purchase some new learning materials off of Amazon.

After all, if I can master "the cat is in the box" (Hako no naka ni neko ga iimasu) and order a hamburger and fries . . . I can darn well revive most of the language and return to my anime habit.

Konnichi wa! or Kon nichi wa! or Konnichiwa! . . . *@#$ phonetic translations . . .