Elizabeth Gootzeit

My oldest recently needed to rank his foreign language choices for middle school next year(!) As a lover of languages myself, I am excited for him…and crossing my fingers he enjoys it.

One of the myriad benefits of acquiring a new language is that it makes you reexamine your own. Honestly, I’m not sure I had much formal grammar study until it came into play in high school Spanish.

Even hearing different regional and country accents can be enlightening. I enjoy a good amount of British media and some of the vocabulary and turns of phrase stand out to my American ear. There are certainly some Britishisms I wish I could get away with…

A language can’t be divorced from its cultural context, and thus language study involves a lot more than memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules. My kids have yet to experience much life outside our suburban slice of the American Midwest, but I hope we have imparted some awareness that we’re part of a much wider world. It is my fondest wish to start taking them abroad when they’re a bit older.

I took Spanish throughout high school and into college. But after falling hard for Japanese media at age 11, I chased that passion into a college major in Japanese (and a year abroad in Nagoya).

Japanese is one of the “Category 4” languages, meaning it happens to be about as different from English as languages can get. The others include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. (I took one year of Korean, which is deceptively similar to Japanese, meaning I would use my Japanese as a crutch and stumble when the languages diverged. I will say as someone perpetually studying kanji, hangul is A+, good job King Sejong.)

And it’s not just the words, writing, and grammar which can differ so dramatically. For example, a beginning Japanese student will learn to say the equivalent of “I went to the store” because in English we want all parts of a sentence. But in more natural Japanese, you would leave out whatever can be understood from context. So you might only say the equivalent of “Went,” or “To store went.” And even how you conjugate your verbs depends on your relationship to the person you are speaking to…

…all right, so I could go on about Japanese grammar for quite a while, because I honestly find it so interesting and fun. This post was originally supposed to be about differences in traditional story structures across cultures, but it looks as though I will be saving that for next time!

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Recently read

The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki (trans. Jesse Kirkwood)
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura (trans. Philip Gabriel)
Emma by Jane Austen (reread for a book club)

Recently watched

Finished up One Piece live adaptation S2
Wonder Man