Tag: Travel

Silly-Billy Language – Japanese

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Gratuitous Hello Kitty

I recently watched Eddie Izzard’s hilarious take on Latin being a silly-billy language. “It has a nominative, a vocative, an accusative, a genitive, a dative and an ablative…. Quad the f—k?”  As I spend this year learning new languages I’ve noticed that Latin is not alone. There’s lots of silly languages. Since I’m in Japan right now, we’ll start with Japanese. After all:

  • It’s really five different languages
  • With ten different words for every number
  • And squiggly pictures instead of an alphabet

First some caveats, since I know this post will go microbial or viral or whatever. My intent is to amuse, not offend. Japanese is no sillier than any other language. I don’t discourage anyone from learning it. The quirks are what makes it fun. I’m having a great time living in Japan, speaking in Japanese, meeting wonderful people, and eating all your sushi.

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Whine

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OK readers, switch on Pandora radio and find some pouty, minor-chord tunes. Break out the cheeseboards and stemless glassware. It’s time for a full-on whine session.

What do I have to whine about on this trip-of-a-lifetime?

(Besides the fact I can’t get Pandora. And don’t even mention Netflix.)

Well, here are the top 4.

  • Japanese is hard
  • Everything I do is wrong
  • I can’t read menus
  • Moving is a pain

Japanese is hard

There. I admit it. For today only, I’m going to say it’s hard. Difficult. Frustrating. Dizzying, confusing, confounding. It’s really just the verbs and the nouns. And the adjectives. And the prepositions. So basically just everything.

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Debrief of the Italy Mission

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That title sounds so spy-like. Debrief of the Italy Mission. I bet debriefings are incredibly boring – listening to someone drone on about all the mundane details of hours stuck in the surveillance van with bad takeout food and…wait, do my blog posts sound like that?

Here are the results of three months in Italy in a surveillance van

  1. I can impress a taxi driver
  2. I wish I’d started school earlier
  3. I slacked off
  4. I earned an art history degree

Impressing a taxi driver

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I chalk up taxi fares to the “language practice” budget.

Everyone knows that the best judge of language level is a taxi driver. And I passed with flying colors. He couldn’t believe I’d only been studying for two months. We talked about my year of travel, the Italian economy, and how to learn a language. I sounded confident, my accent was good, and most of the words came naturally.

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First Impressions of Japan

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“He’s back!”

Japan. I can’t believe I’m here. Until now you were just the land of samurais, sake, and sushi. Godzilla and earthquakes. Walkmans, and six-sigma. Capitalist invaders (Rising Sun) who succumbed to a lost decade. Robot toilets.

You’re known for being disdainful of foreigners (gaijin), but you’ve been completely nice to me. You have TGI Friday’s, Starbucks, and Legends sports bar. Your toilets don’t make sense.

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The Interwebs Sent Me Around the World

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“Rome, if you want to…”

What makes a guy decide to travel the world for a year to learn three languages? Doesn’t everyone know that you can’t learn even a single language in a year?! Three is impossible! And you’ll be completely alone because you can’t make friends until you’re fluent. And your career! You’ll get passed over for promotions and probably never recover all that earning potential. It’s madness, I tell you! Madness!

Maybe all of my friends thought that way. At least they were kind enough to substitute something ambiguous like “it will be the trip of a lifetime” (which could be good or bad). When they said I had to do it while I could, I don’t know if they meant it was actually a good idea, or just something they knew I had to get out of my system.

Today I’m going to give credit (or blame) to some writers on the interwebs who inspired and educated me for this trip:

How weird is it that I’ve never met any of them? Or maybe it’s weird that I actually emailed with a couple of them. (I even wrote a guest post for one of them a long time ago.)

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An Italian in Paris

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This blog post commemorates the Brill/Chance invasion of Paris in 2015…

I love visiting Paris. The three best parts are seeing the Eiffel Tower, speaking French, and looking at Monet’s paintings. I also really like the waiters. Ok, that’s four things. Cramming in Italian must be making me lose other skills. I mean, our brains have to get full at some point, right? Like when you can’t add any more songs to your iPhone?

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So tall you can’t take a picture of the whole thing. (If you see one, it was photoshopped.)

 

It’s a joy to see the Eiffel tower. Not just up close. Everywhere you turn it pops up between buildings. (“Look, there’s the Eiffel Tower!”) The poor thing was supposed to be torn down after the world’s fair of 1890-something or other. Look, Italian has squeezed out my room for remembering dates.

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No Love in Napoli

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Oh how I wanted to love Napoli. I wanted a dreamy week in the pizza capital of the world. I wanted to feel the ocean breeze while I sipped a crisp white wine. Basically I wanted an Italian Hawaii.

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…or the French Riviera.

 

Napoli didn’t give a damn what I wanted. It wanted my money and it wanted me gone. Firenze welcomed me with open arms like we were friends forever. Napoli saw me as a nuisance, if it saw me at all. Nothing personal.

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The International Package

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When things don’t go your way…

I’ve traveled enough to have low expectations for physical mail overseas. Why is it easier to get a person across the Atlantic than it is to get a Fedex envelope? So I knew that trying to receive something here would be a plan of last resort. I hoped to go the entire trip without needing anything. I made it about a week.

Short version:

  • I needed a replacement credit card
  • I can’t get packages at my Airbnb apartment
  • I tried sending it to my host’s mother’s house
  • No one understands international addresses
  • A nearby coffee shop came to the rescue

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Fear of Failure

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Here comes diabetes.

There’s a Chocolate Fair this week!

My goal for the first 90 days is to learn to speak Italian. A few days ago I kept feeling I was going to fail at it. I was spending time on other activities, besides studying or speaking. I went walking. I took long lunches. I played computer games. It seemed like I wasn’t taking this mission seriously and I would have nothing to show for my three months in Italy. Which also meant I would fail at Japanese and German (of course). And the rest of my life really (just a logical conclusion).

...and alcoholism

Lunch in front of the Palazzo Vecchio

Then I realized I’d only been here for three nights. I had to catch up on sleep, fight jet lag, find an ATM, a grocery store, a cell phone plan, and a library card (of course).  So I told myself to chill. Just allow enough fear to motivate me to focus.

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