Memories of Japan – The Language Barrier

Learning Japanese can be a tough proposition, trust me, I know, but life in Japan when you can’t speak the language is fraught with uncertainty and some pretty amusing experiences (looking back that is!). Here is a portion of a comic strip from the Japan Times that illustrates the challenges well (click on the image to see the complete strip):

I gave my mom a laugh when, shortly after we had arrived in Japan in 1994, I told her that I was adjusting to life in Japan well and that I knew how to say most of the important things including please, thank you and “where is the toilet?”. In reality I got by fairly well because I made an effort to speak the language even if it was just one word at a time. I smiled a lot, pointed a lot and tried to be very polite and thankful for everything.

By the end of our stay in Japan I mastered basic counting, katakana (Japanese characters used to sound out foreign words) and some simple phrases. I could not have a conversation in Japanese but often I could understand what people were talking about but not what they were saying about it. My very basic language skills couldn’t help me in these situations…

One day while I was on the train it stopped suddenly in a tunnel which was very unusual. The lights flickered, the car I was in was shaking and I had no idea what was happening. Around me, some passengers looked up from their reading material, some were peering out the window and some appeared to be startled awake from a nap. We sat there for a few moments before the driver of the train came over the public address system and made an announcement. I concentrated hard and listened very carefully but the only words that I understood in his announcement were “left” and “exit”. That wasn’t very helpful to me but most of the other passengers went back to what they were doing so I assumed that this wasn’t a major problem. I sat there trying to remember exactly what the driver had said but I still couldn’t translate anymore of what I had heard. Was I was supposed to use the left exit or not use the left exit? Depending on the situation this could have been critical information but I was forced, due to my lack of Japanese language skills, to wait and follow the crowd once the train started moving again. It turns out that there had been an earthquake and that it is normal for the trains to stop and make sure that all the tracks are in working order before getting started again. By the way, we exited to the left!

On another day, my husband and I decided to take a taxi home from a restaurant. When you don’t speak Japanese well, or at all, you usually ask the driver to take you the train station closest to your destination and walk the rest of the way from there. Not a problem most of the time except we had taken this trip before and realized that we were going to drive by our house on our way to the station. As we started moving, I looked at my husband and asked him if he knew how to say stop in Japanese (we had different sets of vocabulary which came in handy sometimes). He didn’t know and was being cute when he said “Try stopu”. The Japanese do tend to borrow a lot of English words and pronounce them differently so it wasn’t entirely out of the questions that it would work so I tried it out. The result wasn’t good. The driver didn’t understand me and spoke to us in Japanese to which we responded with blank stares. Then I thought that I would try pointing at the curb. Now the poor driver was really confused and thought we wanted him to turn and started to change lanes. I then said “No, no, okay, okay!” All the while I am leaning forward toward the Plexiglas partition between the driver and us so that I can hear him and try to explain myself. The taxi driver finally figured out what I was trying to say, I don’t know how, and stopped quite abruptly causing my head to hit the Plexiglas partition quite firmly….but we got him to stop! I looked over at my husband only to realize that he was quite amused and was trying very hard not to laugh. The phrase that I needed was quite easy, I looked it up when we got home, and I will never forget it now! “Koko i desu” – Here is fine.

These are some of the funnier memories that I have of my challenges with the language and looking back I feel like I really cheated myself out of a better experience of Japan and its people by not trying harder to learn the language. This time will be different! My husband and I have dedicated ourselves to listening to the language tapes that I borrowed from our local library and I am hopeful that it will make a difference.