Bye bye Japanese

I had my last Japanese class yesterday, or rather, my last day, since there was no class, only a test. It was fairly easy. I was left with the impression that an exam you can pass without studying is not such a good thing in the long run. But there won't be a long run for me, since I'm leaving Japanese school.

Though there's a last class on Friday, I won't be there. I was invited to a theater performance where a friend of mine participates and I wouldn't miss it. When I started Japanese, and up until last year, skipping class for something other than illness would've been unthinkable for me, but I grew a bit tired of it this year, and I also freed myself of the sense of obligation to attend.

As I said to my sensei, I began studying Japanese not because I wanted to go to Japan (to visit or work), not because I loved the culture, but simply because I liked the language, and I promised myself I'd leave as soon as it became work rather than fun.

Well, that finally happened, and here I am at the end of the road, at least for now.

I still feel a bit as if I was an ungrateful person. The Japanese Association has been like a second home for me since 2004. I met several of my best friends there or in connection to people there. I started a brand-new part of my life there. Literally and figuratively, I learned anew how to read and write. I was involved with the community whenever I could. But I was dodging hints of being "a part of the community" all this last year, probably because deep inside I didn't feel in the right place already.

Leaving means I won't see some people (not friends, but nice people, neighbours in a way) that I've seen and talked to every week for years. It also means throwing away a full year of study (since it takes three years to prepare for the next international proficiency test, and if I decide to try in the future I'll have to start over), and it probably means I'll be forgetting a lot, quickly, as soon as I stop practising the language on a regular basis.

A great part of the reason why I don't wish to study Japanese anymore is the schedule and the whole orientation of the subject towards the supreme goal of the JLPT. These tests (numbered from the 4th to 1st level, the 1st being the last and hardest) have certain requirements regarding the number of words and kanji combinations you must be acquainted with. Yonkyuu (4th level) should be a piece of cake for anyone who has bothered to follow classes. Sankyuu (3rd level) needs more dedication, but nothing out of the ordinary; I had two regular Japanese classes a week (3 hours total) plus supplemental weekly classes (1½ hours), practising with old exams, during the second term.

Nikyuu (the 2nd level JLPT) is a lot harder, and in my opinion it should not be undertaken by anyone who doesn't intend to devote a lot of their free time to it. At the 3-hours/week rhythm I was doing, nikyuu requires three years of study, and although you learn many useful expressions, a great part of its requirements consists of memorizing a long list of complicated specialized terms and hyperformal words borrowed from Chinese, and an equally long list of kanji combinations, codifying those specialized words and others you'll never use in actual conversation (such as "[hormone] secretion"). A classmate of mine who's been having his own doubts summarized it well: at this point we're not being taught the Japanese language — we're just being trained to pass the nikyuu.

I understand that a certified Japanese school must do this. You can't have students learning words incrementally in a natural way, in conversation and reading, because it'd take ages. If you want to learn Japanese your own way, you need to get a group of Japanese speakers (native or not) and chat and share notes informally. You won't learn the kanji you need to read a newspaper or a book, and you won't be able to write nice compositions and speeches using the florid, homonym-crowded, unnecessary Chinese-imported jargon that Japanese seem to love.

Thanks to one year of training for nikyuu instead of learning usable Japanese, I can say and read in kanji form the terms "blood pressure", "ticket-checking gate" (as in the metro/underground) and "global warming", but I still don't know the words for "tile", "tray" or "coat hanger".

I'm not through with languages, though. I think next year I'll be taking up something else — something easy, like Arabic or Russian. Heh heh.

Japanese weekend

Yesterday I finally took the Nihongo Nouryoku Shiken (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, or JLPT). In Argentina, the JLPT is taken at Belgrano University in Buenos Aires, on the same day as in the rest of the world, i.e. the first Sunday of December. Waves of Japanese students come from many places in the capital on foot, by subte (metro), by bus or taxi or whatever; many nikkei join in from La Plata, where many are settled (they even have a Japanese-language newspaper called La Plata Hochi); and of course, many others travel for hours during the previous night. Rosario Nihongo Gakkou dispatched a busload -- 23 students, including yours truly, two teachers, and one grandma.

I got up at 3 AM so I could gain some degree of composure, ate a half-breakfast (bad idea), and waited for a taxi. We left Gakkou at about 5 AM in our hired bus. I find it extremely difficult to sleep in any place other than a proper bed, preferably mine, so despite the convenience of having proper rest before an exam, I didn't even try. Fortunately there were other similarly afflicted or nervous students; while most dozed off into oblivion, four of us practised with kanji cards, discussed some grammar doubts, and after the sun came out and study was over, we played truco and a couple of other games, and drank some truly horrible ersatz coffee from the machine in the bus while lamenting the lack of a hot water thermos and a mate.

The driver was incredibly slow and didn't quite know how to get into Belgrano. I'm completely clueless when it comes to navigating the oversized metropolis that is Argentina's capital, but then I'm not for hire to do that. We got off the bus with just enough time to run for a gas station bar and get some coffee. Then we went back to Belgrano University, where a Japanese guy with a megaphone was herding the students into their appointed exam rooms, divided in groups according to their exam level and so they could fit into the elevators (Belgrano Uni has several space-age elevators that fit 36 people each, and within which Newton's laws seem to be nullified -- you almost don't feel any acceleration).

In we went, and into our room, where a teacher started to explain the procedures in quick Japanese, then paused, and asked if it was OK or we preferred Spanish (needless to say nobody dared ask for that). First part of the exam -- writing and vocabulary, 35 minutes. Break for lunch, and then back to the second part, which strikes fear into all students -- listening comprehension, 35 minutes. Short break, then the last part -- grammar and text comprehension, 70 minutes. A one-page-long text in Japanese can be a horrific sight, even if you're a step from mid-level proficiency and you've studied for it; as it happens, every language has its quirks, and Japanese is full of elliptical and illogical constructions (as in "It's OK" sometimes meaning "No"). Add to that your nervousness and the writing -- since this was to test your comprehension, it was written mostly in the phonetic syllabary (kana) rather than in kanji, which paradoxically makes it difficult to read quickly, since kanji are much more immediately recognizable, provided you are familiar with one or two hundred common ones. The usual mixed kanji-kana text also makes it easier to spot word breaks.

All in all, except for the audio part, I can't complain; I'm sure I did well. Now I have to wait until March to get the score. This was sankyuu (level 3); it wasn't much more difficult than the yonkyuu I took in 2005. Nikyuu (level 2) is not nearly as light, and might take me two or three years to prepare for it; one incentive is that the 5 top scores get a free trip to Japan. Only a handful of people take ikkyuu (level 1), and by then you're, according to one my classmates, "a Super Saiyajin of Japanese" (even native speakers sometimes fail ikkyuu, I'm told).

We headed back but, at some point, a group of students complained they hadn't been able to get lunch because they were too nervous... so we absolutely needed to stop (and make everybody late). The driver took 15 minutes to get off the highway into Campana, some 75 km from Buenos Aires City, a lovely place with a landscape full of petrochemical factories, and then left us before a McDonalds', which is the closest to "food" you can get when you're on the road on a Sunday afternoon. For a fast food place, it took ages for the girls to be served, and they in turn took almost one hour to eat a hamburger. Back in the road, me very pissed off, and my seat neighbour and I embarked in a heated discussion about Aldous Huxley's use of entheogens, the cultural assumptions of Native Americans, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, planified economies, the practical application of Marxism, and a project I'd heard about to replace arbitrary currency units with valuables backed up by actual energy production. I don't usually get into that sort of arguments before the first bottle of beer, so I guess I was very bored.

I got back home by 10 PM and into bed by 11 PM; I got up today at 5:30 AM and I'm trying to stay awake right now. But it was fun.