that one is still a long way of for me! though the first couple of sentences seem fine grammatically. I should try to go through them and translate myself sentence by sentence and see if i get anywhere. Afterwards I can compare with the English. I will start a word document with the Japanese sentences and my attempted translations, I think.
The Kodansha one also has a CD, so you can listen along to the story.
Hi, I completely understand this, not from Japanese which I am early days at but from when I lived in Mexico for five years. Spanish is a relatively straightforward language to learn when transitioning from English but I had a really hard time doing it because after a time I got into a siege mentality. It had nothing to do with the difficulty. Once I got to the siege mentality it was almost impossible to break. The discomfort was real.
A part of me was hanging onto the idea that I would never live in an English-speaking country again and so I simply didn’t want to move on into this new mentality. And a foreign language does carry with it a certain mentality which if you speak it you will most certainly accept is a part of reality for most of the people who speak it.
The way I learned how to get through that phase was to do as you mentioned, improve my mood/outlook by allowing myself to understand that words are not realities. A cherry tree is not 桜 any more than the words ‘cherry tree’.They’re only elements that depict a thing. So a certain non-voiced ‘says you’ mentality helped me to bypass the discomfort. Yes, many people believe that a cherry tree in English really is a cherry tree, and they assert to you this ‘truth’ if you tell them. But ‘Ce n’est pas une pipe’ as Magritte painted. And it’s not. The whole world around, there is the reality and then the translation of reality. When I started holding the artificiality of all languages in my awareness continuously, then I began to learn really fast and became fluent, and got out of the bunker.
Hm… This is a really interesting thought. I think you might be onto something. Can you elaborate a little more on the siege mentality?
I find that I get exhausted quickly with Japanese because my vocab sucks. I am starting a new push to improve vocab.
When I do get the courage to try a new word I found in a dictionary, I am most often told no one uses this or you cant use that that way. If I use a WK word many people say its just wrong (lol). I’m not sure if its because I have been studying N1 and use words no one uses. I get the sense that N3 is the stuff used in daily life speech. I’m digressing a bit.
But I get the feeling a good friend of mine in Tokyo is the same way with a bit of siege mentality. It has stopped him (imo) from even attempting the JLPT and just giving up on his studies. I won’t let this be me but the frustration definitely hurts progress. How did you shake the feeling of being attacked whenever you tried new words in Spanish or Japanese and they were wrong or you were improving?
Also interesting because I want to learn Spanish after Japanese as I have also heard its very easy for native Eng speakers. I’ll get the hardest language and easiest under my belt hah.
I want to be able to just get over it and get into it. So curious to hear more about your experience with siege mentality.
Hi, I can try to explain it more but some of it is beyond the verbal level.
A sense of siege comes from excessive concretism in my experience. There was a sense of being involved in a physical struggle with the words themselves, almost as if they were concrete drops falling, hitting me on the head. It was only when I realised that the words were representations of reality and not reality itself that the concrete hardness of the words faded away and I realised I was not at all besieged by them. They are representations nothing more. Monolingual people do not ever run into this problem but that is part of learning another language. When I was monolingual I was free to consider the word cherry tree to be connected to the actual physical tree in a mysterious physical way, but it was not connected that way, not even when I felt that it was. I was not the only one, there were lots of monolingual people around me who believed the same thing, and that is what a new language speaker runs into with other people in their new chosen country.
But monolingual speakers don’t always grasp that if a new speaker of a language gets it wrong it is not a failing to grasp physical reality but a failing to grasp a particulated representation. They may feel slightly critical, because their sense of what they think is physical reality has been disturbed. But these folk don’t actually know that their symbolic system is not real and probably won’t know until they immerse themselves in a different language completely. It is not really anybody’s fault that they feel critical, least of all a new learner of the language. New learners are only trying and should forgive themselves their own minor errors because after all, the gist of it is they are still communicating. Body language of a new speaker also makes a big difference and getting physically stressed over what’s correct seems to add to the illusion for a monolingual observer that the new speaker is actually physically uncomfortable because they are not grasping that mysterious physicality associated with the language, which does not in fact even exist. Then the monolingual speaker will respond to the new learner as if they are in fact almost a physical oddity, moving in a magically weird world. This also happens. When I was in Mexico I actually knew more Spanish than I thought I knew. When I was tense people would look at me oddly and need me to repeat myself. They were distracted by my body language, in effect. But when I was more relaxed everyone behaved as if they understood me, and complemented me on my accent as well. Some of them were quite impressed and found my accent exotic rather than strange (I speak Spanish with a Portuguese accent, long story).
If you wanted to ease yourself into relaxing about Japanese you could try practicing Spanish which you may find a piece of cake after Japanese. When you practice it you could try reminding yourself continuously that all words are just representations. They are virtually weightless non-concrete representations of something else. Once that light zone is reached it is possible to learn quickly and with little effort. After practicing in this way you may find that you can learn Japanese in the same way, with the same sense of irrelevance. It doesn’t matter because all languages at bottom are the same in the sense that they’re mere representations.
Learning how language fails to represent reality and how irrelevant it actually is to reality can help to avoid making it heavy and hard. Trying to take these hard nonexistent objects into the self is, in any case, impossible because they are nonexistent. I think a lot of people who succeed at a second or third language started out with a basic grasp of not the power of language but the failure of any language to be truly real. All language is at best a signpost to somewhere else.
But again this is just my own experience and observations so make from it what you will.
Thank you for this reply. It makes a lot of sense what you are saying. I’ve screenshotted your message and I’m going to refer to in whenever I begin feeling frustrated and like it’s heavy and hard learning. I think that was a good description.
Also interesting how you spoke from the listener point of view (a monolingual Japanese speaker listening to me for example). I have felt that way you mentioned (like they were taken aback) when I used an incorrect word or something. I almost felt like I was being scolded for using a word wrong. But it’s not their fault because of the reasons you mentioned. They probably don’t even realize their facial expression or how they are looking.
I think I’m going to try to stick with Japanese for now or if I do Spanish maybe just some super super basic stuff to try to activate this new mindset. I too feel I know a lot more than I think and I just need to relax so I “open” my mind and the knowledge that is in there.
Thanks again and good luck to us
You’re welcome! And I also want to say thanks for asking this question because it gave me a chance to clear something up which has been in the back of my mind for a long time. best of luck to you in future 
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