January 25
君の名は , 8 pages.
Honestly I don’t really know, I’m sure it varies from person to person. But for me, the way Japanese is designed with particles made me think of the language in logical chunks just put together and nothing else. I felt somewhat disconnected because I guess I was subconsciously trying to constantly translate Japanese to English or Spanish, and the way some things were translated seemed too bland. But the more I’m interiorising Japanese over time and the less subconscious translations are needed, the more I’m able to unlock that “emotional?” feel for the language I was talking about in the other post. Japanese is neither English nor Spanish, so it makes perfect sense that translations are very awkward sometimes (plus I’m not a translator so my translation ability is very bad). And well, English and Spanish are different languages but our cultures are not so far apart, and there’s a huge overlap in the way we express things, how we think of language, and so on. I feel that this doesn’t happen as easy with Japanese because, well, obviously our cultures are way too far away to have that many traits in common. To me it’s a whole new way of expressing oneself, a whole new conception of language.
Even then, I see myself constantly translating in my head and I will still need a lot of time and language proficiency for that to go away, just in the same way I for sure had it in English a long time ago but I don’t remember anymore.