the Star Wars School of Language Acquisition and Use

Is it laziness, or just efficient globalisation?

So here’s the thing.

People worry about making mistakes. In everything. When you’re on a foreign language’s home turf and you’re just not stopping by for a week at the beach, this anxiety jumps up dramatically. This can result in a kind of paralysation as you struggle to find just the right sentence structure, instead of simply cobbling together the first thing that comes to mind and seeing if it sticks.

I’ve found that unless I’m dropped into a do-or-die situation – say, talking to the local police at 2am in a little town a hundred miles from the internationally-minded cities – I cannot string sentences together in Japanese. It just doesn’t happen. If you say the words, I know and recognise them, and I’ll remember them for the rest of the conversation. But I will never think of them on my own. This leaves me in the awkward position of understanding 90% of what I hear but remaining unable to have a decent conversation in Japanese. While I’m not going to rule out brain damage (you’d be amased just how particular language deficiencies can be) I think a large part of it is due to this worry.

Thankfully, most of the people I interact with on a daily basis not only have a decent level of English comprehension, they seem to be in the exact same position as me.  This results in the amusing scenario where I’m speaking in English, they’re speaking in Japanese, and we occasionally branch into the other’s language for single words or short phrases, or if we’re looking for a translation of some particular concept. It’s an incredibly comfortable way to converse, which surprised me because I always found those scenes in Star Wars to be ridiculous. How could you learn the whole language of grunts and throat rumblings but not speak it? Excuses of alien physiology? Meh!

Turns out it’s a lot simpler than that. It’s just easier this way.