Mada wakarimasen (I don't yet understand)

My Japanese teacher set me the task of writing a four-panel comic last week. I just had time to finish it before my lesson, so I didn't get the chance to scan it in. You'll have to make do with hastily-shot camera-phone photos (my translations follow each panel):

LONG DAYNot again! You lazy #%!!*!

I work so hard, and you just do nothing...

I'm always looking out for you, but you never show any gratitude!

Myow? (Not again...)

The translation in the last panel was going to read "Feed me" - which would be funnier and, let's face it, much more true to life - but I don't know how to conjugate the Imperative Form yet, and I like having the cat throw the starting exclamation back at the woman.

The more astute students of Japanese will spot my obvious error (apart from the laughable simplicity of most of the grammar I've employed) - the second panel should end せん (Negative form) rather thanす. It probably reads to a native Japanese-speaker the same way as a double-negative does to me, meaning it probably makes your eyes bleed.
Well nuts to it. It's my first comic ever to see the light of day, so just one glaring error in an unfamiliar language is good enough for me. Mind you, this post is now available for comment, so I'm sure I'll be told soon enough just how many other linguistic gaffes I've managed to cram into four panels...

The more astute students of art, humour and other matters of taste will spot the fact that my comic is neither pretty nor funny, since I can't draw or come up with jokes. Strictly speaking I imagine the only thing that qualifies this as a "comic" is the fact that it has four panels. This gives it the same artistic merit as a Ford Transit, only without the choice of colour an optional SatNav.
Still, I did make the effort to go slightly manga-ey in the first panel, and that's got to count for something. Please.


Aside from this travesty of the modern medium, the lesson was even more interesting than usual. We over-shot my allotted hour - by about an hour! - partly thanks to the distraction of a burgeoning friendship between Hiromi's son & me (based principally on DS games and the ability to pull faces), but mainly due to an extensive discussion about language and learning.

We chatted about our experiences of learning different languages and, as is often the case, the act of discussing the topic caused my thus-far nebulous ideas of the subject to coalesce into a clearer opinion. In essence, I think we progress through successive stages of fluency, something to the tune of:

• parroting - repeating words and phrases exactly as you hear them.
  
• knowledge - getting to know what those words & phrases mean, and recombining them in context.
  
• understanding - coming to grips with the interplay of context and content: conjugation, form and style (this is where you start to appreciate the fundamental differences between languages with different roots)
  
• application - using your understanding to apply the language in different everyday contexts: on-the-fly construction of appropriate sentences, the beginnings of real expression.
  
• habit - over time, on-the-fly processing becomes embedded: at this point, you're able to actually converse at a practical depth and speed.
  
• intuitive use - the habits embed deeper: you can pretty much "think" in the language.
  

So by this token, my learning of English as a native should have followed a similar pattern, right? Well, there are probably hundreds of books and papers on the subject, but nothing makes for a blog-entry like an embarrassing anecdote...

Cast your imagination back to my childhood - we're talking 20 years here...
*pause for a little cry*
...sat cross-legged on the floor of the village primary-school's assembly hall, staring up stiff-necked at the projected lyrics on the wall, hoping some poor kid doesn't wee themselves again (there really is nothing as pitiful as a little boy sat silently with his red, tear-streaked face in his hands as, one by one, his former friends leap away excitedly from the slowly-expanding pool of wee in which he stews...).
The song may be a well-known one, or it may be something our musically-inclined head teacher composed himself. He wrote assembly songs with the same casual frequency that other people make a cuppa tea. What matters is, the last line of the chorus was a sustained:

"And praise your hoooooo-ly naaaaaame!"

(Thinking about it, Mr Johns was a bit secular to have written that.)
The line was not - I can't stress this enough - the more confusing "And prisha-horrrrrr-lee-naaaaaaay!"

Not that I was aware of this, becase that line had mostly smudged off the acetate sheet, but then it didn't matter. I was parrotting the phrase in order to sing the song, but without knowing much about the lyric's significance and only having heard it sung the same way, I didn't have any reason to think differently. I was hardly likely to have the opportunity to apply the phrase in my playground banter and have it corrected, and frankly it served its purpose without requiring any knowledge of its real meaning.
At the time all I cared about was getting through the song so I could relax my neck, and not sound like Andrew Bunting in the process (a boy whose curiously rich, tone-deaf bass was probably the cause of all that embarrassing incontinence - I suspect he would have caused whales to beach themselves and go into premature labour given a sufficiently low melody)

Those who were fortunate enough to watch TMWRNJ, back in the day when there was anything on telly on a Sunday except bloody Hollyoaks, may remember Richard Herring banging on about a similar misunderstanding, insisting that Jesus was "the Lord of the Dance Settee" (said he). Come on, there are whole books dedicated to children mishearing speech and believing that "the ants are my friends", or whatever.

The point is, we learn the same way as children, it's just that when learning something new we don't have any preconceptions with which to judge our current understanding - until we come to learn a second language.

So last night, in learning how to conjugate verbs to give the Past Tense, I discovered that shouting できました ("dekimashita") at the end of a round of Hiragana-bingo in our early lessons was not equivalent to shouting "House!"
It meant "finished".
I have developed some minimal level of proficiency in Japanese, which has helped me to evolve this little island of (incorrect) Knowledge, giving it a land-bridge to the ever-expanding continent of Understanding, wherein the highway-planning agency of Directed Learning is extending it's road network of Application, so the articulated lorries of Habit can start to wear their useful grooves into my neural pathways...

So, for all that I find Kanji attractive and interesting, learning stroke-order is as nothing when compared to trying to compose an admittedly un-funny joke, for in such ways are we forced to re-evaluate the misheard lyrics of our early lessons, and come ever closer to understanding the heart of what is, at this stage, still a foreign language.

Which is why you've been subjected to my Ford Transit of a comic.


Dekimashita.