日本語を話したい！: I wanna speak Japanese!

Today's class was one of those times I wish I was in Japan.  Not necessarily because I like Japan better, but for the language.  No matter how many languages I study, I don't think I'll ever get used to STARTING a new one.

The limited expression is always the hardest.  Starting a language, you only have like three phrases that you repeat and rehash over and over again. I start feeling kind of racist, because the only thing I can ask people is "What is your nationality?"  I was even relieved just to be able to ask "Where are you from?" instead.

Furthermore, because there are somewhere around three people here who's native tongue is English, I usually need to limit my expression in English as well and interpret other's simplified expressions all while trying not to put my foot in my mouth.  To facilitate this, I generally end up thinking somewhere between English and Japanese--trying to use English vocabulary to express no more than I could in Japanese. 

Usually this can be rewarding, like solving a puzzle.  I have to admit that it's amusing how many people ask me, "How do you always know what people are saying?  I thought you didn't speak Korean."  (Generally, I just tell them "I'm used to guessing.") But over long periods of time, it's tiring. As a verbose person so used to expressing myself in complex and varied ways, I feel like I'm thinking through sludge.

We got into some grammar today, which is good.  Moving away from "How do you do?" is nice.  I'm actually really glad that our teacher accepts other grammatical structures than the ones we are focusing on.  (I think it has to do with the fact that we come from so many different backgrounds and levels of study.)  Due to the structure of Korea and Japanese, there are concepts and structures that are difficult to explain in English.  So, having studied Japanese, there are times when it just better for me to take notes in Japanese.  The text also has some sections translated into English, Japanese, and Chinese.  I found these particularly useful, but it puts me in a weird state of mind.

What really did it, though, was the new teacher.  We had a substitute today.  She started out good, keeping her structures simple and repeating things with subtle adjustments for better understanding and pattern recognition.  She also wrote things on the board to help get the point across and demonstrated more English than many of the other teachers had dared to. All together, I liked the pace. But about half way through, she began to speed up.  By the end of the period, she was literally rambling in Korean and didn't even bother to ask if we understood.  Between that, my degrading English, and my Japanese notes, I didn't know what language I was thinking, much less speaking.  I don't think there was one.

I did manage to eek out a short discussion in Japanese, but after that I was shot.  Even that short conversation felt liberating, somehow.  The other Japanese speaker was native, so the conversation went at my pace for a change.  For once, I felt like I got across everything I needed to.

I really want to speak Japanese now.  Well, I have for a while, just to make myself feel less stupid.  Why couldn't I have figured out how to talk to people when I was in Japan?