How did you come to know Japanese? Obvs your professions doesn’t demand it, so I assume it was a personal interest?
Well, like, I am a weenie with a little bit of an ear for languages, so I have been picking away at Japanese on a purely casual level as a weeb since the mid to late 1990s…for real, I learned hiragana and katakana while trying to puzzle through FY or Kenshin or Sailor Moon manga.
Back then (with very limited exceptions) you could only really get untranslated manga at your local Japanese bookstore or if a Japanese friend brought some back as a present, so I did a lot of consulting online dictionaries and friends and some textbooks.
Back then online dictionaries (and regular paper ones) really require you to learn how to count strokes and recognize radicals (you would have to enter in a 4-digit code based on stroke count, certain radicals, etc), so that was actually valuable brute-force training.
Now back around 2001 or 2002 of course I discovered Persona 2 and with my friends we played through that and also Innocent Sin (since we’d been doing the disc-swap/mod trick for japanese PSX games for years of course) so our small group put together our little translation team and put together that Tsumi script and website. My role was mostly proofing (since I worked in a publishing house for a year after college) but I did play through Tsumi about 4 times if not more to get the other routes. I also was able to help out with all the wretched German which can be really hard to figure out in kana! (I took five years of formal German, 1 year of Latin, 1 of Spanish and…a smattering of Sanskrit and so on). I stopped trying to parse Japanese for a few years because of school, then came back to in some years ago.
There are huge, gaping, inexcusable holes in my understanding of Japanese - receptive language and expressive language are two different things even on a brain level, so Japanese falls into the pile of languages where I can understand way way way more than I can produce. I can’t ask questions properly, but I can probably understand the answers reasonably well depending on the complexity. You have to speak a language to be able to speak it - and this passive sort of informal learning doesn’t lend itself to that! I think that is also where I may give the impression of being a little better at it than I am - because my receptive knowledge is so much better than my productive knowledge. Also, like, weeb sources are not great for learning formal grammar or social nuances - I’m a woman in her late 30s, so I would sound like a weirdo talking just like, idk, a teenage boy like Naruto or whoever.
This also means that my vocabulary is extremely skewed and hilarious; my friend who used to be a translator will run into things where I’m able to fill in the explanation due to the fact that I have learned that word or phrase or trope from various sources.
Sometimes I think it’d be nice to find time for formal classes where I get a chance to learn how to SPEAK, but…well, one of these days.
Part of it may be that my parents are both ESL but for different languages (mutual language English), so I am well versed in (1) trying to understand languages without any real formal structure to the learning and (2) watching subbed things and trying to learn some words that way and (3) watching unsubbed things and being totally lost. Also everyone uses dictionaries at any level of fluency so don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t.
That was very long, but I do think about the mechanisms of language acquisition and wish I could really put my back into it one of these days. All I can do nowadays is that I go to Japan about once a year to force myself to listen and try to communicate while also having a relaxing vacation. I have interesting successes! And, also….a lot of this lolololol
