A song, and a rude guy on the train.

Recently I listed to a song. But it was unlike any song I’ve ever heard before. It was a Japanese song and I understood more than 80% of what was being said in it. Up until now whenever I listen to Japanese music I really couldn’t understand much of it because I Just couldn’t catch the sentences so I’d only get words here and there. But for this song I understood the most of the vocabulary. It’s hard to describe listening and understanding a song in another language, because symbols flow differently in different languages. The for example the phase “I wonder” can be express in Japanese as “kana.” Notice how much smoother the Japanese is. It allows symbols to be used differently to create songs that flow differently than English songs. There are other words with no close English meaning that can make a song so much more powerful than the closest English equivalent word would. It was like listening to a piano being played when I’d only ever heard songs played with a trumpet. Both trumpets and pianos make sound and can play songs but they do it in different ways. Songs effect your emotions and experiencing another language’s songs is like seeing a sunset when you’ve only ever seen sunrises. It’s such a cool thing. Maybe most people who learn another language don’t notice this because for them it is a gradual process of understanding songs more and more, but for me it was all the sudden I could understand this one song almost perfectly, so maybe it’s an experience that most people learning another language don’t notice.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way I have to vent. Today, on the train, it was incredibly packed, but that’s not the problem. There was this guy who was shoving himself up against the center crowd around the doors. What that does is it keeps the people by the doors really really jammed in so that you can’t even reach up and touch your face. He was doing it I guess to try and save room around his obese girlfriend. I have to add that adjective because there are perverts on Japanese trains, and some attractive girls are sexually harrassed but this girl wasn’t attractive. I use the word obese only in the worse cases and would only mention this because it has bearing on the story. I almost didn’t even mention that fact, but you know what’s funny is Japanese really feel very little when it comes to pointing out such things. You’d think Japanese people would be polite and not mention anything, but the one thing Americans are diffidently more polite on is not mentioning differences in appearance.

I’ve been doing better with my Japanese. It’s coming along okay. My classes are doing okay. I’m pushing myself to make new friends and be in situations to do so. It’s going good for me lately here. I’ve been going to this new circle/club which seems better for making Japanese friends, and maybe my Japanese is workable enough to have a Japanese friend who can’t speak English well. Right now almost all my Japanese friends can speak English well. These circles don’t do much but this one has lunch every day together. Meeting people can only really be done in these types of social settings. Japanese are weird like that. You can’t just talk to someone unless it’s a question or asking for something like a pen, and even then they may recoil away from you like what happened to me one time. Relationships are differently different here.

Relationships with Japanese people are interesting because you can actually see the growth in the relationship. With American you can become buddies in a day, but with Japanese you see a change in attitude over weeks and months. It is never a quick thing with Japanese to build a relationship. Or maybe it’s just more noticeable with Japanese relationships because I’m not used to how they act and I’m more observant.

Anyways, I’ve rambled on way to long. Sorry for not posting more. I hope to post more, but I’m always busy and also I don’t have too much to talk about.