Life Abroad

I have always been, sadly, extremely poor at language learning. I do my best but it just never seems to be possible to get past the most basic level. The first language I tried to learn was French at school, but it never stuck even though I wanted it to.

In Japan I started to speak Japanese at a very low level and I was encouraged at first by colleagues, but I then didn’t progress as they thought I should and they started talking about me behind my back saying how I was lazy and disrespectful for not improving. In my third year there a really unpleasant headmaster at a school where I got little or no support got one of my colleagues to translate his diatribe about how bad I was. Suffice to say I didn’t have good feelings about the Japanese language by the time I left.

The same thing happened in Hong Kong with Cantonese. No matter how hard I tried it never stuck and in fact it was worse than Japanese. In Saudi Arabia, yes you guessed it, the same picture. When I look back I think it was down to a number of factors. I felt under a huge amount of pressure to improve and I found that pressure weighing on every sentence meaning that I could never relax enough to let myself learn properly. I know from my teaching career with EAP students that you can get the best results by making them as relaxed as you can. In a sense I have channelled my frustration at never getting past a kindergarten level in any other language and I am trying to make sure that as many other students as possible are supported and feel like language learning can be fun.

So, onto the here and now. I am learning German and relearning Japanese on Duolingo and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Why? Well, I am doing it for me and I am not thinking about being tested by people in the country itself. I am also enjoying it because it’s not many people who decide to learn a new language after they turn 60 and I feel like it’s really improving my thinking processes. The German was because I went to Austria in November last year and Japanese because I actually enjoyed the language for the first few months before the pressure ramped up. It’s a great language to look at with the Kanji.

Last week, Rhea, one of my students from last year’s summer course at the RCA invited me to the first showing of her Masters project, which was amazing. The incredible variety of work around the exhibition was testament to the incredible amount of talent in the place. One of the works had a section with Chinese characters on a grid and I recognised all of the numbers as they are the same in Kanji, as Chinese writing was adopted by Japan very early in it’s history. Rhea wrote some characters on the grid and asked me what it meant. I had no clue, so she told me that it was the nearest equivalent to David using those characters to make the sound. I was really touched that she did that for me. Here’s my name in Chinese