Justice Watch presents: Cherry Bomb: HOTLINE BING

The most valuable information I got out of Japanese language class was about culture, because it’s just not the greatest thing for book learnin’ (particularly with teachers comfortable with answering awkward questions). Turns out the way for me to learn Japanese language was the same painful way I learned (and am still learning) my own native English—to read and try to hear everything, and not be satisfied with only one kind of thing to read or hear.

Especially because formal classes have limited time so they focus them on an arena of life, like business or travel or family or school (what a foreigner is likely to be involved in soonest, as opposed to something you might just passively enjoy as a consumer on the other side of the planet not concerned with speaking it), and Japanese in particular happens to have substantially (though not unmanageably) different ways of speaking for each of these, and others not mentioned. A lot of people get discouraged by that intimidating factor, even though your grasp on one is truly a window into the next and there are more similarities than differences.

Some days, though, you run into an uncommon dialect and wonder why you bother, even though it’s not actually that bad, haha.