The Gift Of Language Learning

Somewhere in storage, I've got a dozen little booklets, handwritten in Japanese, documenting my daughters' years in nursery school. The booklets were co-authored, half by the girls' nursery school teachers and half by me, poring over my dictionary, chewing my lip raw.

Why did I write them? Because I had to. When you put your kid into the Japanese school system, you have to send him or her off every day with a renrakujo, a journal of your child's' life that is shared between you and the teacher. Most days, you don't have to write anything other than "Good appetite" or "Out of sorts this morning." But when something eventful has happened, like an illness or family upset, you end up writing a lot.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I spent hours over my kids' renrakukjo every single week, looking up terms like German measles, chickenpox, temper tantrum, and teething gel. I documented all sorts of things: baby teeth, rashes, food likes and dislikes, vaccinations, new words, new developments.

Now, I can write Japanese okay. I'm no Haruki Murakami, of course, but I studied Japanese at university and I managed to pass the highest level of the Japanese Proficiency Examination. But I promise you that the renrakujo gave me nightmares and caused me hours of head-scratching misery.

One evening, when I went to pick up my eldest daughter, I found her teachers huddled in a group, laughing their heads off. They were all looking at something: my kid's renrakujo.

"Oh mother," one of them spluttered, wiping her eyes, "what you wrote here--" and she burst into fresh hysterics.

"What did I write?" I asked, the blood rushing from my head. But they were laughing too hard to tell me.

Every language learner makes mistakes, and it's inevitable that some of them are going to be hilarious. When I worked as a waitress at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, I once asked at least three dozen Japanese businessmen if they would like a dish of pee. I couldn't figure out why they were all smiling and snickering until one of my fellow waitresses caught up with me. "Mary-san," she hissed, "it's not oshikko, it's oshinko."

"Did I make a mistake?" I asked the near-hysterical teachers. "What should I have written?"

"It's not what you wrote," cried another teacher, "it's the way you wrote it!" Which would have been high praise if I'd been aiming for humor, but all I'd been trying to do was describe a bout of indigestion.

Still, even though it wasn't intentional, I gave them a shared experience, a moment of real pleasure. And that is a gift, isn't it? In fact, I would argue that not only is it a gift, it is something that only foreign speakers of a language can do. From a whole sea of appropriate Japanese words, structures, and phrases, I effortlessly picked something utterly hysterical -- something I'm betting that a native speaker of Japanese could not have achieved. Sometimes language learning results in communication and that is beautiful, but sometimes it doesn't and that can be pretty wonderful too.

They nursery school teachers tried to explain what was funny to me, but unlike the pee and pickles mix-up, nothing was straightforward, and the humor sailed over my head. Just like I can't for the life of me explain to the student who wrote it why the following sentence is funny:

It was nice last week, outlined as intense. But this week I wasn't enjoy and intested. I passed dull.

Like I said, it's a gift.