It occurred to me today that It’s been quite a while since I blogged about my language studies. Actually, I haven’t blogged about much of anything; I’ve posted lots of pictures and stuff but haven’t shared many thoughts or stories lately. I’m going to try to get back to more regular blogging, especially now that I’m officially only updating one blog (this one) instead of two. By the way, if you’ve just joined us from JapanLog, welcome!

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah — languages studies…

Studying Japanese has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Seriously. A linguist I am not. I was horrible at French back in high school, and remember practically nothing. My spelling’s also pretty bad, though it has improved with some help from a little thing computers do called “spell check”. So it should be no surprise that Japanese would be a challenge. Also, rote memorization is tough for me, and with language study there’s a lot of that.

People talk about “hitting the brick wall” in their studies. I feel like I’ve hit several of them over the past year and a half. But, the good news is, I am improving. Maybe not as quickly as I’d like to be; but improving nevertheless. I’m encouraged by those “a-ha” moments that happen once in a while, when something I didn’t for a long time get suddenly clicks.

I’m also encouraged in those the moments when I actually stop and think about where I am compared to a year ago; when I see how far I’ve come rather than just seeing how far I’ve got to go.

This morning in church, I had one of those moments. We were singing a song and I realized that I actually understood almost all of what I was singing. It helped that today was one of our less-traditional services. Usually we sing from a hymnbook; like English hymnbooks, Japanese ones use a lot of out-dated language and “churchy” language. Today’s songs were more modern and thus used more common language. And I realized all of the sudden during one of those songs that I knew just about ever word. I looked the one up that I couldn’t, and understood.

It was a nice moment. I find I’m having more of them lately. Sometimes it’s when I have a good conversation with a friend. Or when I’m sitting in a meeting and understand the gist, even if I don’t get every word.

Though I’ve got a really really long way to go before I’m even close to fluent, I’m thankful that I can look back and see some real progress.