Writing in Japanese

So obvious thing first: if you've been following our blog at all, you've now noticed that the site has seen a bit of a revamp. I'm moving away from wordpress and to something a little... well, it's more complicated for me, but less complicated overall, and far easier for me to maintain in the future.

Aside from the color scheme, one of the changes you may have noticed is the Japanese on the home page. As my Japanese is reaching the level where I'm technically capable of writing (poorly) in Japanese, I think it'd be good practice to try to at least translate some of my existing content, and maybe even start posting occasionally entirely in Japanese. Short posts only, for now. (This is probably completely irrelevant to you, because if you're reading this you probably can't read Japanese, and I'll probably keep anything I do in Japanese segregated from the rest of the site.)

The weird thing that I've noticed, as I've been starting to write in Japanese: it's pretty doable to translate my English content into Japanese, but if I write something originally in Japanese, it's extremely difficult for me to translate it into English. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me; most of what I've been doing is moving from Japanese to English so far. That's why I'm trying to write more in Japanese, is to get practice creating in Japanese instead of just receiving from Japanese! But it's like, when I'm thinking in Japanese, the thoughts just don't fit in English.

I'm noticing this most as I text my church back in Hakodate. It's a bilingual church, so if anyone sends a message in English, someone in the chat will translate it to Japanese, and vice-versa, so everyone who's monolingual can follow along. I know enough Japanese now that when I'm messaging the group, I try to write in Japanese first, and then I write my own translation afterwards, and it is just so much harder than writing it in English first and then translating it to Japanese. It's harder than reading someone else's message in Japanese and translating that to English. I think it must be because I know what I wanted to convey, and when I'm writing in Japanese first I want to convey those things in a Japanese way of thinking? I dunno, it's weird.

I think the annoying thing about learning and growing is how it's always the hard part. Like, you can take a break whenever you want, but if you want to be progressing, it's gotta be hard. I won't grow if I just keep doing the parts of Japanese that are easy for me. But the hard parts are all hard, and I've done enough of the hard-but-fun stuff that it's starting to just be hard-and-unfun stuff left. Like one of the next things I really should do is start watching anime in Japanese, with Japanese subtitles, and pausing and rewinding until I understand everything that's being said. There's definitely a place for watching at full speed and just following as best I can - you do learn a lot that way - but like, you learn different things that way.

One new hard-but-fun thing I've found to do is learn full songs in Japanese. I make anki decks of all the vocab in the song, ask some LLM to explain the grammar, and then work on memorizing it until I can sing along and know what I'm saying the whole time. The singing along is, I think, one of the key bits - even when I understand what they're saying, getting it all to come out of my own mouth at full speed can be surprisingly tricky. Japanese doesn't have any sounds English doesn't use, but it uses them in different ways and in different patterns, and going full speed is tough.

I've learned doukashiteru by wurts, CINDER ELLA by toaka, and I'm working on NIGHT DANCER by imase and odoriko by Vaundy. I want to start doing some Japanese rap to kick the training up to the next level, so Creepy Nuts and DOTAMA are both on my list, but maybe not quite yet.

In other topics, I'm nearing the end of a complete read-through of the Bible that probably deserves its own post; I'll probably finish tonight. The summary, though, is that it was a good enough experience I think I'm just gonna start over right away in a different translation, or maybe reading it in a different order. Actually, how long has it been since I talked about what I've been reading? I should maybe do another one of those posts, too, though it doesn't feel like I've read very much since the last one. I should really keep better track of what I'm reading and when.