Do you believe in magic?

[mbarker]

This week I had a talk with a young post-doc working at Osaka University. One of the questions that he wanted to talk about was the secret of learning Japanese. Unfortunately, all I had to suggest was a lot of hard work and study.

Just musing about a conversation I had this week with a young Canadian man from Osaka University. One of the topics that he really wanted to talk about was how I had learned Japanese. There's no great secret, I learned it when we first moved to Japan by taking four classes a week, reading a smorgasbord of books about Japanese, switching on the TV and watching kids shows, plugging in a portable radio and listening to Japanese talk shows, making up nonsense songs just to use the words that I did know, and hours and hours of kanji practice, repeatedly writing kanji. I do think living in Japan made it easier, since riding on the train, listening to TV, or even just shopping I was bound to see and hear Japanese in use.

So I recited part of this, and he looked disappointed and said something like, "Oh, just hard work."

Thinking about it later I realized that he was hoping that I could tell him the secret. Let him in on the magic, hidden easy way to learn Japanese. And it's kind of interesting to me that here is a well-educated, smart young man who is still looking for some kind of magic easy way to do things.  It's as if we can't quite believe that the world is as complex and difficult as it is, and someone must know the secret. So all we have to do is keep asking until we find the person who knows the magic.

I also noticed that I really felt a little bit guilty that I couldn't tell him a secret way to do it easily. It was as if somehow I had let him down, that his expectation that I would know the magic really meant I should know some kind of magic way to make it easier. The notion that I worked hard and spent a lot of time doing it is disappointing when you are really expecting someone to point out the shortcut, to take the cover off the hidden tunnel that bypasses all that other meandering that everyone seems to have to do. But it's the best I can do, unless you're interested in fad methods and other ways of missing the point.

Why do we think there must be an easier way? And does this desire make it easier for the snake oil salesperson to convince us that this time, we are really going to get the magic elixir? And why do we feel disappointed when we find out that we're going to have to do some hard work again, or guilty when we don't have a fail-safe, quick-and-easy method to tell people?

Interesting. Do you believe in magic?

Comments

[saruby.livejournal.com]

Perhap we do look for the quick fix, the "magic" that will make things easier. It is also possible that this young man has learned other things easily and quickly, and suddenly he has come across a language or study that is difficult for him. the problem for relatively smart people sometimes, is that you never really learn how to study as a child. I was in law school before I really HAD to study. And I didn't really know how. I had to not only learn what I needed to learn, but also HOW to learn. Twice as much work when I was supposed to be picking things up quickly. the other shock was that I wasn't at the top of my class. Not that I expected to be the best student, but I sort of thought I'd be in the top 10%, not the bottom third, of the class. With languages the key is often to have a good ear. At least for speaking purposes. I can pick up most languages relatively easily (a couple of months in Japan combined with a couple of classes would probably give me enough Japanese to carry on non-technical conversations, but I have a really hard time reading non-Roman symbols. So written Japanese would be difficult for me.

But don't feel guilty about it. The truth is (and I would expect a post-doc to know this) everyone has to learn things themselves. You can't really learn from someone else's experience. You have to have your own.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Good points. The tricky part about Japanese (from over ten years trying to learn it) is that you can pick up the spoken/hearing part fairly easily - the phonemes are well-defined and few, there are only two irregular verbs, and so on. But at some point you really need to start learning to read and write it to move further, and that's when you hit the 2,000 basic kanji (and combinations). Most of us, and I include myself in that number, simply have never learned to memorize that way.

Anyway, thanks. I still find it interesting that this young man really seemed to believe there must be a trick to it, and that I felt this odd guilt about not being able to show it to him. I know I'm a problem-solver, and I think this is one of those cases where that tendency works against me.