Another step in the right direction

Today I have another "first" I want to share. I’ve used this blog before to chart firsts, and I think it’s important to do this to keep track of my progress.

Recently, I’ve come to realise that in my 5 years in Japan my language progress has been disappointingly slow. This is due to a number of reasons I guess, and I don’t really want to go into them here, but I think I realise the mistakes I’ve been making now which is the main thing, and correcting those mistakes, although difficult, is important, otherwise I will never reach my goal.

Hopefully the "first" I have to report today will illustrate my attempts to do that.

Today's "first" is my first business related conversation at work in Japanese. My department is English speaking, I speak English with most of my close colleagues on a day-to-day business and in meetings etc. which is fine, but most of the Japanese staff on other departments expect to communicate with me in English too. This is comfortable for me, and is something that has probably gone on too long—ideally I would have been speaking Japanese, or at least attempting to, the entire time I have been there.

I have been doing this job for 3 years now, and to now begin speaking Japanese to people seems like rather a large step. It’s kind of feels like the first time is always going to be the hardest, I'm going to do it and everybody's going to be like "What the hell are you doing Neil?" A barrier between myself and using Japanese at work has formed over the past three years.

Over the past couple of months or so I’ve been trying to overcome this barrier. For example I’ve been speaking about my Japanese studies more with people. And I’ve been using idioms. How have I been using idioms? you might wonder seeing as I don’t speak any Japanese at work. Well, I‘ve been talking about Japanese idioms and using them to try and raise a laugh.

I’m not sure how this first came about, but recently it’s kind of become a bit of a joke on the department that I want to use random Japanese idioms in meetings etc. And I have. Just for a laugh. This is helping me to break down that barrier that I believe has been constructed, one that clearly I must have constructed myself, but nevertheless one that I feel is there.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, this week my boss introduced me to a Japanese associate of the company. He’s not so hot at English, so she asked me, kind of jokingly, to speak Japanese. And, lo and behold, I had a chat with him in Japanese about the work we needed him to do for us. I think my boss was a little surprised, but she laughed. And it all seemed to go pretty well.

So that’s another first. Not a great leap, but a step in the right direction I guess. In the future, whenever I enter a situation where it is possible to use a foreign language, I am going to make it clear that I want to early on, no matter how bad my skills are, just to stop this barrier appearing.

If I stick to the impudent child method I spoke about then nobody is going to mind. Using humour is a great way to overcome these boundaries, whether it’s talking about funny idioms, or making example sentences about something ridiculous like Pandas again and again—something I do in my Chinese lessons—if people are laughing it’s difficult to feel uncomfortable.