July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Chad’s last post. He has been writing with us since August 2020.
During the first session of the intensive, first-year Japanese course I am taking this summer, my sensei quoted the famous linguist James D. McCawley, who once refered to Japanese as “without a doubt the world’s screwiest writing system.”
Instead of an alphabet, Japanese uses a mix of two syllabaries—hiragana for native Japanese words and grammatical elements, and katakana for loanwords, foreign names, and onomatopoeia—and kanji, which are characters taken from Chinese and widely used for nouns, Japanese names, and stems of adjectives and verbs. A typical Japanese sentence blends the three scripts and looks something like this:
私は店に行ってTシャツを買いました。/ I went to the store and bought a T-shirt.
The kanji is in green, katakana in blue, and hiragana in black. To further appreciate the subtle complexity of the writing system, note that the two smiley faces, one cockeyed and the other smugly wry, are different symbols representing separate sounds (shi and tsu).
New students start by focusing on hiragana, and before a week of class was up I was already reading and writing it fairly well. Subsequently, Japanese stopped looking strange and exotic; rather, it began to make sense and became approachable. It is this thought, the fragility of the foreign in the phrase “foreign language,” that I hope to convey.
There’s no better way to get to know people, to disarm prejudices, and to remove the barrier of “the other” than to learn a language. For me, this effect has occurred in often unexpected ways. At our new church in Seattle, there is a bilingual English- and Mandarin-speaking family whose two youngest kids, a one-and-a-half year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, only speak Chinese. At times, whether when helping with children’s worship or some other church function, I have been the only one around to translate for mei-mei (younger sister) and little di-di (younger brother). Di-di is happy with anybody who plays with him or gives him food. I have come a long way with mei-mei, who used to just stick her tongue out at me, calling me “that Chinese-speaking shu-shu (uncle).” Last week she shared with me her favorite color is yellow, her second favorite is pink.
In learning Chinese, from nai-nai to mei-mei, the new relationships I have made have been the most rewarding part. If I may still be permitted to invoke the pandemic, a time when people have been open to learning new skills and pursuing self-betterment, there’s no better time to learn a new language than now. So, upon my retirement from the post calvin, I leave readers with this advice: pick up one of the multitude of language-learning apps and try learning a new language.
Do it earnestly, or do it for a week for a change of pace, or do it to jog your memory of all the Spanish or German or French you forgot from high school, or do it just for fun. You’ll be surprised and delighted by how quickly the foreign becomes familiar. Bonus points to yo— and I highly encourage this—if you choose a non-European language or one that uses a non-Latin alphabet.
If you select Chinese, which would bring me infinite joy, even though you’ll find it residing atop the list of hardest languages to learn, it is actually the easiest language to pick up from scratch and start speaking meaningful sentences from day one. Putting aside the difficulties of Chinese, namely the character writing system and tones, the language has an extremely low grammatical barrier to entry, with no conjugations, no plurals, and sentence structures that closely resemble English most of the time. Did I mention there is no conjugation?
I don’t expect anyone to go out and master a new language, but I do believe the world would be a better place if everyone, and if Americans in particular, would make an effort to learn other languages. For learning a language cuts deeper than verbal communication—it expands curiosity, invokes empathy, and encourages connection, a veritable antidote to our worst, siloed selves. In a society that glories in division and in demonizing the stranger, couldn’t we all use a little more understanding?
Chad Westra (’15) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington where he studies modern Chinese history. He enjoys chess, following Detroit sports, and caring for the overgrowth of plants in his condo.
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I picked up Japanese again to learn a few weeks ago and it’s been fun! I’ll take your encouragement and hopefully keep it going 🙂
楽しいですね ~ glad to hear it!