1.10 learning a language is a long, long journey
if you feel discouraged, it's not you--it's just the way it is
The photo above is what my hands look like when I try to write with one of my favorite inks.
I am a fountain pen enthusiast, and one of my favorite ink producers is Organics, a maker of handmade inks in Maryland. I purchase these inks from Goulet Pens, a lovely husband-wife business with impeccable service and a ton of blog posts and YouTube videos that will walk you through pretty much any fountain pen conundrum you can imagine.
Organics makes inks with beautiful shading, showing up on the page in a full range of color and depth. I first bought a bottle of Nitrogen Royal Blue (known as “Nitro”) because it was the most popular ink in the Goulet catalogue. This was way back in the days when I was a newbie and didn’t know what I was doing. But eventually I stopped using Nitro because it gets viscous very quickly in the pen, forcing you to clean frequently. And it’s not easy to clean out, either. Plus, you get it all over your hands and even the dry flakes coming off the bottle when you twist open the cap get all over everything. It’s a mess.
But I blamed myself for this. I was a beginner. I figured I didn’t do a good job monitoring my pens, remembering which ones had “old” ink in them. I thought I was “messy” when I cleaned and filled my pens. And I always ended up smudging it and smearing it while writing, which again, I blamed on myself. I have large hands and pretty assertive handwriting, so I thought I was just clumsy whenever I tried to write with Nitro.
I bought two other Organics colors (Walden Pond Blue and Twilight Blue) and I ended up with the same problems. They got thick and gloppy in the pens, clogged up the feeds, and dried out quickly. So they got shoved to the back of my ink collection even though they are truly beautiful inks.
Recently I decided to try out some inexpensive TWSBI Swift pens ($18 at Goulet!), and because I love shimmering inks (they contain glitter particles and they tend to clog up pens) I bought only broad and italic-style nibs. These are wide and flowy, so I thought that would help. When the pens arrived, I remembered my old Organics inks and decided to fill one of the stub nib pens with an Organics ink. And of course, as in the photo at the top, I ended up with ink on my fingers, smearing in my Hobonichi planner, little flecks of dried ink everywhere, etc.
But this time I was a more experienced fountain pen user, so it occurred to me to google ORGANICS INK, because I started to wonder if there were better ways to handle the inks. I found to my amazement…a bazillion Reddit threads, all talking about ALL of these things. Drying out quickly in pens, hard to clean, takes forever to dry, smears, everything I had experienced and more. But I noticed something else, which is that while there is a healthy contingent of “nope-not-gonna-suffer-through-this-anymore-good-bye” people, there are many people who stick with it because they’re so beautiful.
Basically, I had to decide which one I wanted to be. Did I want to struggle through the pain of these inks because they’re beautiful? Or was I going to ignore the sunk cost and stop trying, since they’re so much trouble?
This is my relationship with learning Japanese.
What a great era we live in, with so many, many tools that exist to help you learn a language. Websites like iTalki where you can hire someone to chat with you. Apps like DuoLingo to show you the basics in small digestible chunks. Website extensions of textbooks so that you can listen to the conversations in the book, or even watch video versions of the lessons (these are available for one of my current textbooks). And you can go indie with something like Anki, building your own library of flashcards that you can then flip through while commuting or during a boring zoom meeting.
In my case, I have a tutor, a class, and a kanji-learning app that I work with every evening. But the more I study and learn, the more I notice when I don’t understand something. News programs are particularly difficult for me, because of all the formal vocabulary, so I tend to read the captions to see if I can guess things by context. What’s really depressing is not understanding a scene in an anime where high school kids are shooting the breeze with each other. You’d think that teenagers everywhere on the planet are using the same words to talk about the same things! And anime don’t typically have subtitles in Japanese. I can often guess things if I can see the kanji characters, but I think that’s a hack that isn’t in demand by most anime watchers.
I think for many years I had a common misunderstanding about learning languages, which is that it’s a “thing,” a monolith, but it’s not. There are lots of facets to a language, not just formal versus informal, or spoken versus written. When I watched a drama involving office culture, I was lost. But when I listen to a gossipy audiobook, I recognized the snarky words because—ahem—I’ve participated in conversations like those. Sometimes I understand pop songs, and often I am scratching my head. But that moment when I realize that I’m lost is so familiar, I tend to deep-six it as soon as it creeps up. And when I accumulate enough of those moments, I need to take break, while I wonder if my Japanese-learning activity is a sign of some kind of trauma that I keep trying to process (I still wonder this! hello heritage language learner! hello child of an immigrant!).
And what I wished I had understood a long, long time ago, was that learning this thing just takes a long, long time. And the times where you get ink all over your fingers are part of the process. If you don’t have a group of enthusiastic mentor figures, it’s going to feel really lonely, and you’re going to think that your clumsiness is all about you, when it’s just the truth about learning the most complex thing that humans do (or don’t do), which is to communicate. It takes forever, and you’re never done, and it’s always hard and frustrating.
Sometimes you stop because you can’t stand it anymore. I left my Organics inks in a drawer for several years. But when I hit upon a different tool to use them with, I took them out again. and when I asked the internet for help, I realized that the problem was never me. It was just the nature of things, and somewhere out there are people with Nitro all over their fingers, too, and enjoying the beauty of these inks.
And that’s what studying Japanese is to me. I cry over it but it gives me such pleasure to belly-laugh when I listen to a Hayashi Mariko audiobook (you can find more and more audiobooks in Japanese nowadays, especially on Audible). Sometimes I read a phrase and think, you can’t even translate that into English! And I’m amazed at myself that I don’t have to translate it into English, I can digest it in Japanese and it can stay that way in my head.
Do I get anything out of Organics inks? Yes, yes I definitely do. It behaves so much better in a nice, wet pen like my TWSBI broads and stubs. The shading is beautiful. And yes, there’s ink all over my fingers. Eh. Sometimes life is messy. Is it worth it, though? Isn’t that the question when things are hard…is it worth it?
Maybe this Japanese-learning thing is some kind of processing effort, where I try to settle in my mind who I am, where I belong, and what I offer. I think that as long as I see it as a process and not a monolith, I’ll be able to keep going. Even if I never figure myself out, over time I think I can get more clarity.