Bimyou. Tja...言いにくいね。

Sometimes I feel like I'm enlisting all of Japan in my attempt to master this language enough for a test.

Other times I sit back and reassure myself, "no, it's only the people here in Hiroshima."

But learning a language - can you really do that by yourself? If you could what would be the point? I suggest it wouldn't be a language anymore, if you could. And Japanese... goodness. Every one of my weaknesses seems built right into the basic structure of it. It's like cracking a book to study it at this point is like waking up to a frigid shower; and knowing there're only more to come. Japanese, especially - 漢字だから、微妙なヌアンスだから、訳する事ができないから、読み方やexceptions out the wazoo - it just can't be learned alone.

In the new book, claiming to be 文法 (which it probably is) which translates as `grammar` (which it probably isn`t) I can't even come up with good example sentences for the things I've read and understood, 80% of the time. Bimyou. 微妙な事が多い。Too many little tricks and buts and cues and cuts...

Yeah, three weeks to go, and I'm beginning to grasp *how* to study it. Yeah, three weeks to go and my 先生 still reassuringly insist "yes, you can do it!" and I resign myself to the impossibility; the sheer massiveness of the task, and my friends just laugh at me a lot and then often enough pause to say, "hmm. yeah. I can't think of a good one for that, either. Japanese is difficult, isn't it."

Let me tell you, to walk around with the level of incomptence in one's own language that I often see here - kanji no one can read, words no one knows and everyone skips, whole tenses forgotten except by the high and nerdy - and still feel it *is* your language, you have *no* significant problem with it, and it is so reassuring to hear things explained in it - that is coming to be one of the highest forms of self-delusional self-confidence I have ever seen. This from people who tend to both encourage and proclaim shyness near to a fault.

Well, looks like I'll be needin' some o'that myself. It's not that the drink is bitter - there's just so much of it there that it overwhelms the senses and takes forever for you to realize the best parts of it you enjoy - the reasons you wanted to drink so deeply in the first place.

The test is moving towards where it should be, I think. Not a test of hubris or a brazen display ability. Just a humble thing, really, that really lets you know what it is you do know, and what it is you don't - agreeing with the tester or not be damned. Not a question of can you so much as if. Not a question of do you so much as did you. It's a test. I ganbaru for a reason - it's for the things after, which slows my study; it's out of pure curiosity, which confuses my focus; and mostly, now, it's for the strength of the soul, when confronted with those things that make you feel so much less whole.

Gute Nacht, schlafe wohl.