In my english class I have a bunch of wonderful fellows, among them two chinese girls who I tend to talk to a lot, for various reasons - one being that I know one of them from last semester (we took Society together), and the other because she is the one’s friend, and because she and I share a common interest, namely Buddhism.

But that has sort of almost nothing to do with what I wanted to say.

A few days ago we were walking to the subway station together and on the way I said “I know ‘ni-hao’ is ‘hi’ in Chinese .. but what is ‘good bye’?”, and one of them asked “In cantonese or mandarin?” and I said both, and in one of them it was simply “Bye bye”, but in the other it was some “Tza… ” thing. Point being that she told me, I repeated it accurately, and then promptly forgot the word.

But dude, that NEVER happens anymore, I thought. I hear some word in Japanese 2 or 3 times (3-4 if it’s a boring word) and then it sort of sticks. At least in the “……….. OH RIGHT. Yes.” kind of sense. I can dig out the meaning of the word if I try. But here.. man. Gone with the wind! So I ask her again as we are parting, and she tells me again, and I repeat it again, and … bam. Gone. No chance of me remembering.

It reminded me of the very, very early stages of my learning Japanese. I had written up this silly bash script (iirc) which pinged me with words randomly from a list of words in japanese or english, and I was supposed to write the translation of the word. I spent hours on groups of 10-15 words. Hours. I would run through the words in a variety of ways — “tell me the correct answer and re-ask me again later, until I give the right answer” to “give me the summary + corrections at the end, and do not let me re-answer” and so on. I’d finally short-term memorize all the words in 30 mins or so, then a day would pass and I’d retry and it’d take another 20 mins before I had them down again. And then the next day it took me 50 minutes to do the same words. It drove me bonkers. I was able to provide myself with some really nice tools for learning, but despite that I had a damn hard time doing it.

But that was only the first 30-40 words I ever ever ever learned. I quickly came up with ideas for how to learn. Like “tamago” means “egg”. We all know about the tamagochi, right? So that word was easy-peasy. Some words were just killer-hard to learn, because their spelling was especially “unseen” in English/Swedish. Try to learn how to spell this word, to get a feeling of what I mean: uvghewraiufrauibvkuaeb. You can’t. You fucking can’t. And that’s how it felt sometimes.

But then I learned - long-term-memory-learned - a dozen words, and a dozen more, and for every word, the next came easier. It’s a muscle in the brain, but I’m afraid it’s a “The Japanese Language” muscle, not a “All Languages Muscle” (well, to be fair, it’s probably sort of both).

Our brain’s a wonderful invention, but it’s not entirely obvious sometimes how to make use of it. When I learn my fourth language, I’m definitely gonna remember this and take comfort.