Sam's Japanese Journey: Day 28 — Real Conversation

The Ambush#

It happened at work.

I was in the break room, alone -- or so I thought -- practicing under my breath while waiting for the microwave. I do this now. I narrate my life in Japanese when nobody is around. "Ohiru gohan wo tabemasu." I am going to eat lunch. "Koohii wo nomimashita." I drank coffee. Normal break room behavior for a person who has been studying Japanese for twenty-eight days and has lost all sense of what constitutes normal behavior.

I did not hear Kenji come in.

"Sam-san."

I turned around so fast I almost knocked my lunch off the counter. Kenji was standing in the doorway, holding a mug, with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Not the dismissive look from Week 1, when I tried to say hajimemashite and he said "That takes years." Not the curious look from Week 2, when he started asking what I was studying. Not even the helpful look from recent weeks, when he would occasionally correct my pronunciation in passing.

This was something else. This was a grin.

"Issho ni hanashimashou," he said.

Let's talk together.

My brain short-circuited for approximately three seconds. Then every sentence I have practiced for twenty-eight days came rushing to the surface like a crowd trying to get through a single door. I opened my mouth and said:

"Hai."

Not the most eloquent start. But it was a yes. And from that yes, the first real Japanese conversation of my life began.

Five Minutes#

I am going to try to reconstruct what happened. It is a blur, the way boss fights are a blur when you are in them, but certain moments are burned into my memory with perfect clarity.

Kenji started easy. He asked me my name. Not in English -- in Japanese.

I heard it. I understood it. Day 1 stuff. The sentence I had practiced on my very first day, when は was just a weird particle I did not understand and Mochi would not even look at me when I spoke Japanese.

"Sam desu. Hajimemashite." My name is Sam. Nice to meet you.

And then -- I do not know what possessed me -- I asked him back. "Onamae wa?" I used the casual form. Like we were friends. Because after twenty-eight days of him watching me learn, of him going from "that takes years" to correcting my pronunciation in passing to standing in the break room inviting me to talk, I think we are.

"Kenji desu." He was smiling.

Where Do You Live?#

He asked where I live. Again, in Japanese. He was speaking slowly, clearly, the way you talk to someone you know is learning. Not condescendingly slow -- respectfully slow. The way good conversation partners do it.

I had this one. Day 28 and I had this one ready.

Obviously I do not live in Tokyo. I swapped in my actual city. "Seattle ni sunde imasu." The pattern held. The te-iru form for an ongoing state -- I live here, I am in the state of living here. The same grammar that told me the train was in a state of being crowded on Day 25 now told Kenji where I reside. Same pattern, different vocab, different context, same underlying scaffolding. This is what I mean when I say I am starting to see the architecture of the language.

Kenji nodded. "Ii desu ne," he said. That's nice.

Then he asked me how I was doing. And here is where the magic happened. Because I understood the question without translating it in my head. I just... heard it. Ogenki desu ka.

"Genki desu!" I said. I am well. And I meant it. In this moment, standing in a break room that smelled like reheated pasta, having a real conversation in Japanese with a real person, I was genuinely, truly genki.

The Mixup (And the Save)#

We kept going. Kenji asked me what I like. I said I like anime -- "Anime ga suki desu." He asked what anime. I said One Piece. He said he prefers Naruto. I said "Naruto mo omoshiroi desu" -- Naruto is also interesting -- and he laughed.

And then it happened. The wa/ga mistake.

I was trying to say "I study Japanese every day" and what came out was "Nihongo ga mainichi benkyou shimasu." The ga was wrong. I knew it was wrong the instant it left my mouth. Nihongo should have had wa -- it is the topic, the wide shot, the establishing context. "As for Japanese" -- I study it every day. The close-up would be on what I do with it (study) or when (every day). Japanese is not the new information here; it is the frame.

I stopped. Kenji waited. He did not correct me. He just waited.

"Nihongo wa," I said. "Nihongo wa mainichi benkyou shimasu."

Kenji nodded slowly, and the grin came back. "Jouzu," he said. Skillful.

Not jouzu because I got the sentence right. Jouzu because I caught the mistake and fixed it. Because I self-corrected. Because after twenty-eight days, the camera metaphor is deep enough that my brain flagged the wrong particle before I even finished the sentence. I mixed up wa and ga, and I fixed it in real time, in a real conversation, with a real person watching me do it.

I think that might be the proudest I have ever been of anything.

After#

The whole conversation lasted about five minutes. Maybe less. I do not know, because I was operating on pure adrenaline and time stopped functioning like time normally functions. We said maybe twenty sentences total between us. My vocabulary was limited. My grammar was basic. I paused a lot. I stumbled. I said "eto..." (um...) approximately forty times.

But I did it.

I had a conversation in Japanese. Not a practice drill. Not mirror rehearsal. Not talking to Mochi. A conversation with another human being who speaks Japanese natively, in which I understood questions and produced answers and made a mistake and corrected it and made someone laugh.

When we switched back to English, Kenji said "You've improved a lot, Sam." And then, after a pause: "SakuraCon, right? You'll do great."

He knew. He has been watching this whole time. Not dismissively like Week 1. Watching the way you watch someone train for a marathon they said they could never run. And today, in the break room, he showed up at the starting line to run a lap with me.

I went back to my desk and sat there for a while, not working, just breathing. Mochi was not there, obviously, because this was the office. But I texted my roommate a single message: "I just had a conversation in Japanese."

They replied: "With the fridge?"

No. With a person. A real person. And in two days, I will do it again. At SakuraCon. In a Yor Forger cosplay. With strangers.

I can do this.