Fluent is When?

Recently, I went on an official writing trip to Niigata. It was a pretty unique experience, not only to be essentially a travel writer in the land I love, but also linguistically. For the former experience, with lots of pictures and links to places I went to, I'll defer you to my blog entries on the trip. For the latter, I will talk about my musings on language that I had while on the trip in this post.

We made for an interesting pair: I, an American with my English and 1kyu Japanese, and my fellow travel writer, a German woman who writes in English and understands Vietnamese and French. She also had considerable Japanese ability, but my experiences with the big standardized Japanese tests and language school gave me an edge for the technical terms. Our handler from the company arranging all of this, despite his time abroad, generally declined to speak English, as he seemed to have given up on it. Not that I blame him. So it fell to me to translate for my German compatriot.

It's not the first time I've been a hapless and woefully under-qualified translator. Back when I lived in Kyushu, I was called upon to help translate for a couple of visiting citrus farmers from Spain. They would speak broken English to me, and I would speak yet more broken Japanese to the local mikan farmers we were visiting. Then the locals would speak their local confusing dialect, and I would translate that back to simple English for the Spaniards.

This time around I was a bit more proficient. As we were guided around Niigata, Sado island and the Echigo area, my listening techniques, as I've noticed in retrospect, seemed to be rather zen. Instead of trying to listen and understand each term, I just took whole sentences in. I would stand and keep an ear half-cocked for whatever explanation we were getting at the moment, and have revelations like, Ah, yes, they are talking about the Bakufu's corporal policies. This worked pretty well for me most of the time. Occasionally, the German would ask me what a word meant. Usually, I had to admit that I hadn't picked out whatever term had gathered her interest. The zen of listening to Japanese is to not listen, or something. But happily, I am to the point where I could relay the German's terminological request and understand the explanation. This part required actual concentration.

On day two of our journey, we had dinner with a local couple. The husband was actually a Spanish citizen. They spoke to each other in Japanese at times and English at others. They wanted to speak his native language when together, but wine always got in the way. Ah libations, they can both help and hurt linguistic abilities from what I've observed.

Skip to our last night of travel luxury, in a ski area hotel, and the three members of our team were all talking in Japanese, which was a bit of a nice marvel to me. We had not gotten our handler to break down and actually speak English (which he could understand) outside of one good drunken karaoke session -what did I tell you about libations?- where he sang some, and eventually I and the German were the ones that broke down and spoke more and more Japanese over the course of the trip. By that final night, I was feeling almost fluent and my fellow writer was very impressive herself.

But when I got back home that fluency fell back to its usual embarrassing levels. What was different? Maybe I lost my zen in my normal setting. Maybe it was that I had to go back to teaching English the next day. It's hard to say. I'm not particularly good at languages to begin with, but it was nice to feel like I was for a while. I am not going to stress it. I don't even carry my dictionary around anymore. If there is a need to communicate, a way will come. Way? Maybe I'm a linguistic Taoist instead of a zen-listener. Or maybe I am just awesome at muddled-metaphors.