Asiaglot? What the heck?

Alright, first post! Time to take this baby for a spin….! (I’ve always wanted to say that, but I’ve never had a badass motorcycle to say it about….UNTIL NOW! This blog is now my badass motorcycle and I will ride it all the way to fluency. Just pretend, okay.)

Hi there everybody, my name’s Valerie and this is the beginning of my brand-new language-learning blog, Asiaglot! The name may sound unpleasant, but I assure you, there is nothing gross or scary here. (Well, not yet anyways.  We’ll see how long it takes before it is apparent to my readers that I have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy. It probably won’t be long at all.  While we’re on the topic, here’s a brand-new Japanese word for you to learn, right off the bat: うんこ ‘unko’! It means poop, and sounds every bit as immature as it does in English. Try shouting it in increasingly loud intervals for a more family-friendly version of another popular shouting game. Okay? Okay. Back on track, now that your second-hand embarrassment meters are skyrocketing.)

Ahem. For those of you that haven’t already closed this tab in a frowning, face-palming frenzy, I’ll explain the name of the blog.  “Asiaglot” is a word I just made up, but I like to think it comes from the words Asia and polyglot.  A polyglot is someone who speaks many different languages fluently! Basically, I want to be a polyglot who specializes in Asian languages.

The word “fluency” means different things to different people, but for the purposes of my language-learning journey, I want to define it as someone who:

1: Speaks a language in the natural, spontaneous way that one speaks their native language, at a pace that native speakers of the language would deem natural, using vocabulary that native speakers of the language would actually use.

2: Understands the modern spoken language with little difficulty and only the occasional vocabulary hiccup. 

3: Reads the modern written language as it is used in newspapers, websites, and magazine articles and understands all but the obscure words.

Notice that my goal is not “KNOW EVERYTHING EVER!!” Not knowing things is perfectly okay.  When that one weird professor keeps using that same big word over and over and your brain melts a little, it doesn’t mean you don’t understand English, it means he’s pretentious. Or should I say, MAGNILOQUENT! See, it’s okay, I didn’t know that word either and I’m a native speaker… I just looked up pretentious synonyms for the word pretentious on Thesaurus.com to try and be a little more meta here, and came up with that one. Yeah.

What I’m saying is, while some hardcore language maniacs may claim that to be fluent in a language, you have to know how to discuss ANY topic in the language… I beg to differ.  It’s okay to not know what a word means sometimes. Especially if it’s a word that I wouldn’t know in English to begin with, like esoteric terms related to engineering or physics! Seriously, I know nothing about that stuff.  (I tend to forget the word “protractor” almost every time I need to use it, and have to resort to calling it “that angley thing”.)  If I can say “that angley thing” in Japanese and describe around it until someone knows what I’m talking about, I’m satisfied!

Sorry, I feel like I’m regurgitating Benny at Fluent in 3 Months now, but I think I define fluency in a similar way to him, so I guess it’s okay.  The one difference here is that he’s a badass polyglot and I’m just an aspiring one, so feel free to ignore all my advice! \(o_O)/

I’ve never taken any of those Goethe Institut exams or whatever, and I don’t believe that exams are an accurate indicator of whether you can speak a foreign language fluently, so I won’t be mentioning any C1/C2 exam score aspirations or anything like that.  All I’ve got is PASSION! And I believe that’s more than enough to make up for it.

So anyways, I’ll explain a bit about my language-learning background, to understand the point I’m starting this blog from.

I’m a 21-year-old American soon-to-be college graduate who grew up in a completely monolingual household. My degree is in Japanese Linguistics.  Despite this, and having studied Japanese for, hmm, about 5 years, I am–get ready for the surprise of your life!–still not fluent in Japanese. I consider myself a high-intermediate/lower-advanced speaker of Japanese, able to communicate in Japanese well enough to scrape my way through a part-time job at a Japanese minimart during my study abroad in Sapporo, but still unable to read most magazine/newspaper articles without extensive dictionary use, and still unable to express myself naturally, my personality, my humor, etc. in Japanese.  I failed the JLPT N1 this past winter, but felt like I could probably pass the N2 if I had attempted that instead. Not that tests matter because tests suck a variety of butts. But just for an idea.

I’m currently writing my undergraduate research thesis on the positive and negative aspects of spaced repetition software like Anki for learning Japanese, and I was accepted to the JET Program to teach English in Japan starting this August. Expect significantly more exciting posts around that time!

I have also taken one year of Spanish (fun but I didn’t know anything about language acquisition so I failed at learning it, may try to pick it up again someday), two quarters of German (lost motivation because of a lack of interest in the culture), and one year of Vietnamese.  Vietnamese is one I really want to try and improve and maintain, in my journey to become an Asiaglot.  I’m still a complete beginner but I really loved learning it so I don’t want to lose what I’ve started. More on that later.

To summarize, my main goal here is to be fluent in multiple Asian languages.  I am currently working on moving my upper-intermediate/lower-advanced Japanese into the level that I defined above as fluency, something that many learners consider the most difficult part of the journey.  Since that will require all of my BURNING PASSION!! and efforts, my studies of Vietnamese will be put on hold, and should just be thought of as something that I’m trying to maintain and work on here and there on the side while I really dedicate myself to Japanese. (In other words, don’t expect me to be fluent in Vietnamese anytime soon.)

Here’s to hoping I can keep y’all entertained with my posts!  And maybe I’ll even become informative at some point, too. At any rate, THE (future) ASIAGLOT’S ADVENTURE BEGINS HERE!