What It Feels Like to Be a Toddler Again: Learning a Language

Welcome to my new Mastering Japanese series, where I talk about what it's like learning a language while balancing a full time job and raising kids. Maybe this isn't the most relatable article to the average person, but I thought it would be cool to share my story. Crazy Days Recently, I was thinking about how much time each week I dedicate to studying Japanese, and I figured it might be worth it's own series to document my journey. I did a similar thing with my PhD, and I think learning Japanese is a similarly challenging journey. You might find it somewhat absurd to talk about language learning in the same difficulty as graduate school, but I don't think they're that much different. Perhaps if I had endless amounts of time to dedicate to Japanese, it wouldn't be so hard. Yet, I'm balancing language learning with a full time job and childcare duties. I know I've mentioned it several times on this site, but my day-to-day is a slog. Currently, I spend each weekday morning taking care of my daughter. Later this year, that duty will hopefully double: I'll have a toddler and a newborn. In other words, when I'm home, I'll have my hands full. Then, I usually head out for work around noon, and finish around 5 PM. During that time, I teach three classes and either hold office hours or complete my one-on-one Japanese assessments. On some days, I stay a bit later. For example, I've been attending Oshaberikai, which is a Japanese conversation club on campus that takes place once a week in the evening. When I get home, I get about two more hours with my kid before she goes to bed. We usually eat dinner, and then we play until bedtime. After that, I try spend the rest of the time in the evening to get work done. Unfortunately, that means my wife and I really only spend time together on the weekends. Otherwise, we're just trying to survive. Learning a New Language As is probably clear at this point, I'm trying to learn Japanese. I was somewhat passively learning the language for a couple of years through Duolingo. Then, I went to Japan last year, and I decided that wasn't going to cut it. As a result, I started taking a course at my university called Level One Japanese 1: 1101. It's a four credit course that I was forced to spread out over two semesters. The reason? It's just an incredibly challenging course. I'm not sure how the classroom track works, but in the individualized track, there are 49 lessons for the first class. Most of the lessons are split into two parts: performance and application. The performance portion requires you to perform a script. Basically, you memorize a dialogue and role play as each character. I find this surprisingly challenging. It takes me probably close to an hour to memorize a script of only a handful of lines, and I usually freeze in the moment. Here's the script I had this past week: サーシャ：これ、私が決めていいですか?神田：もちろん、そうしてください。なるべく早くお願いします。サーシャ：わかりました。でも今すぐじゃなくてもいいですか？神田：全然平気です。あすでもあさってでも構いませんよ。サーシャ：了解です！神田：よろしく。 Then, the application portion varies a lot. Sometimes you just redo the script with different contexts. For example, with the script above, I think the context changed from deciding a time to deciding what drinks to buy. Other times, you prove you did the activities in the activity book by doing a few exercises together. Funnily enough, the instructors recommend that you spend 90 minutes preparing for each 15-minute session, but I easily do more than that. Every morning, I do a round of kanji practice on Duolingo, though I might move to WaniKani. Then, I run through my Anki cards for the day. These are just flashcards built from all of the vocab from the course, but they use spaced repetition for better learning. After that, I usually work through the script and its associated textbook, or I might work through the activity book. Often, even this feels inadequate. Sometimes I ask my instructors questions, and they act like I am an idiot (which fair, I guess). That does feel a bit demoralizing, and going to the conversation club often makes me feel less confident in my skills. But, I don't quit easily. Watching an Actual Toddler Learn Language One of the things that makes me feel somewhat good about my language learning progress is that I can watch basically the same progress happening in my toddler. Right now, she's just over two years old, and she still can't quite communicate much. Sure, she can ask for food or her favorite toys, but she just states the word "foodee" for food, "Tendo" for Nintendo, "teebee" for TV, "Bluey" for, uh, Bluey, and "opee" for open. Before that, we relied almost purely on sign language. She could sign "help" and "please," which she eventually started saying. Now, she understands the concept of a sentence, but she kind of just uses random sounds before tagging on the thing she wants (i.e., buhawabagobluey). Often, I won't know what she wants, so I'll just say, "can you show me?" Then, she walk me to whatever she wants. At a little past two, she has a pretty good vocabulary, but she has virtually no grammar. She might string two words together, but that's about it. For instance, when she wants to go outside, she'll say "coat shoes." Or because she sees me working a lot, she'll ask for her toy version of her "lapt pone" (i.e. laptop and phone). Perhaps my favorite language struggle she has right now is around the word "you." When she sees a picture of herself on my phone, she'll say, "that's you," because that's what I always say. Then I'll say, "no, that's not me, that's you." This has caused so much confusion for her that I'll say, "what's your name?," and she'll point at me and say, "daddy!" It turns out 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns aren't exactly obvious to a toddler, and I can see myself making similar mistakes in Japanese with the so-ko-a-do series. Watching this play out over the last two years makes me feel pretty good about my language progress. I, too, know some vocabulary. I, too, struggle to connect that vocabulary into sentences. Of course, she has to learn all of language from nothing. In some ways, that's a huge benefit to her. She doesn't have to unlearn anything. On the other hand, it's much harder because she doesn't have any frame of reference. It's funny because I often tell students that the hardest programming language to learn is the second one because you have to break out of what you already know. This is particularly hard if your second language is nothing like your first (e.g., Java and Haskell). I think I'm feeling a similar gap between Japanese and English, one that makes me feel suddenly very confident in my Duolingo Spanish skills. Somewhat of a side note, but I recently heard that some people believe that you can be a better author if you don't read books (please watch the linked video). I think the idea here is that reading could taint your originality, but it's quite absurd, right? If you do not read, you can't learn about writing. You would have to invent writing, which again is not only absurd but also incredibly arrogant. Every author (or musician, artist, etc.) will borrow from others when they first start, but that is only so they can practice their craft and develop their voice. Originality comes from contextualizing the self among the many. You cannot do that alone. I bring that up now because I don't want the previous paragraphs to make it seem like I'm claiming that your first language (natural or otherwise) is somehow easier because you are more ignorant. All I'm saying is that the further away that second language is from your first, the harder it's going to be to rely on your prior knowledge. In some cases, you're going to have to battle some misconceptions. Being Mindblown by Japanese Okay, so speaking of how different languages operate, let me share with you something I learned about Japanese that genuinely blew my mind. There are a lot of things I've learned about Japanese so far that are cool, weird, or interesting. For instance, a lot of folks point to counters in Japanese being a weird feature (i.e., there is a different word for counting different objects, such as thin objects, rod-like objects, and bound objects like books). I didn't find that too weird, personally. However, there was a moment when I was reading my textbook, and I started to sweat a little bit. It turns out Japanese is famous for its morphology (i.e., how words change shape). You might be used to this in a language like Spanish, where verbs have different conjugations for tense and point-of-view. Japanese takes this to an almost absurd level. Up to the moment where my mind was blown, I had learned about two basic conjugations: past and non-past. At the same time, I learned about affirmative and negative conjugations (though, I think a lot resources just call these inflections; I'm not a linguist). Then, I learned about formal and informal conjugations. As a result, you can have the same word in like every combination of the splits described above: 食べます: formal affirmative non-past of "to eat" 食べません: formal negative non-past of "to eat" 食べない: informal negative non-past of "to eat" 食べました: formal affirmative past of "to eat" 食べなかった: informal negative past of "to eat" 食べませんでした: formal negative past of "to eat" There are probably more combinations, but I haven't been taught them. I guess Jisho has two more inflections for past and non-past affirmative. Anyway, that's not what's mindblowing. What's mindblowing is that you can tack on adjectives to the stems of verbs to get new meanings. For example, the verb "to understand" is 分かります. You can remove ます and add the adjective for "easy" (やすい) to get "easy to understand": 分かりやすい. I mean it when I said this was mindblowing. I can understand modifying a verb to get new POVs or tenses, but this started to worry me. If this is possible, what else can we do to words? This amount of complexity made me suddenly realize I don't really understand the language at all. I started to feel like maybe listening might be even harder than I thought. Demonstrating Mastery While I've mentioned a lot of different aspects of my study, one thing that I've been really excited about is Obsidian. It's basically just a note-taking app, but it combines some of my favorite things. For example, you all know I love markdown—so much so that I built an entire Python API to generate markdown. Well, Obsidian uses markdown for note-taking. At the same time, Obsidian helps you build out a concept map (i.e., a way of showing how your knowledge is connected). Basically, whenever I'm taking notes, I try to think about how the new concept is related to things I already know. Then, I link those two pages together, which creates a visual link in the concept map. Something I thought would be cool would be to share my concept map any time I write one of these mastery articles. Hopefully, this will help convince me that I am making progress, even when it doesn't feel like it. So, to kick that off, here's my first concept map: Right now, I'm working through Act 5 Scene 2, so that will get linked in shortly. In fact, all the remaining Act 5 scenes will be linked in by the end of the semester. Then, this summer I'll be doing some self-study. We'll see how that changes the graph! 頑張ります All of this is to say that learning Japanese over these past two semesters has been really challenging. I am officially three credits into the journey, and I expect to finish the fourth by the time spring semester ends. I plan to take another four credits next semester (来学期), and four more credits next spring. Then, if I'm feeling good, I might go all in and take nine credits over the summer in 2027 through their "intensive" track. If not, I'll keep my four-credit pace for the next couple of years. Maybe by the end of the decade, I'll have some reasonable speaking skills. Also, feel free to ignore where I'm sneaking in Japanese vocabulary. Ultimately, these articles are just an extended form of my studies (勉強します), so it feels good when I can relate what I'm writing (書きます) in English (英語) to words I already know in Japanese (日本語). I'm sure I'll laugh at this later when the writing is completely unnatural. I went through a similar phase when I was learning Python: I wrote every program like it was Java. But, you have to start somewhere. The last thing I'll sneak in here is that while this is the first time I'm introducing the Mastering Japanese series, I think the spiritual start of this series came when I wrote I’m Learning a Language, and I’m Tired. So, I've set that to be the first article in the series. This will be number two! Anyway, I hope this was interesting to you! If so, here are some articles that are Japan/language adjacent: Reflecting on My First Trip to Japan I’m Learning a Language, and I’m Tired Translations of The Renegade Coder Content: Russian, Spanish, and More Likewise, you can support the journey by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. Take care!