Speaking Cutely

Hi everyone!

The last few weeks have been relatively uneventful, so I apologize for not having anything interesting to post. Yesterday, however, something rather interesting happened.

On Monday night (during a long weekend), I boarded an overnight bus from Tokyo to Aomori after visiting Kristin in Komagane-shi in Nagano-ken. The bus left Tokyo at 8:30 pm and arrived in Aomori at 6:50 am the next day. As you can imagine, these bus rides are not the most comfortable methods of transportation in the world, so I didn't get much sleep. I also needed to be at Toyama Middle School at 8:20 am to teach, so I didn't have any time in between getting off the bus, going back home, taking a shower, and heading to school to have a nap. This was an extraordinarily tiring Tuesday.

I, however, have been having a much better time communicating with the students. All my choice napping spots were being used (like the judo mats in the gym), so I had no choice but to stay awake. In between classes and during breaks, I tried my best to have as much conversation time with the kids as possible, even if it had to be in Japanese. After I finished my only class for the day, the students were preparing to practice their performances for the upcoming school festival. I took this as an opportunity to sneak into the music room and have a nap on a makeshift bed of 4 lined up chairs.

I was, of course, caught 15 minutes into my slumber by the two piano playing girls who came up to work on their piece. I woke up as they tried to open one of the locked doors, and I went and opened it for them. They asked if I was sleeping, and I sheepishly said yes. Then I sat with them and watched as they practiced their piece, and then we had a fun episode when a bee (wasp?) and a grasshopper flew in through one of the open windows. I got the grasshopper out easily, but the bees here in Japan are humongous, so I was not quite as manly while trying to shoo that one away.

Anyways, after they were done, I left with them and headed back to where the other (less musically talented) students were working on their performance. The group of girls leading the performance (but who don't actually perform themselves) were idling about in the hallway while the rest of the kids did their thing in the main area. I started up a little conversation with 4 of them, and they noticed my name tag. The students here get a little confused by the way my name is spelled, so they want to call me RAI-AN (ライアン) even though my name is pronounced more like RAI-EN (ライエン), which is how I spell it in Japanese. The girls realized that they've been pronouncing my name wrong this whole time, and tried their best to get it right. They also noticed my last name RIN リン and asked me about it. I told them casually, "It's written like the Japanese [Hayashi]," or 「林と書くんだよ。」

The girls looked at each other blankly for a second and then burst out laughing. I wasn't sure why at first, but one of the girls turned to me with her thumbs up and exclaimed, "Very cute!" Then I remembered something. I talk like an anime character. Especially when I'm tired and easily suggestible, I tend to speak without thinking very much. This means that my Japanese language skills return to where they came from: anime.

For those on you who don't know me, I studied Japanese for 3 years in high school and less than 2 years in college. In high school, I hadn't ever heard Japanese spoken before, and I only decided to learn Japanese because foreign language was a requirement and the other options were less attractive. I also had very little motivation and enthusiasm. The teacher was pretty terrible, so I spent 3 years learning very little and speaking hardly anything. Honestly, I was horrible, and listening to my old cassette tapes of oral tests makes me cringe.

When I started college, I found out that my unwillingness to consume alcoholic beverages left me very bored and with a lot of free time. This is when I picked up a truckload of hobbies, one of which included watching anime. My first year in college, I watched a massive amount of anime in between learning martial arts and archery, teaching myself to become a mountain/road cyclist and inline/freeline skater, and of course, engineering.

Because I watched so much anime, I decided to re-learn Japanese in my second college year. I took the classes for fun, and the teachers were so much better than in high school. In 3 months, we learned the same amount I was taught for 3 years in high school, and we learned it better. What I noticed this time is that I practically breathed in the language. I went to every class and participated heavily in every lesson, but I never studied. Even so, I was still one of the top students in the class and definitely the most natural sounding speaker. Why? Anime. Not only had I heard the language enough to replicate the sounds almost perfectly, I was now motivated to use what I heard from anime in class and learn more about it.

Over the year and two-thirds I studied Japanese in college, I honed my colloquial Japanese into a more proper form of the language. However, when I'm trying to produce language quickly and naturally, I still return to where I originally learned certain words and phrases. This unfortunately means that I talk like an anime character. Even worse, I tend to talk like an anime GIRL.

In anime, the characters speak Japanese, and Japanese has a masculine and feminine way of speaking (besides the standard unisex talking style). Anime Japanese is entirely sensible and understandable, but much of it is not used in real life. For example, anime girls like to add cute feminine endings to their sentences, like NANO なの, N ん, or WA わ, or extend the sentence with a long SUUU す～. They also tend to use long matter-of-fact or affirmation endings like DAYO だよ～ or DAYONE だよね～ much more than boys. Meanwhile, anime boys tend to speak very standard normal Japanese, even though the more masculine boys will end sentences with ZE ぜ or cut short the more polite DESU ending into a SSU っす.

Since anime tends to be rather female-heavy, I am more used to hearing the way girls talk in anime instead of boys. The unfortunate side effect of this is that I have also started talking like an anime girl. When I've got nothing else to go by, I like to use lexical phrases I learned in the way that I've heard, so they come straight out of lines in an anime. Lots of times, it's standard Japanese. Sometimes, it comes out masculine, which is perfectly normal since I'm a boy. A lot more times than is socially normal, it comes out feminine.

The girls I was talking to found my way of speaking hilarious because that's not the way a male would usually talk. If anything, I used 2 feminine modifications consecutively, so they almost thought that I misspoke before they put 2 and 2 together. When they realized that I in fact said what I did, the overall cuteness of it was too much for them to handle.

Even if I wanted, there isn't much I can do to fix my problem, since it lies at the very root of where I learned the language. I supposed I will just need to continue living my life speaking cutely, which I am perfectly fine with.