One of my favorite skiing experiences was from my time in Oregon. Skiing on Mt. Bachelor, sometimes the clouds would come in low and sit mid-way up the mountain. I would take the chair lifts up to near the top of the mountain, above the cloud line. From there all I could see were the other distant cone-shaped volcanic peaks of the Cascade Range poking through the sea of clouds. It was incredibly clear, exhilarating, and beautiful, yet a little creepy, isolating, and surreal at the same time. As I would ski down the mountain I would enter the cloud cover, and everything became slightly foggy. It was hard to see the trail ahead of me, but I was still able to follow it, and had to let go of my urge for complete control over the situation. Eventually, I would near the bottom of the mountain, and things would clear up again below the cloud line. By then I was fatigued, and while I had an impression of the skiing that I just did, everything was a bit convoluted. I was thinking about this experience today as an apt metaphor for my current study of Japanese.
Right now one of my daily class assignments is a reading passage. These are “real world” passages, things from the newspaper or books, not the nicely edited textbook passages of beginner and intermediate Japanese. For homework we read the passage, and then answer comprehension questions on the passage and the more difficult vocabulary (in Japanese). When I begin my preparations for these passages, my feeling is like that at the top of the mountain, I have all my tools for study (dictionary, grammar reference book, pencil, eraser, glass of water, and a clean sheet of paper) and things are clear and exciting. All too soon the cloud cover comes in- I get mixed up on a certain grammar point, or a vocabulary word is used in a sense that I’m not familiar with. I usually fall down a few times here, as I feel like I have blue square ability (intermediate) but I’m on a black diamond run (advanced). Then I get to the comprehension questions and it’s all a little bit blurry, yet somehow I manage to get it (or at least most of it). By the end, my brain is tired and I feel exhilarated that I just completed something challenging and rewarding.
Perhaps my metaphor seems flaky or far-fetched (especially for the non-skiers or language learners), but in many ways skiing and Japanese elicit similar emotions for me. I love both of them, yet they both involve a bit of pain. For the most part they are good for my health, yet they probably are also causing me some problems (knee problems from skiing and carpel tunnel from practicing kanji). Neither is an inexpensive pursuit, and in the end both the mental exhaustion from my course and the humidity of the Japanese summer have me wondering, how many days until ski season starts?
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