Humble Pie

Image by weegolo via Flickr

I admit that as a language learner who is now fluent in one language, it is easy to get prideful at times when you hit this level where you can flow in and out of speaking and understanding two different languages. It's hard not to get a little puffed up when people around you are telling you how amazingly well that you speak and that they don't encounter alot of foreigners that can speak as well as you.

If you fear getting too prideful in your language learning abilities, then I have a cure for you. There is no better way to eat humble pie than to spend an evening trying to conquer learning the Japanese writing system of hiragana. Fortunately, Rocket Languages has an amazing program that comes with their audio language program. It is called Mega Japanese and basically it is these words and picture games that you can play on your computer to increase your vocabulary skills and build your audio comprehension. Every Rocket Language product comes with this game that is free as a download once you've purchased your chosen language.

In the case of Rocket Japanese, there are three types of games available for me to play. One that helps with my audio skills, one for my vocabulary, and the third game is to help me learn Hiragana. The way the game works is that I will be shown a symbol and to the right, I have 4 different sounds to choose from. Only one of them is correct and I have to pick the sound that corresponds with the hiragana symbol.

The first time I played the game, I came out with a whooping score of 60 out of 150.  Which is gentle reminder to me that when it comes to Japanese, as a language learner I am basically at the bottom of Mt. Fuji.  I don't think that anyone at this point is going to be rushing to book tours to Japan with me. Having a tour guide that cannot read the signs properly does not leave much peace of mind for the people on the tour!  But I'm determined to scale this mountain at all cost (I mean in a metaphorical sense of language learning. Fitness-wise, I'm going to need a few more centuries before I'm in any shape to be actually scaling Mt. Fuji)

I was very pleased that after taking some time out one evening to practice MegaHiragana, my score improved drastically and by the end of the nite, my average score was 96 out of 150. It was at a point that I could guess the right sound for the majority of the symbols in two tries or less.  And I swear that this game must have some kind of intelligence because at once point it seemed that everytime I started to recognize alot of the symbols, new ones would get thrown at me that I had never seen before in my life.

One of the greatest dangers and language learner can face is getting satisfied with their level and not feeling the need to pursue more. I was in Argentina when Rocket Spanish Platinum came out, the third level in the series. Part of me just wanted to be like "My spanish is good enough already. I can get around, have conversations, make friends etc." But I shook off that feeling and bought the program and made myself explore new levels of the language and I am so glad that I didn't settle where I was. Buying the third level of the series really gave me the ability to accent my language skills nicely and resulted in deeper, richer interactions with people while I was down there.

 Now with learning Japanese, I feel like I am in that place of humility all over again where I am starting at the bottom with the most basic level of skills. But I am glad that trying to tackle this language is helping keep me on my toes.  It is a humbling place to be and an awesome place to be at the same time.  Looks like learning the Japanese language and culture is gonna have me eating humble pie with my order of sushi......