Hello everybody from the lingq community,
Ya see, today, I got into a bit of a pickle. It was a warm summer day and I happened to have been walking down a narrow but long, rough but soothing cobblestone road in the midst of a shady crevice between two buildings stacked rather intricately around me as if I were in some sort of a deep dish pizza as a microbial virus sitting dead center in a piece of pepperoni. It was at that moment having reached this sort of transcended “nirvana” so to speak, that I realized that the true meaning of learning a language is not how, but where to do it. I searched corner after corner in this new world of mine, only to find that each new location brought on a new set of challenges to learning Japanese that I would not have otherwise encountered in my journey across the long lonely road. But one thing was certain in my mind all along, I was headed on the right track. And perhaps it was just that sense of reason that propelled me only forward, like a spring without any restoring force. And without any restoring force I was. Long after the day had gone by and the streets had vanished and sun dropping behind the cheesy crust before my eyes, that I checked the top right corner of my web browser. 5000 Lingq created today. I looked closer, with my fingers jamming uncontrollably at the space bar, 5001, 5002, 5003, I knew at that point there was no stop, the life behind me shifting behind my peripheral vision, vanishing into the unreachable void conventionally known as the past. But I knew these numbers weren’t going anywhere this time. The knowledge transmitted flowed through my hand and into my mind as it trembled, encountering the slightest hint of cultural legacy, the stroke of a newborn kanji, stroke after stroke in appearing in my mind. And before you knew it, the kanji materialized before me, transforming my world into a true amusement park of streams of calligraphy accumulated over the day. Maybe I was just hallucinating, or perhaps, it was just a figment of an otherwise restricted imagination, but when I called for help that day on the empty road, the only word that could come out of my mouth was, “tasuketekudasai, tasuketekudasai…” over and over again. I thought no one could hear me, but how wrong I was. Turns out, I looked behind me, the first time I did that that day, and to my dismay, it wasn’t that of a setting sun that I was seeing before my eyes. Rather, the setting sun was glaring back at me, appearing to care little of my puny existance, but rather, that of the knowledge I carried. And at that moment, the sun said, “You are now one of us.” I was like wtf are you talking about… And the sun replied, “Welcome to Japan, the Land of the rising sun.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Part of me wanted to like…shake the sun’s hand, somehow greet the sun, get to know the sun a bit better this time around. But part of me couldn’t get over the fact that the sun was actually setting, not rising. What a ridiculous hypocrite, I thought to myself. But the sun just kept setting, falling lower and lower below the horizon, ultimately masking its entire existence before my very eyes. I spoke to the sun one last time, “Sun-san, ohayou gozaimasu! Kiiteimasuka?” The sun took no more than one second to vanish entirely behind the curtain of sky above which I was still sitting, dead center in the courtyard I had come to know quite well over the course of the day. Despite the fact that I had seemingly lost contact with the sun, I knew that in some supernatural way, shape, or form, the sun was hearing what I was saying, and words that I couldn’t speak or hear were being transmitted to the sun simultaneously, spontaneously. Maybe it was a part of my own soul dictating to the sun, Rise!, but in the intermediate reality I knew I was patiently waiting minute after minute, hour after hour, thinking about the sun while throughout the entire moment still jamming my fingers to the space bar on my Windows 7 glancing at the top right corner every once in a while thinking how many more times is this story going to reference a previously referenced reference. I did not care. I decided I needed to take a break, and I stopped. I put my computer down and looked up at the sky. Finally without the weight of the computer on my lap, I rose, standing up on my two legs and looked over the skyline. And there it was, the sun, staring back at me with the same face I saw yesterday, grinning back at me. I instantly opened my mouth to speak, but the sun, beating me to it, replied, “speak!” And I spoke, and first words that flowed out of my mouth were, “Watashi ha nihonjin desu. Ohayou gozaimasu.” It took me 2 and 3/4 of a second after this to realize what I had just said, and 2 and 2/3 of a second for the sun to spit back at me three words that I will never regret hearing. “Nihon ni youkoso.” I knew what it meant! Not just the Japanese, of course I understood that after a day of punching my fist into a crippled space bar on my Windows 7 keyboard covered in tryhard sweat. I understood my fluid place in society, my duty as a newly born Japanese to fulfill my duty to learn the culture and history behind the backdrop in front of me. And it took only 3 seconds for me to reply back, “Japan, here I come.”
