A few nights ago, I dreamt in Japanese. That was a first for me, at least that I can remember; while I’ve been known to have some weird dreams I’ve never remembered dreaming in a different language. I can recall dreams with side-scroller-video-game-style adventures, flooded train rides, and famous roommates collecting tattoo flash to display in our apartment, but it’s all happened in English. I was a bit turned around, then, when I woke up. The dream felt like a memory more than it did something my brain cooked up while I was in bed, which made it hard for me to discern what it actually was.
In the dream I was talking to one of my ninth-grade girls, following up with her about a conversation we had in real life the day before. We were standing in the hallway by the sinks that were by the lunchroom, drying our hands, and behind us the elementary students were walking past on their way into the cafeteria. Everything was normal…including us speaking Japanese
Many of my conversations with many of my students are in Japanese, actually. Given that I’m one of their only exposures to English this isn’t my proudest admittance, as I have personally found merit in Krashen’s i+1 input hypothesis of language learning, but for better or worse it’s still our communication standard. Now that I know where their English level is at I try to use it with them more, but when I first arrived…I felt like I had to use Japanese, otherwise I would never get to know them. I’m sure that’s not entirely true, but I am glad that I opened up their shy exteriors because at this point they are (mostly) all comfortable talking with me. This has made communication as a whole a lot easier, and has also allowed for me to coerce them into using English more without stressing them out too much, even if it’s just saying “Hello” instead of 「Konnichiwa」when we see each other in the hall. It’s a start.
Anyway, “normal” out-of-class communication in my school is almost exclusively in Japanese unless my JTE and I have time to chat. This makes Japanese far from out-of-place in my work life, which made the dream seem all the more like reality. It took me thinking backwards—realizing that there’s no way any follow-up happened, because the initial conversation itself had taken place the day before—to reconcile that the event was a dream, and even after that it took a minute to really settle on me that it had been in Japanese, too.
I think my initial reaction would have been more excited had it not been right after I woke up.
After all, dreaming in a second language doesn’t feel like an accomplishment you received by any deliberate effort, but you still want to be proud of it. I’ve heard it said that once you dream in a second language you’ve made it; you’ve gotten to a point where your brain thinks in a non-native language even while you’re unconscious, which means you’re doing pretty well where learning is concerned. There have been many people whom I admired for their language ability who talked about dreaming in both languages, and it always felt like some sort of milestone I would never reach. Even though I speak and listen to Japanese every day, I still make my share of frustratingly consistent mistakes and don’t feel as if I can think fluently in Japanese. That’s enough to make me feel as if Japanese dreams are beyond my reach, but even moreso than that, another discouraging factor has been…that I’ve also reached the language plateau.
The language plateau is a linguistics concept that I often learned about in my college courses but had never gotten far enough in second language learning to reach. There has been a lot of research on language acquisition—topics like “does age really have an influence on being able to learn a language fluently” (it does), “how much does immersion affect language acquisition in adults” (a lot), and “is there such a thing as a linguistic aptitude that allows some people to learn languages easier than others” (there is)—that suggests language learning among adults has three phases (generally speaking). Often when someone starts learning a language, they make rapid progress at the beginning. This makes sense: going from knowing nothing to know how to even say something like, “Hello, my name is _________, I’m _____ years old and I am from _________” is a massive leap, though it may be simple in the long run. Vocabulary and grammar points come fairly easily, and basics are mastered a lot faster than, say, a baby could manage. This rapid learning phase can last six months or a year, perhaps more depending on factors like whether or not the learner is in a class, how much opportunity he or she has to use the language in daily life, how often they listen to or communicate in the second language, etc. But alas, language learning is not like climbing a mountain, where you progress steadily up a slope until you reach fluency. There comes a time when most if not all adult language learners hit what’s called the “language plateau.” This is a time when you can often communicate decently well and may have most of the basic grammar and vocabulary elements under your belt, generally being able to make your way around in the language, but your learning progress slows considerably or seems to stop entirely. Language learners on the plateau are not fluent, as there are many more complicated, nitty-gritty grammar or vocabulary elements that they don’t know, but at the time it seems like, no matter how much they practice or study, they aren’t learning those new things, either. This can perhaps be attributed to the less frequent usage of complex ideas in everyday language, but is also just…part of the process. The language plateau is something that just has to be borne—in Japanese, we may say that you have to 我慢 (gaman, meaning “persevere” or “endure”) through it—still studying and practicing and soldiering on with the hope that one day you’ll get to the third stage…which is probably best as the “slow and steady uphill walk wins the race” phase. Of course not everyone learns language the same but this pattern is generally applicable to most people, and I have the pleasure of currently being in the midst of the infamous, the despised, the immensely frustrating “nothing is happening” part of language learning.
At this time, I am able to navigate through life in Japan fairly well—which isn’t to say I understand everything—but despite speaking Japanese every day the more advanced topics I learned go a bit sideways in my memory, and while I’ve picked up plenty of new vocabulary I still feel unprepared to express myself when “intellectual” topics arise. I’m also frustrated when I can’t use Japanese to the same effectiveness as I can use English, as I feel like, while communicative, my Japanese isn’t as…me as my English is. I can make puns in English and write prose in English; in Japanese these things are often still stilted and take a lot of time and effort. It’s maddening in a way, to think that in some ways I can speak Japanese well, and in other ways I’m still fairly useless. While I know that this stage will pass in time and I know that I am actually making progress even if I don’t see it, the process is beyond frustrating. It feels stagnant, and sometimes I’d like to just start learning Korean (as has been my plan, after I got good enough at Japanese) to give up on the the tedium of Japanese.
I was ever the more caught off guard, then, with my dream—I never imagined that in the midst of the linguistic doldrums I would finally reach such a weirdly tangible, long-anticipated goal. I don’t feel like I’m improving at all, so why now did my dreams get the System Update? Was this a sign that I need to get out and talk to people in English more?
Well, I don’t need much of a sign to answer that second question.
Regardless of the reason, I’m glad I had the dream. If anything it’s encouraging to know that even now, when it feels as if I have perpetually fossilized some of my language mistakes, I’m getting somewhere. I’m not quite sure where that somewhere is, given the only visible progress I’ve made was done from bed (how’s that for working from home?), but I’ll take it. One of these days I’ll get to the other side of the plateau, to whatever next steep climb awaits, and I’ll take that too when it comes—after all, while it may be a lot of work, the view from the top is always the best.
最後まで頑張るモン。
WabiSabi She 