I’ve noticed a trend.

In nine months I’ve been here I’ve gotten quite a bit better at Japanese. I’m still an extremely long way from where I want to be, but looking back to my initial arrival I see that I’ve come quite a decent distance.

But…

I talk less to students now. I talk less to teachers now.

The longer I’m here the more jaded I become and the less I really want to attempt to converse with the students and oftentimes the teachers. Now, it’s not like I ever really did have deep conversations with either of them (language/cultural/age barriers saw to that), but the interest for me to even attempt so has waned quite a bit.

Thing is, I have quite a bit of trouble holding a conversation who speak my native language, so it comes as no surprise that I have even more trouble with people who I can only speak to in a poorly spoken second language. It frustrates me because I know that it’s stifling my adoption of said second language, not to mention that it helps to keep me on the sidelines of the school.

So there, I eat lunch with the students everyday, but most of them are spent in silence. I spend almost all day, every day at school studying Japanese, but I’m still too self-conscious to use it conversationally. Thankfully I got over the hump of being afraid to speak survival Japanese (at the store, bus, directions, post office, etc), but try to have a conversation with me and it’ll quickly hit a dead end.

Time to go back to studying.

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