Friday was a public holiday in Singapore for Labor Day, so I didn’t have to work. I stayed up late the previous night and indulged myself by watching one video after another on YouTube. I can’t remember all the genres of videos I watched, but the ones I distinctly remember are somewhat morbid and cruel, like a video of a bull frog swallowing numerous cockroaches at amazing speed, or that of dozens of rats being trapped one after another in a hole, where they were squeezed together and unable to get out.
I also watched a video of a Japanese woman who keeps a crow in her house as a pet. While she was explaining how to take care of a crow in a human residence, her pet crow named Happy was right beside her—it fluttered its wings vigorously and hopped around restlessly, croaking from time to time to get her attention. It was a bizarre video, to say the least, but both the owner and Happy looked happy, literally, so I see absolutely no reason to criticize her for keeping an unusual pet.
I didn’t start out wanting to watch strange videos, but once I clicked on the attention-grabbing thumbnail of a random video, other videos of a similar nature kept being pushed to my screen by the YouTube algorithm. I ended up watching them non-stop until around 5 a.m., when I finally succumbed to my sleepiness and went to bed. Having wasted hours watching videos of so little intellectual value, I felt a bit guilty, but it was fun all the same.
The next day, I got out of bed at around 11 a.m. Determined not to repeat the same mistake of watching silly videos ad infinitum, I poured myself a cup of strong coffee and picked up a book to read. This time, I chose a novel titled Mina’s Matchbox, written by the female Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa.
The story revolves around the life of a 12-year-old girl called Tomoko who, due to her mother’s job circumstances, temporarily moves around 100 miles to the east to live with her cousin Mina’s family. The novel is about 280 pages long, out of which I have read around 120 pages so far. It reads like a heart-warming story up to this point, with every character in the book nice and kind to Tomoko. However, it’s still relatively early in the story, so I have no idea what the future holds for her.
Incidentally, I am reading the English translation of the novel, as I want to study a few English words and phrases while I enjoy the story. Stephen Snyder’s skillful translation flows very smoothly, and I find the text pleasant to read.
As is always the case with English books, I come across several words I’m unfamiliar with, and look them up one by one in the dictionary on my smartphone. Looking up words while reading a book may sound like a grind to some people, but I find the experience rather enjoyable as I get to acquire new knowledge and deepen my understanding of this beautiful language.
As an example, from this novel I’ve learned words like platypus—a mammal native to Australia with a bill shaped like that of a duck—and rhinoceros beetle, an insect particularly popular among Japanese schoolboys. I know the Japanese words for these creatures, but up until now I didn’t know their English equivalents as they rarely come up in my conversations with native speakers, if at all.
It is words like these that remind me of the importance of active, deliberate learning of words in a foreign language, instead of passively waiting for them to be acquired through natural exposure. You can live for years, if not decades, in an English-speaking country without coming across terms like rhombus and parallelogram, but that doesn’t mean they are unknown to native speakers—quite the opposite, as these concepts are imparted to schoolchildren through compulsory education.
I wish I could claim that I have acquired most of my English proficiency through natural means—otherwise known as comprehensible input—such as having conversations with native speakers and entertaining myself with native content like comic books, television series and movies. It would certainly sound cooler than memorizing words with flashcards and doing countless grammar exercises.
However, the reality is that language acquisition for adult learners can only be effectively achieved through conscious and deliberate efforts. While reading books and watching shows and movies in a foreign language can be a great deal of fun, learning a language to a very high level of proficiency is not always fun and games. How fluent I can become in English ultimately depends on how much hard work I am willing to put in. I hope to stay mindful of this fact while I enjoy reading novels like Mina’s Matchbox.
