How Badly Do You Want to Improve Your English?

Last night, I finished reading the novel Mina’s Matchbox written by the Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. I briefly touched upon this novel in my previous journal entry, in which I mentioned that I had found it to be a heartwarming story in the first few chapters. I don’t want to present any spoilers here, but suffice it to say that it stayed a beautiful story to the very end, and I loved every character in the book increasingly as the story progressed, including the two animals who played rather significant roles. In the end, I liked Mina’s Matchbox better than Hotel Iris, a novel by the same author that dealt with a much gloomier subject.

Incidentally, I didn’t know about Yoko Ogawa up until a few months ago, when I first heard her name mentioned in a YouTube video introducing popular Japanese novelists to Western viewers. Although I am originally from Japan, I am not very familiar with Japanese literature, so it was nice to hear this introduction to a few outstanding authors who are globally popular. When it comes to modern Japanese fiction, Haruki Murakami may come to mind for most people, but in fact there is a robust literary scene in the Land of the Rising Sun, with numerous excellent authors yet to be discovered by international readers.

As mentioned previously, I read Mina’s Matchbox in its English translation and not the original, because I wanted to learn English words and phrases while I enjoyed the story. The English version is 280 pages long, and I read it in its entirety while making sure to mark and look up every word and phrase I was unfamiliar with. It took me 8 days to complete the task—in total, I looked up 208 items in the dictionary, averaging out at 0.74 items per page. This may sound like an excruciating grind to most English learners, but I found the entire process rather enjoyable, as I felt excited at the prospect of my vocabulary expanding rapidly.

I may not be the most efficient or talented learner of foreign languages, but one thing I’ve got going for me is my fixation with acquiring an extensive vocabulary, not only for English, but also for Japanese, my mother tongue. Whenever I open a book to read, I always make sure to have my smartphone dictionary close at hand, so that every time I come across an unfamiliar word or phrase I can look it up immediately. Instead of frustrating me, this repeated act of consulting the dictionary brings me instant gratification at each occurrence—not unlike the sensation of fitting a piece of the jigsaw puzzle into place. This whole process makes me love reading even more as I devour one book after another.

Recently, in addition to books, I practiced the same method while watching the English-dubbed version of the latest Japanese Netflix series Straight to Hell. This 9-episode series is a part-fiction, part-biographical story centered on the life of Kazuko Hosoki, arguably the most famous fortune-teller to have emerged from Japan. 

Hosoki used to make regular TV appearances reading fortunes of guests to her show using her unique astrology-based fortune-telling method. More often than not, she uttered unkind or even violent remarks straight to the face of her guest, causing distress and consternation to concerned parties and viewers alike. Yet her show, while controversial, proved to be a big hit, boasting high ratings and earning her millions of dollars.

I could have watched this series in Japanese, but I watched it in English, again for language-learning purposes. Netflix’s dubbing is of very good quality, and I was able to get into the story and enjoy it without feeling any strangeness whatsoever. This time, I listened to the dialogue attentively for any English expression I didn’t comprehend, and interrupted the viewing at each occurrence to look it up in the dictionary before continuing the video. Much against my expectations, these interruptions didn’t take away too much from my enjoyment of the story, so I intend to keep practicing this method for the time being.

If you are not a language-learning enthusiast, this method of consulting each unknown item in the dictionary may strike you as rather odd or even masochistic, and I fully comprehend that position. I guess it all comes down to how badly you want to improve your proficiency in a foreign language. There will probably come a time when I finally stop employing this extreme method, but for now I will let nature run its course and keep practicing whatever method suits me the best.

Learning a Language is Hard Work!

Mina's Matchbox

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.