Singing softly - by ftlsid - cybermonk

A few nights ago I was at a bar in a small Japanese town called Shimanto. A close friend lives there. I’m sipping something, probably Asahi or Sapporo, talking to another foreigner, an Englishman. The bartender passes by and my partner in conversation employs the local dialect to ask for another drink. Perfection. To speak standard Tokyo Japanese, fine—but to command the dialect endemic to a place that is eighty-one bus stops away from the nearest express train, on the remote southeast coast of the smallest and least developed of the four main islands of Japan, where the elementary school built for a thousand students sits empty but for the vines and the weeds—to have tamed that wild tongue as if it were yours by birth… You don’t learn a language simply by hearing it spoken around you. It’s possible to spend years in Japan, or anywhere, and never get past the how-are-yous and can-I-get-the-checks. You learn a language by loving it. You learn by coming back again and again, so many time

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• Ishwari Bawiskar