Note #6

Dear Mizuki-san,

Welcome to Raha! It’s great to have you here. Moving to a new school and new place is always daunting and it may be even more so in your case, since you have never lived outside Japan. Worry not, for I will try to make this transition easier for you by informing you about the challenges you are likely to face in a new community with a new language.

Japan has a homogenous, monolingual society so you must be accustomed to the usage of one language both at school and at home. Here though, you will be primarily using two languages – Japanese and English. It might sound like a challenging task, but with practice, you will get into the habit of transitioning between the two. Alternating languages is much easier for students like me, who grew up in a multilingual environment. I, like many students here, used my mother tongue initially but began using a different language on starting school. In an international community like this, there is a need for a common channel of communication, and English due to historical reasons is what bridges the gap here.  We are compelled to take up English, regardless of choice, because that is the benchmark here. Learning a new language has cultural connotations too. While our mother tongue keeps us rooted in our origins, acquiring a new language exposes us to the cultural background of that language and suddenly, we can view it with our naked eyes, rather than through a telescope.

Learning a new language opens up a door of new opportunities and possibilities. You will be delighted when you are finally able to grasp the new language, for it will close the distance between you and other people. You can communicate better and more effectively, express your ideas with more depth and more importantly, understand others better. In the 21^st century, language is not a factor that will keep you shackled.  With globalization and the rise of social media, mediums of communication are more inclusive as they have been made intelligible for different people. Data is available in many different languages so you will not have a problem with grasping the course material. Being bilingual has also proven to improve academic performance. As you communicate more with us, you will begin to feel comfortable in this new persona. And I say new persona because these unprecedented experiences that you will gain will give you new perspectives which will alter your mindset and maybe even your thought process. Don’t let that scare you though, because new perspectives will open up your mind to consider situations you had never imagined you would encounter previously.

While learning in school, you will probably have the tendency to process the subject matter in Japanese and reiterate it in English separately but as time goes on, you will get into the habit of comprehending the matter in English as it is without the need to translate it into Japanese. With practice, you will abandon alternating between languages, a phenomenon known as code switching, in class. Speaking Japanese at home and English outside may cause an identity conflict but you will come to accept this persona as your own. It will be ingrained into you to the point where it cannot be detached willingly.

Hope you enjoy yourself here!

Monica Panigrahy