How did I learn German?

Tsugio Sekiguchi

I am not sure how much helpful is my German study experience, but let's start it.

Academic Background

I start to talk about my personal history, I am not a person who graduated high school and university, I quitted junior high school (Himeji Junior High School) at my second year, and entered the Military Preparatory School, graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, became a training commissioned officer and pleurisy at the same time, when I became an ensign, I was asked to take a break, then was ordered to resign. I think my achievement was not too bad, but once I got pleurisy, I wouldn't be able to enter the Army War College because of the health condition, if so, there's no reason to keep working at the Army, I thought like this and changed my career when I was 21 years old. And I learned German at the Military Preparatory School.

I am afraid that my age is 58..., 59 or something this year. (I am not good at remembering my age, sometimes I try to remember, but it changes next year, therefore I am always confusin. 58 years old is also maybe my age of few years ago. Parhaps my wife remembers it sometime.)

To tell the truth, I learned German at the Military Preparatory School. Only few people know about the School in which teacher never taught English. It is because, many students enter the Imperial Japanese Army Academy with finishing English class at junior high schools, it maybe be a reason to teach other language but English at the School. There were German class and French Class, (In addition, there was Russian class at the School of Tokyo.) When we play. German and French classes compete everytime, I am not sure the reason but German class wins everytime. Someone from French class may get angry, but it is the truth. And strangely enough, their faces between students of French class and German class are different. I hadn't know who is from French class, who is from German class, but I could recognize 70-80% of them. I don't know why. Our faces change during we are learning der. des, dem, den, gegangen and so on, or there are so-called "Elective Affinities" of Goethe and we get together -- this is still interesting for me. You can imagine what is the German class' face when you look on my face. I was stubby before WW2, but since the society has changed after the WW2, I start to have a shave almost everyday, it takes a lot of time!

Why did I choose German?　I don't remember the reason. I don't remember the reason, but I guess it was a very random thought, like following the common evaluation that English is the first language and German is the second, and since the first was not available, I chose the second. Also, I think it was because the German army was very famous at that time. In any case, it is not unreasonable for a 14-year-old boy.

I realized at the age of 14 that I was in a very good position in this respect. I realized this at the age of 14, and I realized that I was in a very good position in this respect, because I started learning German a few years earlier than most people who go to high school or university. In particular, a few years at the age of fourteen or fifteen have a great influence on one's ability to learn languages. For language and music, the earlier you start, the better. As long as you don't take a nap in the middle of the day like a rabbit (I took a nap a couple of times, especially when I was about twenty-three or forty-four years old, I was so absorbed in a new play that for a year or two I didn't even open my eyes and look at a word of German, because I didn't think I would be eating German...) I never thought I would be able to make a living in German, so.... I'm still doing shingeki, really!　If you think I'm lying, I'll show you.　(But I'm not very good at it. ......).

The First Struggle

Now let's move on to the story of how I learned German at the Osaka Regional Children's School, starting at the age of 14. I think the most important thing is to talk about the initial struggles. The reason for this is that there are probably still three or four hundred of us who were in the same childhood school with me at the time (the highest was a lieutenant general, and most of us were major generals or colonels when the war ended), so I can't lie, and I don't have to be modest and tell lies, so I can say this with confidence. In any case, it is a fact that during my three years of study at the local childhood school, I was able to master the German language by far, and the fact that this was the result of a kind of extraordinary effort and enthusiasm is not only acknowledged by my schoolmates at the time, but is also preserved as a so-called "one story" to this day. In any case, it was a marvelous thing. It's funny that I should say this, but I hate lying, so I don't mind if people laugh at me.What's more - and here's the interesting part - I can't help but think of it as a miracle.

Effort and miracle, miracle and effort!　That's what it's all about. If there is something to be gained from what we do when we are young, I think it is here. Effort and miracle, miracle and effort! Effort creates miracles. Effort produces miracles, and miracles produce effort (the former is just a standard Shugyo lecture, but pay attention to the latter. No matter how I think about it, I don't think I could have made such an effort, but I did it anyway because of some miracle.

A Decision at the Age of 14

What kind of effort did I make? In a word, I planned something reckless. In other words, I was taught the ABC's, learned the general pronunciation, and eventually, after the usual marital quarrels about answering or not answering or not answering were over, I think I was able to look up the dictionary by myself (I don't remember exactly when, but it might have been around the beginning of my first year, or even in the middle). I don't remember exactly when, but it might have been at the beginning of my freshman year or in the middle of my freshman year. So one day I decided, "Okay, I'm going to take this guy! There was no reason for this decision (1), it was what I call a decisive, commanding, blind, reckless, stubborn, desperate, desperate, and many other things, and at the same time I made this decision, I felt as if I had become a great person, and when I looked around at my peers, I felt as if they were two or three levels below me. I remember looking around at my peers and feeling like they were all a few grades below me. It was a daily event in my childhood school for the upperclassmen to beat up the lowerclassmen, and at first, I was so annoyed when they beat me up for no reason at all that I sometimes cried when the trumpet sounded at night and I was alone on the floor. I don't care about you! But after I made up my mind that I was going to do German, I didn't care about you guys! However, once I made this decision, I felt that my heart had left my parents, or perhaps my filial piety had faded, and I stopped writing letters to them. I don't write letters to my parents anymore, and I don't even think about my hometown before I go to sleep at night.

At the time, a captain named Kamiryo was our 12th year student advisor, and his personality is so nostalgic that it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about him. However, there was a time when this man called me up and told me until around midnight that I was a little crazy these days and that if I had any problems, I should tell him everything now. Even though he was the person I worshipped the most, I just couldn't say it. If I told him, he would ask me why. However, as I mentioned earlier, I had no reason, so I was just being stubborn as a spoiled child. Moreover, when I looked at the world with this resolution in mind, I saw that everyone looked worse than me.

Because of this, I couldn't bear the thought of having my most revered Captain Kamiryodono stare at me and criticize me in detail. But I was very sorry to him, and after standing alone in a corner of the room for a couple of hours, I started to cry instead of replying at all. Instead of answering at all, I started to cry. The captain was very stern and said, "A soldier should not cry! But he put on a kind face and said in a low voice, "All right, that's enough, go back to bed. I thought about going outside and telling him, but then I felt that he would say, "If you are going to make the same decision, why don't you decide to be a good soldier instead of deciding to speak German? I couldn't think of any reason why I would prefer German to military service, so I felt bad, but I went back to sleep. (Later, the captain wrote to my father that Sekiguchi's character had changed a little recently and that he needed to be careful because he was showing signs of becoming stern. (Later, the same captain wrote to my father that Sekiguchi had recently changed a little and was showing signs of becoming more stern.)

You can see that even a fourteen or five year old boy can make a decision that completely changes his personality. So, it would be a mistake to immediately think of a boy's change in nature or his becoming less pale as something bad. The boy has a very dangerous period of his life, when he is very emotional and sensitive. In my case, I had to leave my parents' lap for the first time in my life and enter a very strict childhood school, where upperclassmen beat me up every day and even complained about my chopsticks, so the first few months were like a whole new world. If I had gone on with my life as it was, I would have either become an unbelievable delinquent or run away to my parents and become a public joke. In an attempt to save myself from this crisis of multiple emotions and sensitivities, I took up the German language by chance.

For example, when you apply moxibustion, a person who is not sensitive to moxa may be able to endure it without hesitation, but a person who is sensitive to moxibustion may have to put pressure on his or her lower abdomen, squeeze someone's arm, or hold on to something tightly and concentrate all his or her strength into a fist in order to resist the heat. It's the same thing. I, too, tried to hold on to something to fight the crisis of my emotional and sensitive childhood, as if I were being moxibustioned in the most ticklish part of my side. The story goes that German was the closest thing he could find. Young people will understand this story, won't they?

What caught your attention first?

I'll try to remember as much as I can about the circumstances before and after I made up my mind to learn German, and then I'll write about how I did it. I think this will be of great help to you. However, I don't think it's helpful because the way I did it was exemplary and I wouldn't be ashamed to tell anyone about it, but because it wasn't exemplary. I don't want anyone with a good head on their shoulders to read this, but since no one with a good head on their shoulders is likely to read such a stupid article, I'm going to be bold and honest. For those who are not exemplary, what is not exemplary will be more exemplary.

Anyway, ...... as soon as I made up my mind, I went to the Maruzen branch in Shinsaibashi Dori on Sunday (I was in a childhood school in Osaka) and stood in front of the many foreign books. "I was filled with the feeling of "Let's just buy a book! I thought to myself. But sadly, I didn't know what to buy. I thought it would be boring to accidentally buy a medical book ...... (apparently, all the magnificent books are medical books), so I looked around here and there. I began to look at the Reclam Books. I remember that one star cost five sen, but it might have been as much as ten sen. Anyway, the price of one star was posted on the shelf, so I started looking at the titles without worry. The only problem was that the clerk was watching me, so I couldn't pull out a dictionary to look at the titles.

In the end, I bought a very thick German translation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which has seven or eight stars on it. It's a very familiar book to me. The reason why I bought this book was because when I opened it up, I noticed that on one page there were five or six words that I already knew well, such as ist, in, and ich, in succession. And, anyway, I'm going to buy a thick book and read it all!　I had a boyish feeling of bravado. The book with the most stars happened to be "Crime and Punishment". This is a very interesting point for me. The fact that I bought it without any definite idea, just because it was huge ...... seems to tell the whole story. There is nothing more meaningful than the nonsense that young people do. Whenever a young person does something strange, it shows that the educator should respect it the most.

Now, how I read it was a very drastic and reckless way of reading. Some of you may still know about it at school, but I was only about halfway through the first half of the German Book, a reading book that started with "Hier ist ein Mann," which was used by many people in the past, when a 14-year-old boy who didn't know much about the world suddenly read a German novel. So, you can probably guess how he read it. Rather, it is the question of "how could I read it" that still puzzles me to this day. Anyway, I guess I didn't understand the meaning at all from the very first line. However, there were some words that I could understand, such as ist, nicht, Haus, schön, etc., so I guess I had a vague idea of what they meant when they appeared. A smart boy would have said, "I don't understand this at all! It's a waste of time to bite into such an obscure book! If he was a smart boy, he would have had a clear understanding that "This is a waste of time! However, I was really stupid when it came to such practical matters. (I think it was not until I was almost forty years old that I started to ask people for directions when I visited their homes for the first time. (I think it wasn't until I was almost forty that I was able to ask people for directions lightly. No matter how much I lose, I don't feel any pain on the loss side, and I have the annoying habit of not feeling like I'm living unless I do something badly, just the way I want to. In other words, he is a type of "stubborn sick person. The same goes for academic matters. There are many things that I have recently discovered and admired myself that the academic world has discovered eighty years ago. (I hate people's advice the more they give me bad advice. ......) Since I see my German teacher every day, I'm sure he would have given me some good books if I had consulted him.

Some people may read five or six pages without understanding a thing, but not many people read a hundred or two hundred pages (and carefully) like I did. I did it!　If you're smart, you'll hate it, but I didn't hate it at all. When I say that I read without understanding the meaning, I don't mean that I slipped up and skated over the characters. In any case, I thought, "I'll figure it out, I'll figure it out," so I looked up every word in the dictionary, connected whatever meaning was written in the dictionary to the strange sound of the word, stared at a line or two until I could open a hole in it, reread it ten, twenty, thirty times, and then wondered, "What if it's not like that? Anyway, I pondered and pondered until I reached the last limit of my fourteen-year-old wisdom.

Anyway, ......there are too many "anyways," but ......I've always liked to think things through on my own without letting others tell me what to do. My sister, who went to a girl's school, used to come up with all sorts of riddles and assign them to me, but she had a bit of a bad habit of posing riddles to other people and then, while they were thinking, she would tease them and say something that explicitly implied the answer, and I remember we used to get angry and fight. In the end, when my sister told me a riddle, I would immediately go to the back, open the back door, stick my fingers tightly in my ears and think about it.

In other words, it was with the same kind of feeling that I had been trying to read a book I didn't understand for about a year and a half or two years. During the course of the book, I happened to hear someone say something about a translation of "Crime and Punishment" at the lodgings of a person from the same prefecture, but I still remember the unpleasant feeling I had at that time. Of course, I have no intention of referring to such a counter-translation, but anyway, the fact that the secret of each step I'm taking and exploring in this way is known clearly enough to someone in the world, whether it's a translator or something else, to be able to properly translate it into Japanese... ...was very unpleasant. If I had met such a great person, I would not have been able to be in his presence.

Then, anyway, even though I didn't know why, I liked the book very much anyway. Even after it was torn to pieces, I didn't feel like putting a new cover on it. Anyway, the brown cover had become a part of my life, and I couldn't think of turning it white or green (so it seems that my motivation to study German was not mental or content-based, but totally external and animalistic. (This shows that my motivation to study German was not mental or content-based, but external and animalistic.) I took out a book that I didn't know what it said, simply because I was attached to the color of the cover, and stared at it day in and day out for a year and a half or two years, hoping somehow to understand it because I liked the cover so much. I'm not sure if people can understand this kind of foolishness or not,......, but doesn't this happen to everyone?　I'm not sure if people know what I'm talking about. ).

In short, it took me about two years to read several hundred pages of a book that was almost a thousand pages long, without understanding it. By the end of the book, I started to understand something about ......!

"It would be a lie to say that I started to understand. "I think I'm starting to understand something. To tell the truth, I can't really remember what this "something" is right now. But anyway, here's what I can tell you: First, I started to understand the plot of the novel. I started to feel that the main character, Raskolnikov, might have fallen in love with this woman, and that's exactly what happened. When I was reading the story, thinking that it would be useless to do such a thing, the author said, "But it was useless. This is proof that I am beginning to understand the story.

Strangely enough, while I was getting the gist of what was being said, the relationships between the sentences and the characters were as hazy as looking at your neighbor's house on a foggy day, and I couldn't make out anything clearly. For example, if there was a line of text, I would immediately pronounce it, read it out loud, and repeat it over and over again, as is my habit. However, there were only a few stepping stones, a few words here and there that I knew, a few phrases that I knew, and I couldn't understand the whole structure, and I couldn't translate it if I was asked to. I can't translate it.

It's a strange thing to be able to understand a story without understanding the meaning of the text, but it's not a lie, because that's what I did. Anyway, that's how it seems to be after two years of staring at an incomprehensible book day in and day out. As I was writing this, I remembered an important fact. At that time, I did not hear the German pronunciation, but I always had the tone of voice of my teacher "Wakabayashi" in my head, so that when I fell asleep on the floor, for example, I would constantly hear long, long sentences (about two or three lines) in German that I did not understand in my head. It was like putting on a gramophone!

This is what happened to me. One night, as I was trying to fall asleep in my bedroom, thinking about something trivial while being tormented by German phrases and sentences that pierced my ears like a noisy loudspeaker in the neighborhood, there was one strange sentence that I couldn't seem to stop hearing. I tried to turn over to the right and left, but again and again the same sentence kept repeating in my head, and I couldn't help myself. In the end, I thought, I'll just keep going until I get to the point where I can't stop, so I cleared my head and spelled out the next one in my head. I went to the lavatory and held the book up to the dark bulb to look for it. I found it immediately. And when I read it, I found that it was almost exactly as I had memorized it, with a word or two of difference. Moreover, it was almost a page long (though it was the part where I could almost memorize the middle plot).

This testifies to the fact that a couple of days before, I had read the same passage over and over again, chanting it out loud without understanding it, probably repeating a page or so of it dozens of times in one night. I didn't memorize it with the intention of memorizing it, but rather, like a frog on the path of Ono no Michikaze, I jumped here and there, jumped here and there, making monotonous efforts almost like a madman.

I'm sure you'll agree with me that it's very important to have a clear understanding of what's going on.

How was the first German you learned put into your head?

Because of this, my head was filled with short, half-understood German sentences and phrases that I didn't understand. It doesn't bother me at all if I don't understand what they mean. Rather, they felt as if they understood because of the various phrases that came out. For example, whenever I come across the word elf (eleven in English), for no reason at all, the phrase Es schlug gerade elf (I have just struck eleven) reverberates in my head. However, I don't really understand the meaning of gerade. Such is a short sentence that still holds together well when I say so, but most of the time it has a meaning that doesn't hold together. For example, in an example I remember well, I was in the middle of lining up and listening to an instruction when I heard something about "son" in my ears. I knew well that the German word for "son" was Sohn, but at the same time, I thought "Sohn!" and somehow, a very long phrase, "die die liebe Base meinem Sohne hat angedeihen lassen," came to my mind as if I were playing a gramophone. It came to mind. Since I was in the middle of arranging, I had some free time, so I wondered what die die was, and what rangedeihen meant, although it must be a verb. As soon as we were dismissed, we changed into our gym clothes and got in line again, and after about thirty-four hours of one thing after another, I finally looked up the dictionary after dinner. I finally looked up Base in the dictionary after dinner, and found two words: one was "base" and the other was "relative's woman," but I couldn't figure out which one it was. For the next ten years or so, whenever I heard the word "base" (I didn't know what "base" was in the first place) or "relative's woman," I immediately thought of the phrase die die liebe Base meinem Sohne hat angedeihen lassen. Ten years later, I was a bit curious and looked up "angedeihen" in the dictionary, but I still couldn't figure out what it meant. Finally, when I was almost 30 years old and started teaching German at Hosei University, I was doing some preliminary research, and I found this angedeihen again, and it was also But I didn't have a dictionary at the time. However, I remember that at that time, without even looking up the dictionary, I was able to understand this difficult word immediately and consciously make it my own.

These are just a few examples, but all of the German words in my head have some kind of strange connection to them, with some differences. Moreover, I remember more sentences and phrases than words, which means that what I have in my head is not a pebble, but a piece of rope. When I pull on the end that is slightly visible, a long rope comes out one after another. Moreover, the rope was tangled up here and there, and it was impossible to pull out just one rope. If you pull out one rope, two or three other ropes that have nothing to do with it will tangle with it. ......

So (and this is fifteen or twenty years later), as those in the prep and German literature courses at Hosei University and those who were taught by me when I was first in good health will probably remember, I took up chalk as soon as I heard something and wrote long, floppy examples on the blackboard. As I got older, I wrote very concise, well-organized sentences of only thirty-four or fifty-six words, but when I was young and inexperienced, I would just show them a long rope of sentences as they came to mind. The students who had to listen to the lecture were the ones who were annoyed. However, because of this, I gained a reputation as "that teacher is amazing," and I quickly became known as a German genius. For the students, it was a natural disaster for the German language.

When I set up a sentence organizer notebook with the idea of German grammar by example.

One day, before I turned 30, I realized that I could not make a living in the theater and finally decided to make a living in German. One day I decided to make a living in German. The notebooks that sit on my right side now are nearly a hundred in number, each one as large as a cart. I'm not going to tell you what kind of notebooks they are because it's a business secret, but most people are surprised when they open them up.

Just before the end of the war, when we evacuated to Tsumago in Nagano Prefecture, this notebook worried me because it was like a detective story about hiding. We packed up all our belongings and asked a local carrier named Udagawa to take care of everything, and only our bodies went to Tsumago before April. However, no matter how long we waited, the shipment never arrived. While I was wondering what was going on, I received a telegram from my eldest son Ikuya, who had been away at the time, saying, "The house has burned down, and I'm going to the office only by myself. But he didn't say anything about the cargo, but simply said that the house had burned down. I assumed that the house had burned down along with the cargo before the cargo was delivered, and I was completely prepared. My notebooks, which I had spent almost half my life writing, were burned to the ground, so I was no longer qualified to be a scholar. I thought that my half a lifetime's work in planning a German grammar based on phrases and sentences had been reduced to ashes. But then, after ten or twenty days, a cartload of goods arrived!　Moreover, I was told later that the cargo had left the house on April 12th, the day before the house burned down. So the cargo was saved by a difference of a day, or to be more precise, by a difference of about ten hours.

But that's not the end of the story. The fate of the notebook was even more tricky. The notebooks came in three crates, but when I unpacked them and inspected them, I discovered that only two of the crates had arrived. I was disappointed because I had been so happy. For me, no matter how many clothes and household items were saved, I would not be grateful in the least. It was no different from not coming at all. I was disappointed again.

However, about a month later, another shipment came in, and when I ran to the door, I found that one of the crates that I had given up on was lying at the entrance with an indifferent look on its face.　According to the letter I received from the shipping company, they had brought the cargo to Mejiro Station on the 12th, but they couldn't load all of it onto the cart, so there were 56 boxes left. If I had brought the rest of the cargo back to my house, it would have been burned down along with my house, but the carrier threw the cargo out in front of his store when the alarm went off and went to the police station or something. When I came back to Tokyo, I found that only one corner of the carrier's house was left unburned, like an island!

I've wasted pages on idle chatter, but anyway, after such a dramatic fate, the mate is still safely at my side. It is truly a chaotic and dense jungle of notes. It is a kind of bizarre notebook that I have painstakingly written in day after day for almost thirty years, but which is probably not available to anyone else. For example, for the preposition "in" alone, there is a book of considerable thickness, and it is divided into many sections, each of which is filled with typed fine print, with various red, blue, black, and green markings and notes. After all, you have to be very careful when opening them, and if you open them when the wind blows, it will take ten or twenty days to sort through them. In other words, notebooks are much more subtle and detailed than my own head, so while I can use notebooks to organize my head (and that's what notebooks are for), I can't possibly organize notebooks with my head. Fire is a problem, but wind is also quite frightening.

Cursory Reading

I'm digressing again, but to finally end the story of my first steps, I'd like to mention the moment when I first gained the confidence to say, "Haha, I can read German. I remember it very clearly. Disregarding the German taught at school, I skipped the beginner and intermediate levels, and barged right into the nearly 1,000 pages of the original book, breathing like a tropical serpent in a fight to the death with a ravenous beast, and making relentless, monotonous efforts for about a year and a half or two years (in relation to my living environment). (I was so sensitive to my living conditions that I immediately regretted entering a military school, and this reckless, monotonous, and relentless inner struggle saved me from immediate anxiety. ) After reading about two-thirds of that enormous book without understanding it, I think it was around the time I started my second to third year of school, I began to notice that there were many parts of Ko that I could understand quite clearly. At times, I could read half a page or even a page at a time without difficulty, and I could understand the meaning!　I remember very clearly the strange feeling of joy I felt at this time. I remember very clearly the strange feeling of joy I felt at that moment. It was the first time in my life that I realized that I had to understand the meaning of a language before I could read it. Rather like Columbus discovering America, I felt as if I had made a great discovery when I discovered that even things written in horizontal letters had a clear meaning, word by word.

First confidence

And then - and I remember this clearly - I thought, "Well! So everything in this book has a clear meaning, word for word, as I just found out. ......" I picked up the brown book and looked at it carefully, and it felt like a completely different book. I felt as if it was a completely different book. I had only liked it strangely before, but from that moment on, I began to look at it with a kind of awe. Then, I opened the first page and read the first few lines, thinking, "So far, I've read this book without thinking that every word has a clear meaning, but I wonder if it had a clear meaning from the beginning. I opened the first page and read the first few lines. And guess what!　I could understand it or not, but once I read it down, I could understand it right away!　I became like a madman and read through the first ten or twenty pages in a single breath. I know, I know!　I can see it in a funny way!　There were phrases here and there that I had already memorized so well that they were stuck in my head, and I could clearly understand all of them, the ones I had forgotten and the ones I hadn't!　It was as if someone who had been oblivious to his nearsightedness had suddenly put on a pair of well-fitted glasses! After that, it took me a month or two to reread the book that I had spent the previous two years struggling to get through. The progress I made in German at that time was tremendous. The confidence I gained at that time was also tremendous. Then, in the third year, I bought a lot of reclaimed novels and plays, and read a lot of them during the year. Some of them were a little difficult and I didn't understand the plot or anything, but for the most part, I could understand what was written in them easily with a little dictionary. But for the most part, with a little bit of dictionary work, I was able to understand most of what was written. When I was in the third grade of a local elementary school, I developed a habit of "ryu-reading," which means that I would read the next sentence after I understood most of the words, even if I didn't know two or three words in a sentence. The textbooks we read in the classroom were so ridiculous that I remember not listening to the teacher at all, but opening the optional pages of the dictionary to search for new knowledge when I was bored.

Close reading and cursory reading

Previously, I finished describing my extremely desperate method of studying for the first couple of years, so now I'd like to talk about all the things I've been thinking about since then.

First things first.

First of all, let's look back at the absurd study method I have just described from the perspective of "close reading or rough reading", which is often a problem when discussing language study methods. From the standpoint of "close reading" or "rough reading," I'm not sure which one I belong to. It seems like binge reading in the sense that I was reading in a rough and crude way, and it seems like close reading in the sense that I couldn't make much progress in a day because I couldn't get anywhere and had to keep looking up the dictionary.

However, after I finished reading the enormous novel, I had some confidence, and then I went on to read various difficult books one after another in the "second period". I read randomly, went through them half-digested, put them away quickly, and rifled through them one after another. ...... In short, typical binge reading. So, since I'm sure this is of interest to everyone, I'd like to share some of my own beliefs about this famous question of close reading or binge reading, as they relate to my own habits (beliefs are always related to personality, and I believe that everything I'm about to say is true only for people who are like me). (Beliefs are always related to individuality. (Beliefs are always related to individuality, so please consider that everything I am about to say is a truth that can be applied only to people who are like me.) I seem to belong to the so-called Dionysus type, to borrow Nietzsche's term.

There are two ways to study a language, the way of close reading and the way of rough reading like me. This is because of the experience I had when I was young, as I have mentioned so far (but please think of this as a case where you have young people in mind. It's a little different when you're much older. Let's talk about that much further down the road. I would like to say that this is the most common case in the world, and that there is nothing more poisonous to the world than this. I would like to say that this is the most common example in the world, and there is nothing worse than poisoning the world.

The term "reading incessantly" is a poor choice of words, so I'll call it "reading in a stream", which is the Kursorische Lektüre (running, flowing, reading through) to the Statarische Lektüre (close reading, mature reading). If you don't know how to do this, you won't be able to progress in the language. Also, if you don't do this boldly from the very beginning, you will never develop an unconscious bottom line. It is a big mistake to think that reading smoothly is something you can do only after you have acquired a considerable amount of language ability, but the opposite is true. "If you don't do this, you won't have "substantial language ability" in the first place. It's not that you can read smoothly when you understand, it's that you can understand when you read smoothly.

Of course, to do this kind of reading from the beginning requires a great deal of determination on the part of those who already have a clear mind and a lot of common sense. I was able to do such an insane thing because I was confused after being suddenly thrown into a military school, and I took it almost as a desperate act of self-defense. But for young people who are studying in a normal and free environment, it would be ridiculous to ask them to read an enormous book of 1,000 pages just for the pleasure of occasionally reading a line or two on a page that is half-understood. Instead, you will want to read something that makes sense to you. If I were to ask you to spend twelve years of your life doing useless things that you have no idea whether you are making progress or not, you would not be able to ...... do it. But, but!　If you don't do monotonous, relentless, mindless, insane, blind and destructive "shit study" in some sense, you'll never get anything done. I think this is the most direct way to go.

However, as I have already said, if you are a person with a fairly developed mind, you must be prepared to do a lot of work in order to accomplish this kind of reading. First of all, don't worry too much if you don't understand a few words. Secondly, you can look up each word you don't understand in the dictionary, but if you can't make any progress because of that, there is no point in reading the book. However, if you find that you understand the meaning of a sentence well, and there is one word or phrase in the sentence that you don't know, and you are very curious about it, you should take your time and look it up in the dictionary. In such cases, you should take a moment and think about the words in detail in the dictionary. This is like an oasis in the desert of monotonous reading. If you do this all the time, it will become monotonous and less effective, but it works well because you do it once in a while.

Thirdly - and this is the most important! The third thing is to dare to reject all kinds of trivial reflections and become a complete idiot. It's hard for smart people to do this. The smartest people are the ones who are impatient for success, who don't have patience, who think of all kinds of plausible things, who criticize their own work. This is what is wrong. "I'm reading so much without really knowing what it all means, but isn't this just an uphill battle? Or, "I don't feel like I'm making any progress at all, what's the fun in this? These and many other reflections may arise, but they are strictly forbidden when you are reading in the same way. If you are so smart, you should also be smart enough to think, "There is no right or wrong way to do things, and in the end, doing a bad way thoroughly is a better way than doing a good way poorly.

In short, ryu-yomi may not be the best way to read, but it is the easiest way for energetic young people who don't mind wasting time and energy to do so. I think this is more difficult to implement if you are a close reader who has to look up the meaning of every word and understand it well before proceeding. This person would have to be very strong-willed to do it thoroughly until the end. In comparison, the same shit study is much easier to do if you read in a stream. Even an idiot can do it (for a smart person, as I said, there are some difficulties).

When we do a close reading, we mainly use our brains, intellect, and consciousness. On the other hand, when you read in a stream, "feeling," "instinct," and "unconsciousness" come into play. I believe that language is not a matter of the mind, but mainly of the feeling. What you learn with your head is useless, but what you learn with your feelings and instincts certainly is. The head can't remember a lot of things at one time, but instinct and feeling, on the other hand, can remember an unbelievable amount of things in a short period of time, albeit very vaguely. Memorization is also a matter of feeling, after all. This is why, for example, if you take a single word and try to memorize it by logic, it will not go as you expect. In the end, you will find out after a long time whether you were able to remember it or not, but when you examine it carefully, you will find that you don't remember many words that you made a conscious effort to memorize because you thought you needed it. I remember the words that I had a "feeling" that I could remember. This shows that memorization is all about feeling.

When you are reading in a stream, you don't have time to consciously think in detail.

When you are reading, you don't have time to consciously think about the details, so your brain is shut down and your subconscious mind is mainly at work. When you read it carefully, you can see that the conscious mind is very active, which at first glance makes you feel as if you are making great progress, which gives satisfaction to people with good minds. On the other hand, the development of feeling tends to be hindered because unconscious activities are blocked by the brilliant conscious activities.

For the first two years of my life, I tried to read like the frog of Ono no Michikaze, but generally speaking, I read in the same way. Then, when I began to understand and could read more or less smoothly, I did nothing but cursory reading. In other words, for about ten years from the time I was in my sixteenth year (the third year of a local childhood school) to the time I was twenty-six and seventeen years old, I really did a lot of reading. I only occasionally did some close reading. It was only when I became almost thirty and started teaching at Hosei University, where I had to give explanations and translations in front of students, that I realized that I could not serve as a teacher unless I did close reading, and I finally got into the habit of making an effort to read while thinking in detail.

Based on the idea that in my local childhood I often had incomprehensible short sentences and fragments dancing around in my head that were just useful, I then invented a kind of method that I began to use consciously. It is a method I have already introduced to others many times, but I would like to mention it in passing (in fact, I used this method to make progress in my French studies, which I started around the age of 20).

About "Memorization"

When I'm doing cursory reading and I come across a sentence that says, "This makes a lot of sense! I immediately look up from the book and try to say the sentence (even if it's only two or three lines) out loud.

If you get stuck, look at the book a little bit, as if you are cheating, and somehow memorize it. Then you say it over and over again and memorize it.

In the end, I was able to say two or three lines of any sentence immediately after reading it once (after thirty-four years of practice). Moreover, instead of memorizing a single sentence forever, I practiced it day after day so that I could say it in Japanese as soon as I read it. Of course, it's not very interesting, so it doesn't take half an hour and a lot of patience. Most of the time, I got tired of it after about 15 or 20 minutes. But I did it at least once or twice a day. As I did this, various strange things started to happen. For example, when I reached the end of a page and the sentence was still continuing on to the next page, I would be able to guess what the first word of the next page was without opening the page immediately. You will discover that not only the first word, but sometimes as many as forty-five words will go as you imagined. (And the weird thing is, you can even figure out the destination of a sentence full of unfamiliar words that don't make much sense. It's weird, but it happens.

I learned French very easily by doing that while I was learning German. I went to a school called the Athénée Français in Kanda, and I had already learned it in the year before. I went to a school called the Athénée Français in Kanda, Tokyo, and I had already done that for a year before, and after a few more years, I was able to read, speak, and spell French all at once. I was even hired as a teacher at the same school, and I was able to earn my living by teaching French instead of German, which was my main occupation, thanks to the study method I just mentioned. Of course, my French was not complete as an academic discipline, because I was merely a fluent speaker. Of course, my French was not complete as an academic discipline because I did not read a lot of literature. But anyway, I think I'm as good as those who specialize in French when it comes to translating and teaching, but sadly, my progress has stopped and I don't seem to have much real ability.

Philologie and Linguistik.

The story of my struggles during the first ten years after I started learning German has been described above, but if I were to talk about what happened after that, I would have to consider one of the major problems that lie at the root of language education. The critical issue is whether "philologie" (cultural language) or "linguistik" (practical language) is a critical issue that is especially relevant to the current policy of foreign language education, and also to those who are going to learn any foreign language.

First of all, I would like to make a clear statement about my own tendencies. For those of you who have read my personal story up to now, there is no need to confess again, but I am a person who studied German from books in Japan. In other words, I am a person who learned German from books, just as Chinese scholars learned Chinese sentences in the past. Recently, especially in the field of English education, there seems to be a lot of talk about the need to adopt a teaching method that allows students to learn with their ears and mouths, and not to teach in an "academic" way. From that point of view, I would probably be in the camp of those who are criticized.

However, from the standpoint of "cultural linguistics" versus "practical linguistics," I would say that I am somewhere in the middle, with a slight leaning toward cultural linguistics.

I also have to confess that my practical linguistics (i.e., pronunciation, conversation, writing, etc.) is not so good. I have never even been to Germany, so you must consider it a miracle that I can speak, but of course I can't speak so smoothly, and I have to work very hard to say every word. I am confident that my pronunciation is close to that of a German up to 99%, but there is nothing I can do about the other 1%. I used to broadcast in German on the radio about ten years ago, so those of you who have listened to it will have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. It is strange for me to say this, but my pronunciation is very similar to that of Germans. It is not a poor pronunciation that sounds like something a Japanese person would do. However, when I asked a German, he said, "If you listen carefully, you can tell right away that he is not a real German. After all, it's not like the English of the second generation.

When it comes to writing, this person is much more genuine than pronunciation. He takes a lot of pains, sometimes a lot of time, to research and write essays, and he knows a lot of things from reading literature, philosophy, and other books, so you could say that he can write essays like a German.

It is a bit difficult to explain how I have been able to advance my pronunciation, conversation, writing, and other aspects of practical linguistics to such a degree, even if somewhat falsely, based simply on the knowledge of German that I have acquired through my eyes. Those who praise me tend to dismiss me as a "language genius," an honorable but somewhat annoying adjective that makes little sense to me. The reason why it is annoying is because the adjective "genius" is an evaluation that doesn't buy into my complicated, subtle, infinitely complex, and infinitely intricate "artificial efforts" that I have manipulated with my consciousness, brain power, effort, and hard work, as well as the "planning" and "belief" behind those efforts. No, my language ability, whether you look at it upright or sideways, is nowhere near "genius," it's all just an artificial thing that I've consciously, effortfully, and planningly made up with what I can and what I can hold on to. For example, in terms of pronunciation, since I could not go to Germany, I had to pay attention to every word spoken by Germans in Tokyo every time I came in contact with them, like a botanist collecting plants, and at the same time, I tried my best to imitate their pronunciation. In particular, I often used vocal movies. I would watch the same movie for three or four nights in a row and end up memorizing half of the phrases in the movie. Even so, it was difficult to understand everything I heard. But anyway, I learned a lot from the talkies. In addition, when I was already twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I had the good fortune to meet an Austrian living in Tokyo, Leopold Winkler, who lived in Okubo. I still have this guy, but he is the only German I talk to in person. In addition, to date, I have probably spoken to 50 or 60 Germans in various relationships. My conversational ability and pronunciation are very much artificial, acquired from 50 to 60 Germans of various backgrounds in Tokyo and some German movies. What an effort!　When it comes to certain details, I am too embarrassed to disclose them.

It is true, however, that my German language has a lot of "practical language aspects" that many German scholars and professors in Japan lack, no matter how hard they try to make it. It is true that I have a lot of "practical linguistic aspects" that are greatly lacking in the professors, and I can say that my strength is that I am a man of the "Philologie" field, which is the same as these people, but I have a lot of practical linguistic elements that are most lacking in these fields. However, if there are people who think that I am merely a pragmatic linguist, I have a definite objection to that. After all, I am opposed to the idea that language is exclusively a practical language, and in that sense, I may not be what one would call a "linguist. In this sense, I may not be what you would call a "linguist," but I am in the camp of "scholars" who know a lot of difficult things, but when it comes to speaking and listening, they get confused about even the simplest things.

Therefore, when it comes to the question of cultural or practical language, I am more inclined to emphasize "cultural language". It may be a bit against the current times, but from the lofty perspective of a country's culture, I believe that all true educators must be like that. This is not to say that I am opposed to the reform of the ear-to-mouth method of teaching, which is fine, and I myself have made it my highest principle when actually teaching. (I am not designated as such now, but I graduated from the Military Academy and was formally commissioned as a second lieutenant.

Now I would like to say a few words about how I emphasize cultural languages. However, this issue is so closely related to the process of my own language development that I don't think it is possible to separate the two, so I ask for your patience.

First of all, let's take a closer look at what is called Linguistik, or practical linguistics. If we do so, we will soon find out whether it is really the ideal of language.

In my experience, practical linguistics is a moot point, as long as the true language, i.e., cultural language, is more solid. It is often said that university English is to blame, that after years of university English, you can't even read a canned label. But that's unavoidable, because they don't teach you how to read labels on canned goods!

On the contrary, foreign languages acquired with the ideal of practical linguistics alone have a much more fatal flaw. It is a common phenomenon that some people who are able to speak well with foreigners really know the foreign language well, but most of them do not. As a result, when it comes to more complicated topics, such as the presentation of ideas or matters of the heart, the gaijin gives up from the beginning and does not take any notice of them. When such a person is seated together with a foreigner discussing such a difficult topic, it is as if a rakugo storyteller has taken on the role of an opera performer. I have seen and known such situations many times, and it is truly humiliating, or rather, I would say, a national disgrace. In such cases, I feel a kind of righteous indignation. I am whipped by an indignant patriotism. I thought, "I don't care how many times we lose the war, but we need to create 50,000 to 60,000 Japanese who can at least meet the spiritual and cultural standards of the West without being laughed at. It is true.

Therefore, even though I am more keenly aware of the necessity of practical language study than anyone else, my conviction that language education in Japan must be a cultural language comes first and foremost from my patriotism from a cultural perspective. This patriotism and ethnocentrism are the only things that do not cost a penny.

I am not a man with a right-wing ideology. Nor am I a leftist. I am more of a cosmopolitan liberal or an individualistic nihilist. However, there is a beast from the past that remains in the back of my mind that I can't get rid of, no matter how hard I try. It is a sense of patriotism, a sense of self-respect as a Japanese. I want you to leave this one alone and not touch it. But Maa, let's not talk about this, because it's silly. ......

Why not?However, I think that the purpose of learning a foreign language is completely different from learning a German, English, French, etc. language with a cultural background, or learning Hottentot, Zulu, Dakota, or Eskimo.However, it should not be the ideal to be able to read a canned label or talk to a Westerner. As long as one can read, it is not necessary to be able to speak or write. At the very least, not all intellectuals need to be able to speak or write. But all intellectuals need to be able to read books!　This is my point of view.

If you ask me, I think that the purpose of learning a foreign language is completely different from learning a German, English, French, etc. language with a cultural background, or learning Hottentot, Zulu, Dakota, or Eskimo. Or is there no difference?

Of course, if you can read books, but you can't speak or write well, that's one thing. But it's better than not being able to read!

Anyway, let's not forget the most important thing for a little trifle. They say that university professors can't speak a word of English, or that linguists can't pronounce a word of English, but who do you think is responsible for improving our culture and science to at least the level it is today?　Is it the power of foreign guides, rickshaw pullers in Yokohama, pumpernickel pans specializing in American soldiers, and other people who can talk to foreigners in a lively manner?　If so, the Javanese, French Indians, and other colonial natives who had more contact with foreigners would have been able to penetrate the brains of Westerners much more than we did, and would have been much closer to the level of Western culture than we were.

Rather, it was the medical doctors, scientists, thinkers, translators, writers, university professors, and other one-lingual scholars who could read books, but were unable to speak English.　In other words, they were "cultural linguists"!

After all, there is no such thing as a poor practical language in terms of vocabulary and expressions. On the contrary, the foreign languages that appear in books are the real English and the real German (the theory that the language spoken is the real language is obsolete). Therefore, this one is not so easy to control. It will take many years of study. But that is rather natural.

Those who take language lightly should go back to the position of the old Chinese scholars and deeply reflect on its true purpose. Otherwise, the map of the Far East will completely change its color by 2049 AD.

The above is based on the assumption that it is only about the German language. I don't know anything about the Hottentot language, though it might be a little different if it were a Hottentot language.

Conversation and Composition

In the above, from the perspective of cultural linguistics, I have been a little too critical of practical linguistics, but now I would like to go back to my struggles and tell you mainly about my struggles in the areas of conversation and pronunciation.

It was not German that I struggled the most with in terms of conversation and pronunciation, but French first and foremost. (Even so, when I was in the military academy, I secretly kept a French translation of Tolstoy's novel in my desk. (Nevertheless, he had kept a French translation of Tolstoy's novel in his desk without telling anyone when he was at the military academy, and was summoned by the weekly watchman - Lieutenant Ii, I think it was - and was severely yelled at, saying that he was an anarchist, so he must have already been able to read to some extent even at the military academy.

However, while doing French, I had yet to hear a single French pronunciation. So, as soon as I was forced to quit the army, I enrolled in a French night school in Kanda called Athene Francais. By that time, I was able to read and understand most of the books alone. In the two years before that, I had a lot of free time, so I decided to read about a hundred pages of French a day, whether I understood it or not, and I spent about half an hour a day studying. In addition, I set aside about half an hour a day for the practice of "looking over a couple of sentences once, and if there is a word in it that I don't understand, I can immediately say it in French. The progress in French during that time was really great, and I think that was partly because I had already been learning German for seventy-eight years.

In short, by the time I entered Athens Francais, I hardly knew a chit about pronunciation, but I had made considerable progress in reading. So, right from the start, I entered the advanced course. I was taught by Mr. Cotte, the headmaster of the school, who of course spoke entirely in French. To tell you the truth, I didn't understand a word of what they were saying for the first couple of hours. It was the first time in my life that I heard French pronunciation, so it was understandable. In addition, they would ask me questions from time to time. I felt very weak.

However, strangely enough, from the fourth or fifth hour, I started to understand. It was as if a fog had lifted and I could see the house next door. Once I started to understand, I could understand every word clearly. And this was in the fourth or fifth hour. This was all thanks to the two years of intensive study I had done on the books before. Also, the practice policy of "memorizing long sentences as they are" that I have already mentioned worked well.

I would like to emphasize one point in particular: language is really quite easy to learn, as long as you can already read books well. From my own experience, I would like to assert this point. "If Sanyo Rai had gone to China, he probably would have been able to learn actual Chinese in a year. This is because I spent about two or three years learning actual pronunciation at the Athénée Français, and by the third year, I was accepted by the aforementioned Mr. Cotte to teach at the school as a direct teacher of the Athénée Français style, albeit a bit sluggishly. The reason why I was accepted was not that I was particularly good at French as an actual language, but I had absorbed a great deal of Western spiritual culture through German, and in addition, I had been reading French books for a couple of years, so my "spiritual level" was somehow different. In addition, he had been forced to read French books for a couple of years, so his "spiritual level" was somehow different. Mr. Yoshihiko Yamada was also in Mr. Cotte's office at that time, but I think he was also bought for that reason. Although it would be rude to say so, I thought that Yoshihiko Yamada and I would never be able to compete with someone like Juntaro Maruyama, even if we stood on our heads.

This is going to sound a bit ragged, but I really had a bloody hard time in the classroom at the Athénée Français. Anyway, I had to teach the ABCs of French in French from the very beginning, without using any Japanese. As a newcomer, it was a real hardship for me to teach them from the very beginning in French, without using any Japanese. I had to speak in French all the time for the whole hour, with my hands and feet, in other words, pretending to be a French person, and teach them from the ABCs. In other words, it was the most theatrical of all. In addition, while I was teaching, Cotte-san was walking along the corridor outside the door, squeaking her shoes, and listening carefully to every word. As soon as I came out of the class, she grabbed me and said that your pronunciation of difficile sounded like difcile, that I needed to hear the -i- in fi more clearly, and that you were a commencer de ...... You said commencer de , but commencer is not de, it's à. Or that "at this moment" is not à ce moment, but en ce moment, and that "à ce moment" would be "at that moment". In any case, I was pointed out five or six errors in one class. It was at this time that I keenly realized that when it comes to conversation and writing, unless you are very good, you will not be able to become a full-fledged student.

In this way, I made a lot of mistakes and experienced a lot of embarrassment, but thanks to this direct teaching, I was able to reflect fundamentally not only on my French, but also on my German, my main language. Even though I think I know a lot, I have to be very sure that I can responsibly teach even the simplest things to others.

Anyway, thanks to Cotte's training, my French as an actual language improved remarkably in a short time, and later, when I worked in the translation division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I translated some rather complicated diplomatic documents into French. In the end, I was surprised to find that some of my ideas were accepted. If I didn't have cultural ambitions, I would have stayed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and probably become the head of the Translation Division by now. However, I only intended to study French as a liberal arts subject, no more than Latin or Greek, so I stopped working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as soon as I found a job in film. However, at that time, I still had no idea that languages would become my main occupation, so my ideal was "philosophy or entertainment," which was a bit of a strange thing for me to do.

Since I mentioned acting, I would be remiss if I didn't mention this person as well. While learning French, I was most interested in the French plays held by the Alumni Association of the Athenee Francais. I'm sure many of the people who were there at that time are still alive and well, but they performed Moliere, Raviches, etc. in very bogus French. I myself was a bratty general and took the lead role whenever I was asked to do something. There was usually a French semi-expert there to correct my pronunciation, which was very useful for my language skills. So, I don't mean to brag, but I think my French pronunciation is as good as any of the current masters who specialize in French. I'm not sure if it's because I haven't made any progress in my language skills over the years, or if it's just my pronunciation (but I'm not so sure anymore when it comes to speaking French, as it seems that if you don't use it for a long time, it gets worse). I can barely say what I need to do).

More than ten years ago, I was annoyed when some people started to talk about me as if I was a philologist. In other words, I can speak not only German, but also French, English, Italian, all Western languages, and even Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew and other classical languages. In addition, I can speak Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and other classical languages. I was troubled by his irresponsible writing in magazines.

As a cultural linguist, if I were told that I could speak many languages, I would become a kind of phony in the eyes of the public. People who think that the relationship between an individual's limited life and the brain achievements he or she can make in that limited life is extremely insignificant will say things like, "That person can speak many languages, ten languages," without any conditions, which is really strange. In fact, it is not rare for a person to be able to speak several languages at will. However, it must be practical linguistics. For example, there are millions of people in the world who have mastered several languages in the range of low-grade practical linguistics, that is, in the range of conversation and daily intentions. If you want to make a business out of it, you can probably master about 30 languages in your lifetime. However, if you have already mastered a high level of practical linguistics (let's call it a slightly hairy version of practical linguistics. However, if you are already in the range of high-level practical linguistics (let's call it "practical linguistics with a hint of hair", although this is not much after all), such as reading newspapers, interpreting at international conferences, or translating scientific books, you will not be able to master dozens of languages. Even for a genius, five or six languages would be the most. It is natural for anyone to be a little skeptical when it comes to four or five languages.

In short, being able to speak so many languages is all about practical linguistics, and when it comes to truly in-depth research, i.e., a true cultural language, even two languages are impossible. For example, in my case, if I tried to study German and French in depth, I would be chasing two rabbits. For example, in my case, if I tried to study German and French in depth, I would be chasing two rabbits, because a true cultural language is not only a language, but also all the literature, academic books, customs, history, etc. written in that language. In the case of the German language, the German language as a cultural language encompasses everything that the German mind has created, just as Chinese literature, Confucianism, Chinese culture, and Buddhist culture encompassed everything in the past. The German language is not only the German language. As a cultural language, a German linguist is more than just a linguist (as I have often said, German, English, French, etc. are not Hottentots or Eskimos). First and foremost, one must be a literary person, an artist, a philosopher, a thinker, one must know science, one must have knowledge of institutional culture, and one must have considerable confidence in daily conversation, writing, pronunciation, and other concrete practical linguistics. It is not a true cultural language unless it is built on the foundation of all these. In this sense, how can a person learn more than two languages in a lifetime?

I say this categorically. It is absolutely impossible. If someone claims to be able to do that in more than one language, they are cheating. A true genius would not make such a foolish effort. If there is someone who plans to do such a thing, it is proof that he is not a genius.

However, in order to understand German, for example, and to master its fundamentals, it is necessary to have some knowledge of not only English and French, but also Greek, Latin, and as many other languages of the same family as possible. All learning is like a pyramid, and if the base is not wide enough, the height cannot be reached. For this reason, I also studied French and other languages. I can read a little bit of English. But I don't want to be called "fluent" in several languages. But I don't want to be called "fluent" in several languages, because I feel like asking myself, "What is fluent? But I don't like to be called "fluent" in several languages because it makes me want to ask myself, "What is fluency?

A personal view on memorization and memory

It was between the ages of twenty and thirty that I became obsessed with French and temporarily neglected German, the language in which I was most confident, but during that time I also became obsessed with theatrical performances, translated for a living, and engaged in various other pastimes that had nothing to do with my main occupation. However, language is a strange thing, and as it turns out, the unrelated things are the most related. When I think about it now, I wonder why I didn't get involved in more things, and I rather resent the fact that I didn't get sidetracked more often. Nowadays, German is my lifelong endeavor, but in other fields, the only thing I can do with confidence is theater. At my age, I don't have the confidence to learn the way of business, nor do I have the energy to become a scientist again. In fact, I would like to be a lawyer, a social activist, and do many other things. But I can't do that anymore.

Even though it is called a language, a language is deeply related to the "things" of life. To take a simple example, you can't learn a single word if it doesn't interest you. For example, the German word for "mood" or "feeling" is die Stimmung. You can teach it to the students in the classroom by writing it on Kurosaka, and then mix it in with the exam questions. If you have fifty students, probably forty or fifty-six of them will have forgotten. However, there are four or five students who remember it mysteriously and answer it correctly as if they had been waiting for it. Try to find out what kind of person that student is. The student must have a deep interest in something like art or art theory, and lives in a world that has something to do with the concept of "mood" in some deep way. This is just a small example, but the bottom line is that memorizing words is not just a matter of memorization, as most people think. It's not a matter of "being smart" or "being bad. The ability to memorize is determined by how deeply and how strongly a person is interested in various phenomena in life. Let's take a different example. Memorizing words (and thus understanding sentences, phrases, etc.) is like memorizing people's names and faces. If you were asked to memorize a list of twenty or thirty names of people who have nothing to do with you, who don't hurt you or itch you, you wouldn't be able to memorize them even if you stared at them for an hour. I have tried this myself as an experiment. When I was at Hosei University, the admissions committee had finally decided on the students who would be entering my class with German as their first language, and I had a list of students with their photo IDs in order, so I decided to do a little warsa. I decided to do a little "warsa," which meant that before I came into contact with a student for the first time, I would compare their photo with their name, so that I would have the names and faces of seventy or eighty people in the class in my head. Then, from the very first day of teaching, he would suddenly grab a student he had never met before and say, "Hey, this teacher knows each and every one of you from the very beginning. It took me three or four hours to memorize the pictures and names, looking at them for a moment and closing my eyes, then looking at them for a moment and closing my eyes again, just as you would memorize a vocabulary card.

As a result, when I stood up in the classroom, I found that only four or five of the seventy-eight students remembered me, and two of them, when I called out to them, said, "You're wrong! When I called two of them, they said, "Wrong! In other words, Maeda was called Maekawa, Furuya was thought to be Furuya, but it was Koya, and so on. ...... No, it was a complete failure!

Forcing yourself to cram words onto word cards is the same thing, isn't it?

On the contrary, where you are already interested, you can learn the name of any person without any effort. If you hear the name of a woman you think is beautiful, you will probably remember it for the rest of your life. In fact, you will probably have a hard time forgetting it. The face of a man who says or does something rude to you will be instantly etched in your mind, and his name, along with his voice, will be incorporated into your vocabulary as an absolute certainty that cannot be wiped away!

One-sentences, declarations, and sentences are no different. This is the reason why you have to be very careful in writing letters that are related to emotional issues. You may have written it without much thought, but the person who reads it will have it engraved in their mind like a student who has been taught the part of the "mountain" that is sure to appear on the exam. The only difference is that students study for exams with a headache and cram in five or six lines of text, but flattery or slander that touches a sore spot or a ticklish spot is read twice, three times, four times, as if it were sucked in, without the need for a headache or a headband. Even when I'm writing a sentence that has nothing to do with it, I can't help but come up with the phrase whenever there is even a slight resemblance.

These are just a few examples, but there is a psychological basis for the phenomenon of memorization, which can be summed up in one sentence: "Words that relate to a direction in which you are already cultivating potential interest will stick in your head as if you've been waiting for them, but words that don't yet exist in your sphere of interest will be forgotten. No matter how hard you try, no matter how smart you are, the amount of words that enter your mind is fixed, just like the relationship between your stomach and food, and once they enter your mind, you forget them. That's why you can only memorize about ten words a day that have nothing to do with your interests, regardless of how good or bad your brain is. Even if you memorize a hundred words, you will surely forget ninety of them. If you learn ten words a day, that's three thousand six hundred and fifty a year. Five years or ten years is nothing. If you have such a poor memory, you will not be able to master a language in your lifetime. (Just to be clear, I said ten words a day, but to elaborate, for example, there are probably more than a hundred uses of kommen, so all such words should be counted as more than a hundred words. (In the case of in, an, etc., you would have to count it as 500 or 1,000 words.

"Interest" and "greed" are decisive factors.

Therefore, if you memorize ten or twenty words a day, you will not be able to keep up with them, and if you look at it as a whole, you will have to memorize thirty or forty times as many words to be able to read a little in five or ten years. The reason why such a miracle is possible is because of the connection with interest, so even if you think you have read one page of the original text and have drawn fifteen or six words, you have actually learned probably fifty or sixty new things on that page through the unconscious power of interest. What determines whether the dozens of new things on a page that you unconsciously memorize will become thirty, forty, or fifty (here's the problem!)? It is not determined by "brain power" or "eagerness". It is determined by the "latent interest" that colors our consciousness every moment while we are unaware of it. It is this "latent interest" that determines whether we understand or not when we read the text. This latent interest, like a high-voltage electric wire network, stretches out like a network of interest and pain in all areas of life, to the same degree as material desire, sexual desire, and self-esteem issues. It's a story of naming them.

For example, young people in the prime of their springtime, when they hear a certain story, they react with a fierce potential that we old people cannot match.　That is genius. The people who do bad things under the eye of the authorities have a level of intelligence in certain matters that is beyond that of you innocent people. This is genius. Everyone is a genius when it comes to things that have a serious bearing on them. In matters that have nothing to do with you directly, even Newton was no better than a lowly child.

The difference between a genius and a mediocre in a certain matter is simply the degree to which we are pained or itched by that matter. The difference between a genius and an ordinary person in a certain matter is simply the degree of pain and itch we feel toward that matter. The difference between genius and mediocrity is simply the degree to which we feel it. This is what I believe.

By the way, where do the pain and the itch come from?　Isn't it heaven that we are born with that pain and raised with that itch?　I would like to answer this question in a simple way. It comes from the heart, like a snake. We all come into this world with (too much) abundance, and we are born from a horrible, poisonous, eternally unknowable "snake-like mind. The Vedasutra says "The Vairocana Sutra says, "Without destroying love, you will attain liberation. I would like to replace the word "then" (obgleich) with "therefore" (weil). I would like to replace the word "yet" (obgleich) with "therefore" (weil) and say, "Because you do not destroy your love, you will attain liberation, and because you are in the phase of the five opposites, you will attain liberation.

There is no limit to how much I could write about this relationship, but its relationship to memorization is quite clear, isn't it? "This is what I meant when I said, "I should have had more fun when I was young and gone off on all kinds of tangents.

This is not only my personal view as a linguist, but I believe that every person who is trying to fully accomplish a professional mission has this kind of lament, don't you?　It is not so easy to say what is related to what in the human world. Every department stands in an ordinary relationship to every other department. In order to be profoundly thorough in one thing, we must not be profoundly thorough in another. In order to embrace the whole range, we must not embrace the whole range. In order to embrace the whole range, we must not embrace the whole range. In order to embrace the whole range, we must not embrace the whole range. In order to make one place deep, it is necessary to make it as wide as possible. This is because width is not width at all, but a kind of depth. The depth is also not really a depth, but merely a kind of width. There is no absolute value for width and depth as width and depth respectively, because the problem is to achieve a large area.

As a mere scholar of one language, I think my "half-life view" is probably a common practice among all professionals who work with brain power as their capital. In fact, no one has ever taught me this. I myself have made many mistakes and lost my way, and now that I can no longer get back, I have come to this realization clearly. In any case, this kind of lifelong policy, or lifelong economy, or whatever you want to call it, is the kind of training that should be thoroughly prepared for, for example, having a good teacher at a university, and separating only those who study, so that they can make the most effective use of their lives.

Fortunately, before I turned thirty, I had clearly decided on the most advantageous way to live my life, the way to make the most of my conditions, and had made up my mind about it. But anyway, my starting point was too narrow to become a linguist. If philosophy, literature, and theatrical performance are your secondary specialties, you are not much of a linguist. If you are careless, you will end up as a mere pragmatist. Or maybe not, but it seems that there are many people who see me as such. When I think about it, my original ideal of a cultural language may have been unsuccessful this time, as long as the experiment was conducted with me as the material (although it is very shameful to admit this). I will try again in the next life. But please buy the ideal of cultural language as an ideal.

In connection with this story, I would like to introduce my personal motto as a cultural linguist. In the words of the great writer Schiller, German is a little difficult, but study it. It is as follows.

Wer etwas Großes leisten will，muss tief eindringen，scharf unterscheiden，vielseitig verbinden, und standhaft beharren．
Whoever wants to accomplish something great，must penetrate deeply，distinguish sharply，connect many-sidedly, and persevere steadfastly．

I had some success with the second and fourth points above, but I completely failed with the first and third.

Now let's change our focus a bit and talk about our experiences with time use.

Time Use

I have been very active in the area of using my spare time, so to speak. I have dabbled in classical languages, Latin quite deeply, Greek somewhat less deeply, and finally a little bit of Sanskrit, all thanks to the use of spare time. As for Greek, I don't think I spent more than an hour sitting in my study and studying it properly. In other words, I did all my studying on the train and during the ten-minute breaks between classes. In return, I was able to understand some Greek in my spare time, without affecting my German and other subjects. I studied Latin at the Athénée Français and later taught Latin there as a lecturer, so I studied a lot at home to avoid embarrassing myself in the classroom. However, at the same time, I taught Latin at Athens Francais in a direct teaching style, where no Japanese was allowed in the classroom and Latin was explained and translated in French. My interest was mainly in French. When students would come to me with difficult quotations, I would often chase them away by making puns in French and laughing at them. I would like to add that I am sorry to say that there might be such a person who might be reading this article and laughing. I'm much more advanced than that.

This is a bit of a digression, but the first thing that comes to mind when I think of using one's spare time is the latrine, although this is a bit of a digression. A few minutes or even a dozen minutes spent squatting in the latrine can be a lot of time in a person's lifetime. Moreover, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of quality, the time spent squatting in the latrine is extremely valuable. When you are in this world, you are in a state of anxiety in many ways, but when you go into a villa and come into contact with the stinky air, not to mention the stinky food, it really calms you down. When I was about twenty years old, I began to think about how I could make use of the ten minutes of zazen, and at first I made a vocabulary book and brought it with me, but eventually I realized that the ten minutes I had been selected for was too wasteful to do something as trivial as memorizing words. I realized that I should use it for something more meaningful, and finally came up with a plan to go out with a book in my pocket as soon as I had a bowel movement. It's not a matter of reading a book, but of opening a book that I have marked with a red pencil and thinking about a few lines. There were many times when I was unable to understand something in the real world, but within ten minutes I was able to figure it out in a flash. Also, when I quietly reread a phrase that I had red-lined because I thought it was interesting (because it was so long ago that I had almost forgotten about it) and savored it while thinking deeply, a whole new world that I had never paid attention to began to open up in front of me. It's like sitting in front of an infinite paradise. Anyway, there are so many unexpected things that I cannot describe them one by one, but in any case, in terms of deepening one's thought, there is a harvest that cannot be ignored. If you think I'm lying, go ahead and try it. Anyway, when you are reading a book, you may think, "This is interesting," or "I should think about this," or "This has something to do with me," and you may draw a red line through it.　For that reason, there is no suitable air outside, leaving the stinky air on the face wall for ten minutes. At least I think the latrine is the best place for it. The term "contemplation" is often used to describe the contemplation of a young person who does not yet have a solid, concrete content. It was the same for me. However, if you give yourself some written text and its meaning as a starting point, you will find that your mind will develop to an extent that surprises even you. On top of that, the progress in thinking, especially in languages, is amazing. Instead of reading a hundred pages of boring articles, you can make much more progress in the language by staring at a line or two of some kind of red-lined phrase in the toilet.

However, as I have gotten older, I no longer think every moment as utilitarian and calculatingly as I did when I was younger. Also, I have changed my mind a lot during the course of my life, and I think more and more from my own independent point of view, so my use of leisure time has become a bit sloppy since about ten years ago. However, I still love to spend ten minutes or so at the face wall. Until recently, I was evacuated to a place called Tsumago in Shinshu, and on a fine day, the only thing I enjoyed was walking alone in the mountains in my dirty military uniform and taking a dump on the highest point of the mountain while looking down on the world below. If I climbed up a very long hill, I would usually have a good bowel movement by the time I reached the top. This seems to be a general rule. In fact, the house we rented is located at the end of a slope that runs along the Araragi River from the bank of the Kiso River, and the horses of the wagons coming to Tsumago Village always stop to take a dump when they reach the front of my house. It was my job to go out with a dustpan to collect the golden blessings and take them to the fields behind my house, but I knew exactly how the horses felt. Whenever I went out with the intention of taking a dump at the zenith of that mountain today, I would have contractions as expected by the time I reached the top.

Abandonment and the attitude of old age

The taste of wild dung on a mountaintop!　It has nothing to do with German, but as I said before, you never know what is related to what in life, and no one can say for sure that German is not related to wild dung, either in the German language or in the sphincter, and the research on the sphincter is not that advanced yet. So, please listen to the lecture on wild feces. Since there is no one else on the mountaintop, I bravely roll up my ass and squat down in full view of all directions. Then, looking down at the world below, I waited for the time to arrive while blowing on a cigarette. When the time came, I could feel an unmistakable movement, and soon the advance of the vanguard, or a large force that already looked like the main body, began. The long and winding line of vertical lines spun on and on, winding one after the other, winding on and on in a mighty left-handed motion. The feeling in my lower abdomen when I reached the top, as if I were ...... stunned, ecstatically deprived of my soul, hatching and ascending to heaven, desolation, nirvana, or emptiness. In any case, I feel as if I have been dissolved into the heart of nature.

I don't think it's very impressive to take a dump in the wild, sitting behind a bush.

I don't think it's very impressive to take a quick dump behind a bush, even if you're sitting in awe of a big toad. The pleasure lies in rolling up your ass on a mountaintop, where you can see in all directions, and looking down at the world below, thinking, "There are a lot of human beings and other bastards making a lot of noise around here.

If you ask me what the wild turd has to do with my struggles with the German language, this is a bit ...... troubling. However, it is not completely unrelated to anything. For example, for a person like me who has been making the most of every spare moment, there is naturally a backlash when you reach a certain age, and the era of hard work and effort, when I thought everything through calculatively, did not last more than forty years. These days, my focus is on something a little different from that kind of life. ...... Please think of this as a symbolic expression of a complicated and subtle matter that cannot be described in a few words.

Sleep

Next, sleep. I sleep eight to ten hours a night. If I don't get enough sleep, I can take a nap for half an hour or an hour whenever I feel like it. When I was working at Hosei University, I spent most of my time studying at night, so I would always drool and take a nap for thirty or forty minutes after lunch at school. Like taking a dump, taking a nap in a cramped space is a good feeling. A colleague of mine at Hosei University at the time, Mr. Hoshino, also used to take naps, but he was also a man who studied hard. I believe that all people who make an effort to study will be able to take a nap whenever they feel like it. I've never had a case of insomnia.

Character Differences

When I reflect on the above, I can't help but feel that my own way of describing things has become a little distorted. Have I really been studying in a calculative and utilitarian way, as I have described so far?　When I look at the various facts, I feel that there were many exceptions. For example, I remember that when a play started or some other sudden event occurred that disrupted my daily life of studying, I was not able to study until the commotion had completely subsided. I would open my books in the middle of a storm as a form of mental discipline, but it was no use. Instead, as I always felt when my quiet life of study was disturbed, I found that I was able to demonstrate my "administrative talent," that is, my ability to keep a clear head and deal with things and handle the urgent requirements of the moment, even in the midst of any turmoil, to an astonishing degree. I also find it interesting to do so. The so-called scholars that I know do not have such a tendency, and I, who do not know much about the world and only study in my study, tend to enjoy such things more.

However, what I completely lack is the talent to get into people's heads and carry things out well with my superiors. As long as you are a general, you will do well, but if you are in a position where you are being ordered around by someone else, at some point you will fall flat on your ass. In the 20's, I left the Army for the first time, and after less than two years at the Translation Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I fell on my ass and caused a bit of trouble for the head of the Personnel Division at the time (if he is still alive, I apologize again here). Also, when I was working for Mr. Hijikata and others on the play "The Way Out of the Finger Wig," I was the instigator of something like a strike. I was also the one who started the Hosei riot. On the contrary, I usually get along well with publishers of my own choosing. When I want to work with them on something important, I don't go with the big, big, famous ones, but with the ones who trust what I do and think of my methods as an oracle. Most publishers, when they produce a few books, have a nagging mother-in-law behind them, so I would have to work with a place that didn't have such a mother-in-law, which meant that I would always end up colluding with someone who was just starting out, someone who had no name or anything (this was the case with Nikko Shoin). So, for me, "selfishness" and "unrestrainedness" are like a diver's diving shell, and I can't do anything at home or in the world unless I use them to keep the water of my fellow human beings two or three inches from my skin. I think this is both my strength and my fatal flaw in the eyes of the world. I don't even remember how many times I have dared to shove my ass in front of other people, so I'd like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude. I don't even remember all the times I've dared to speak out. It seems to me that a story must fall to the bottom before it can be settled. (End)