My Strange Brain

I had the weirdest experience on my flight from Japan to America via Canada.  I was flying Air Canada, so everything was announced in English and French.  Naturally my brain processed the English announcements without thought.  Then when the announcements came on in French, my brain quickly recognized the language I had been surrounded by growing up.  

However, about five minutes later they decided to get on again and make the announcements in a third language.  For several seconds my brain could not process what language it was hearing.  I was literally dumbfounded.  Not because I didn’t recognize it or couldn’t understand it.  On the contrary, it was too familiar.  

At first I couldn’t register whether or not it was English.  It sounded so familiar to me that it seemed as if it could be English.  But then my brain registered the fact that I didn’t really understand what was being said so it jumped over to the foreign language options in my brain.  But I immediately knew it wasn’t French because it felt too fresh and familiar, and it’s been years since I’ve been around any French.  Besides by that time my brain had begun to get in gear and stop just spinning its tires.  I was able, at last to identify the language as Japanese.

This may not seem like much of a story and the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds in my head.  But I cannot describe to you the the extreme bewilderment I first felt when I heard the Japanese announcement and could not decipher what language I was hearing.  My amazement is not in the fact that my brain could not identify the foreign language, we’ve all heard languages we don’t understand or recognize.  But I find it fascinating that my brain seriously could not determine whether or not I was hearing English for several seconds.  When we hear other languages, even if we understand them, we can generally distinguish them from our first language.  It was a strange and fascinating experience to have something sound as familiar to me as English and yet be foreign.

It made me realize just how immersed I have been in Japanese over the past two years and nine months.  The majority of the time the only English I heard was the English I was speaking myself, or the broken English my kids were using with me.  Granted, as a teacher, I was the one talking most of the time, but I still heard my kids playing in Japanese all day long, every day.  And I listened to their words more acutely than I was aware of, not so much in an effort to learn Japanese as in an effort to monitor that their communication with each other was kind and respectful and appropriate for school.  

I picked up a lot of Japanese, more than I consciously acknowledge.  I had good friends to help me and teach me when I had questions, but mostly I just listened, and listened a lot.  And after listening to Japanese for nearly three years straight, it was as familiar to me as English although it remains more foreign to me than French or Kreyol.