Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 29/6/2019 (454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

For the first time in my life, I am scared to write a sentence. My fingers hover over the keyboard and pull away; I flip through an online dictionary for the third time in five minutes. At last, I take a deep breath and begin to compose my first post on the app feeling neither confident nor entirely ready.

After two years of studying Japanese, this is the first time I have tried to use it to communicate with other people. It’s unsettling, like trying to fly a plane without knowing what any of the buttons and dials do. But the app promises to help learners take wing in a new language without fear of crashing in embarrassment.

Launched in 2015, the app, Hello­Talk, is designed to connect everyday people who are learning each other’s first language. It is purpose-built, with clever features to make it easy to correct errors and test pronunciation. It is also remarkably successful; since its launch, it has drawn more than 10 million registered users.

The app’s culture is distinctive. By what appears to be widespread tacit agreement, the atmosphere on Hello­Talk is broadly upbeat. Corrections are widely met with profuse gratitude, even if — as must sometimes be the case — the learner’s ego is bruised; on my first visit, I wished an Osaka man good luck studying English.

"I had a good time with you," he messaged later. "Thank you. Thank you so much. Talk to you tomorrow, I promise."

This chipper microculture is a function, I realize, of HelloTalk’s mutualism. It is not a classroom. There is no teacher-student dynamic, and no one is poised as a master. Every interaction is fundamentally reciprocal — we are all here for the same reason. We are all learning. We are all bad at this and trying to get better.

So, every correction received will be paid forward with one given. This takes some of the fear out of trying out a new tongue. This is key: to learn a language — really learn it — requires endless mistakes made freely and flagrantly. It is impossible to become fluent, or even passably conversant, without screwing up.

My first post is a qualified success, if not an exercise in profundity: "Hello everyone, this is my first post, it’s scary to write here in Japanese."

The first comment is encouraging: "totemo jouzu desu!" replies a woman named Natsumi: "Very good!" It is not until later that another user gently corrects my ragged grammar.

I wince to see the red lines pop up on the screen. Then I thank my linguistic rescuer. In Japanese. Profusely.

We are all learning. This app is our world now, populated by halting and bite-sized expressions. We write about what we did that day. What we ate. What we saw. We read paragraphs aloud, and ask the meaning of what we don’t know.

Somehow, users still find ways to let our innermost selves shine through. We express thoughts both chipper ("I can not sleep because I was too excited!") and poignant ("I’m forgetting her... I think I like it, is this a good thing?"). Or, we can be despondent in ways so universal, the meaning flows over the limits of grammar.

"Life is difficult," writes a young man from northern Tokyo. "It is not almost good."

I have no idea what to say to him. The reassurances I would normally offer may just make more labour for him; nor am I certain they’d be wanted. He wrote on HelloTalk for a reason, wrote in English for a reason. He chose to speak pain into a hole where the words of his daily life can’t find him.

Mostly, though, we muddle through the labyrinth of language, running our hands down its walls, poking at the bricks.

These exchanges force you to confront the meaning of the words that so easily roll off your own tongue. Sometimes, such as when 27-year-old Yokohama resident Keisuke asks what it means to "pitch in," the explanation is easy. It means "to help," I reply, or "to contribute," and Keisuke understands this immediately.

Other questions don’t have such simple answers. Can you describe the subtle shade of meaning that lies between a recommendation and a suggestion, in words a learner will know? How about "definitely" and "absolutely?" Or do you just give up and say they mean more or less the same thing?

When can "anyway" go at the start of a sentence? When are "before" and "until" interchangeable, and when are they not? And why do we say we live "in" Wolseley, or "in" Transcona, but when it comes to the core of a city, we only "live downtown"? (I puzzled that one out for an hour, before resorting to a shrug; because that’s the way it is.)

If you’re a native English speaker, it is likely that no one taught you these things. You absorbed them as a child, without noticing. Most of us feel language, more than we consciously know it; we float through meaning like sea-weathered sailors, sensing when something in the air doesn’t feel right.

Once, the Bible’s book of Genesis says, all humans spoke the same language. On the plain of Shinar, they put all these shared words together, and decided to build a tower that would touch the heavens. God, seeing this, feared that if humans could build a marvel like that, then nothing would be impossible for them.

And so God confounded us, splintering the language into a fractious mosaic, leaving each group of speakers unable to connect with the others. Humans fell into disarray, leaving the city they were building unfinished, and the Tower of Babel became a monument to the perils of unchecked ambition.

In this telling, the scattering of tongues was a curse, a punishment for our hubris. But maybe we misunderstood the message. Maybe it was meant to be a blessing: it is only when language fails that we learn how deep our common humanity goes. With few words to trade, we are forced to distil all that we think down to its essence.

So it is that a traveller feels the peculiar joy of realizing just how much meaning one can impart and receive with nothing but facial expressions and hand gestures. So it is that I smile, when one of my Japanese HelloTalk peers devises the word "softy" to describe his steak, for lack of knowing "tender."

No words can be wrong when they speak the right feeling.

And so it is that I realize all we are is reducible to gut feeling, to instinct without complication. Without the finery of words, we are once again naked in the garden, aching only for a companion. We reach towards connections. We build and rebuild the Tower of Babel with every new sentence.

Somewhere in the semantic construction zone that is HelloTalk, a strange thing happens to me.

I’m a writer both by trade and by disposition. The only marketable skill I’ve ever had is how to convey meaning, and once stripped of that, I don’t know who I am. It is liberating and scary. Who I am without words is someone I’ve never met, someone who, as far as I can tell, just eats and does things and wakes up to do them again.

And I ache to share these thoughts to my anonymous new interlinguistic friends, to ask if they’ve ever felt the fear of losing who they are in the chasms between the English words in their heads. But what it would take to convey such an idea in Japanese is so far beyond my meagre facilities, I am forced to reconfigure.

Instead, I start a new post, flail around an online Japanese-English dictionary for a while, and finally settle on telling them this: "I just now woke up and took a photo of my lazy cat. I have to clean the house today, but I don’t want to."

Somewhere in Tokyo, a 26-year-old woman looks at the photo of my rotund tabby, curled up on my bed, and taps out a few red-lined corrections to my stilted Japanese. "Neko kawaii," she adds — "cute cat!" — and in that moment there is nothing more anyone could say or, for that matter, that needs saying.

Or maybe, I could say just: I had a good time with you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca