• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

04:00 on Saturday morning

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I woke around 04:00 this morning. My brain's adjusting to the sheer amount of work and stress I'll be going through in the next year ramping up for a fifty+ department to manage, and not being able to speak to half of them or more. The real problem is how very difficult this particular language is (for me).

It's been pretty mortifying to be illiterate and barely able to follow rudimentary greetings and so on. I spent the first three months apologizing for my shit Japanese and telling an old joke told in the '80s by the Iraqi Jewish doctor my mum worked for:

If you speak three languages, you're trilingual.

If you speak two languages, you're bilingual.

If you speak only one language, it's English.

I have a French colleague who underscores the truth behind this joke; in addition to French he speaks excellent English and Japanese (one of my staff says his accent is perfect) as well as some Italian and German. He doesn't understand how anyone could consider Japanese difficult. But I sat down to look at the Japanese lessons I've been doing.

And I'm too burned out from day to day nonsense to even concentrate.