Category: Rant

もしポストを日本語で書くならどうなるの？

日本語を勉強することを新年の抱負にしたから、ブログで練習しよう！

しかも大きい先頭文字はかわいいし。

There is a song by Sia called “Insidiously.” Interesting word, “insidious.” I had never come across it until I heard the song for the first time. Here are the best meanings I found:

• working in a subtle or apparently innocuous way, but nevertheless deadly
• harmful but enticing

Reading the word, you can feel it trickling down like sweet venom into a soon-to-be-numb tongue, or like drops of water drilling a prisoner’s head.

Insidious people are the most dangerous of them all: as you lie bleeding from the wounds they have inflicted on you, you’re still thinking there must be a path to redemption for them. They talk to you as though pointing the way to what’s best for you, and with these very words they slowly destroy you from within. Resist the urge to forgive! It’s a trap!

Will someone ever think of me as something other than a mere circumstance? Will someone ever do something on the sole grounds of trying to be closer to me? Being constantly in someone’s mind rather than happening to be in front of someone’s eyes—that’s what I’d like.

Writing once a month on this blog is a very bad idea. Not practicing a language is an extremely bad idea, especially when it’s the language that feeds me. Although I read in English all the time, never ever writing in the language makes me prone to forgetting my vocabulary or even how to structure sentences. I know this sounds as I were a beginner, but I’m detecting that something’s very wrong with the English compartment in my brain. The other day I told somebody I was working for, an Arabic-English bilingual, that I felt I had gaps in both Spanish and English. He told me that at last somebody described the way he felt.

Spanish is okay right now because I write fairly often on my other blog. By the way, I feel so much better now that I took the conscious decision to stop forcing stories upon myself. Maybe it’s a bad decision, but I do feel better now acknowledging the fact that I don’t have stories to tell other than my own. Comics, on the other hand… I need to get over my fear of drawing. Rather than that, I need to get over my fear of beginning.

So, where was I? Oh, right. I was so much more fluent when I wrote in English than now that I’m mostly a passive consumer of words. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make sense if my job is to speak the language. But still, writing fixes words in my mind in a way that mere talking doesn’t. Or maybe it’s like the autowash cycle in the machine that we’re checking out at work—the machine never stops working but everything becomes so much clearer after the washing’s done.