二年目のおわり にねんめのおわり — The End of the Second Year

The end of year 2, and what comes next

Year 2 ends here, and it is worth being plain rather than warm about where that leaves you. Alex's story reaches a decision in this lesson — he stays — and year 3 follows that decision somewhere year 2 never went: out of the city, to a small mountain town in 高知県, where he joins the 地域おこし協力隊 and finds that a place that needs him is not the same as a place that is easy. So here is an honest account of where you stand before you go with him. You have about two thousand words, the plain form and the polite form and 敬語 as a system, the hedging that adult Japanese actually runs on, four dialects you can at least recognize, and enough of the written register to read a memorial stone and a newspaper headline. That is somewhere around N3, with patches above it, and year 3 is written at N2. What you do not have yet is the kanji, and no course could simply hand them to you — there are two thousand one hundred and thirty-six in the everyday list alone, and they are acquired by reading rather than by being taught. That work runs alongside everything that comes next, and it is the part that was always going to be yours. Four things make it go faster. Read what your own life needs rather than what a list says: you will learn a specialist word in one encounter if you actually needed it. Pick one thing and finish it — a novel, a manga series, one newspaper's front page every morning — because 積み重ね only works on something you come back to. Read ahead: year 3's town will put a 回覧板, a grant application and a landslide warning in front of you. And find the people who correct you instead of complimenting you, which lesson 101 was about: a colleague who says ちょっと違和感がある is worth more to you than a stranger who says お上手ですね. 卒業はない. That is not a consolation, it is the description of how languages work, and you are further along it than you can currently feel.