English is the common language of my graduate school. In any official events or major lectures, I am required to speak English even if Japanese can help me to express what I want to say more precisely. Not to mention the average Japanese professors’ English lectures do not sound very enjoyable.
Japanese is the common language of the country where I live. In order to live in Japan without any unnecessary pressure. I have to push myself to speak Japanese as natively as I can because people care about that. Average Japanese people will treat me quite differently depending on if they know I am not Japanese.
In the last several months, I have often practiced my Spoken-Japanese by reading famous Japanese novels like Lemon and Under the Cherry Trees. Normally, I will listen to some recordings made by native speakers. Then, I will imitate their accents and ways of speaking. I also use my Sony IC recorder to record my own voice to compare with those native ones.
Due to a lake of time, I haven’t been able to practice my Spoken-English for a long time. In the past, I was always using American shows as my speaking materials. Thanks to Netflix and the English subtitles they offer. The materials themselves has not cost me too much. Now, my pronunciation let some people thought I was studying abroad in an English-Speaking country for a while.
So, here is the problem. For local people, the languages I am currently working on never become an issue. I wonder why I didn’t speak Japanese or English in the first place. Why have I had to spend over 20 years to master a language, Chinese, I don’t like and I may not speak it too much in the rest of my life? Even I can’r speak Chinese fluently sometimes, people still think I am a Chinese native. However, even if I made a tiny mistake in Japanese, people would still think my Japanese is bad.
It is not fair at all, not even close. From now on, other than Japanese, I want to renew my English practice. As for my Chinese ability, I don’t care about it. In fact, I would rather weaken this language by avoiding using it. Most of the time, even when I talk with Chinese people, I would like to speak Japanese or English.