Back to Japanese
It is a strange and terrible fact of life that no matter how good you may be at something, there is a teenage girl in Japan who is already far better at it than you will ever be.
There are two ways of dealing with this.
One way is to get discouraged and think, I'm almost fifty, and I've tried to play the guitar riff from 下弦の月 a thousand times, and I haven't nailed it once. I might as well give up.
The other way is to look at things from the other direction and say, if Kawaguchi Senri could play like this when she was only fourteen, then it cannot take more than fourteen years to learn how to do it.
This of course leaves out the question of talent, of which she has more in her little finger than I have in my entire body, but on the other hand, she had to learn a lot of other things during those fourteen years, including how to walk, which I already know how to do.
When encountering Japanese writing for the first time, it's easy to believe that no one could ever learn this: four different writing systems, thousands of characters, some of which have seventeen different pronunciations, plus whatever the deal with ヶ is.
The fact of the matter is however that practically everyone in Japan manages to learn to read and write to at least a functional degree. We can certainly quibble about the relative rates of illiteracy in cultures that use Chinese characters versus those that use something more sensible, but since we are all language nerds here, that need not concern us: we are willing to put in far more effort than strictly necessary.
After all, I managed to learn English reasonably well, and let me tell you from an outsider's perspective: English does not make any damn sense at all. The fact that "laughter" is one letter away from "slaughter" makes about as much sense as 犬 meaning dog and 太 meaning fat. Neither language is easier than the other, the difference is in the familiarity.
I give you my word that I don't have a clue how I learned English; I simply don't remember. All I know is that at the age of twelve or so, I could not understand anything I heard on television, while at fifteen I was reading The Lord of the Rings and the Sherlock Holmes stories. I don't really know what happened in between. No formal study was involved, and I have looked up probably no more than a dozen English words in a dictionary in my entire life. I own several dictionaries, but no English ones. I got it all from context.
(And in case you're wondering, yes I'm aware that Victorian literature may not be the best way to pick up a natural writing style. Rest assured that I do in fact know how to talk like a normal human being. I can even write like one, but where's the fun in that?)
Playing the guitar so far has been beyond my grasp, for complicated and depressing psychological reasons, but language is one of the few things in life that I have a knack for, and it has always been a safe place that no one else can intrude on. It amuses me that 物 means thing, and 着物 means clothing, so in my mind 着 means clo, and no one can take that away from me.
I used to think that my normal approach wasn't working with Japanese, but lately I've begun to realise that I have actually picked up a fair bit. It's just that all the bits and pieces haven't joined up to form a complete picture yet.
I have been to Tokyo, and while I wasn't able to communicate, I could read basic signs and understand some announcements, I have heard young women go kawaiiiii at the sight of a little dog, and seen teenage boys play janken to settle some decision. At the Skytree, I saw a girl in a school uniform tackle-hug her boyfriend in a scene straight out of an anime series. I saw two people dressed as Star Wars stormtroopers driving a van as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
It was by no means a perfect trip. I was severely impaired by jet lag, stifling heat, and being several thousand miles out of my comfort zone.
It was still better than staying at home, where I wouldn't have seen any of those things.
Once, several decades ago, I happened to see a TV programme about Chinese characters. They showed some basic ones including 女 for woman, and 雨 for rain. For some unfathomable reason, those two stuck in my brain all that time, even though I had no inkling that I would ever have any need of them again.
Women and rain. There are worse places to start.