Upon arriving in Japan, I realized what I could understand was about five phrases: hello, thank you, excuse me, goodbye, and sorry. I knew more than this obviously and could speak more than this, but for understanding Japanese people this was it. Definitely a shock and really stressful. After about a month I started being able to understand more, but that first month was rough. Still struggled with understanding, but what changed was that instead of hearing a jumble of sounds I heard a jumble of hiragana.
However, something I noticed is no matter how terrible my Japanese was, people were incredibly patient with me. I'll share some stories below.
My program was connected to an English school and some afternoons before our lessons some of the students would show up to hang out and speak Japanese with us. The other kids in my program could speak good Japanese so they could have full on conversations and such but me...not so much. About two weeks into my stay the other study abroad kids were off somewhere and I was the only one in the house when the girls showed up. They kept trying to talk to me but I couldn't understand them. Felt terrible that I just wasn't getting what they were saying no matter how simple they went. However, these girls got creative and used some English and google translate to ask me a few questions then proceeded to teach me some sort of word game. Basically it was just say a word with a certain number of hiragana characters. I learned some new words and managed to understand a few sentences ("I want to eat food" and "do you have jet lag?").
These three came to hang out with us a lot and still liked me despite my inability to speak Japanese decently. Wonderfully patient and fun.
At one point my housemates and I joined an elementary school field trip to a potato farm. It was a fun trip hanging out with a bunch of kids and digging for potatoes and smashing watermelons (highly recommend suikawari it's so fun). On the way back, I sat in front of two girls and they started talking to me. I'm forgetting if they were asking me questions in English or Japanese, but they were asking me simple questions that I could answer like "what is your favorite color?" and "how old are you?" and stuff of the sort. At one point I noticed one of the girls was wearing a shirt that had the name of her school on it, east Ojiya elementary school. For some reason or another I decided to try saying the name of her school even though I have trouble saying the word for elementary school. Failed a lot trying to say something as simple as "east Ojiya elementary school," but these girls kept helping me pronounce it until I got it right. These girls were only 9 years old but were patient enough to speak to me in Japanese I could understand and help me even when I was failing at saying something pretty simple.
Digging for potatoes with a bunch of elementary school students. That was pretty awesome.
One time I was at the grocery store and the cashier was asking me if I had a store card but I didn't know what she was asking me. For the record, the Japanese word for card is literally "ka-do" so it's not like there's a vocabulary problem here. The lady asked me a couple times and I just wasn't getting it. The lady behind me in line saw me struggling and pulled out her card and pointed at it. It was something pretty dumb to be struggling with, but she helped me anyway. She was an older lady with an oxygen tank and she gave me the sweetest smile and was really helpful despite my stupidity.
A few months later when I was hosting Ojiya students at my house, I was always trying to speak in Japanese to the girls. They knew more English than I knew Japanese and sometimes would say "Juno, we don't understand you" but still were patient with me as I struggled to form sentences or words or explain things. They were also very patient in teaching me origami and how to make onigiri. Not particularly skilled at either of those things, but they helped me and laughed at me as I freaked out over trying to tear a piece of origami paper in half and squished my onigiri way too much.
Me with an origami samurai hat on my head
These are just some of the many, many times people were extremely patient with me while I was in Japan or otherwise attempting to function using Japanese. Very often I just wouldn't get it when trying to go about my life and despite all my stupidity about basic things like the word for card or how sinks work or not being able to understand anything spoken, people were still patient and helped me. These were just random people I met, many of them children! Everyone was so incredibly patient with me and I will never forget that.
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