| | | Yes, really...
My first foreign language was Japanese...
When I was in the U.S. Army I served with the 313th ASA Battalion and assigned to the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky...
I was sent to Japan for two years, to the southern island of Kyushu, a beautiful southern island with a tropical climate, a really beautiful place...
It was specifically at a place called Hakata which was just across Hakata Bay from the city of Fukuoka and with Shikanoshima to the north of it...
Shima is Japanese for the word island, so in English it was Shikano Island but called Shikanoshima to everyone there...
I lived much of the time in the economy and learned Japanese by being fully immersed in the Japanese culture...
I knew Japanese so well that in my sleep at night I was dreaming in Japanese...
Japanese has three different kinds of alphabets, I learned how to read and write the Katakana which is the typical Japanese alphabet...
One time I was in a department store in Fukuoka and I saw two guys about 50 feet away, they certainly didn't look Japanese, so I walked over to them to hear them speak, I presumed it would be English, but I couldn't understand a word of it...
For some crazy reason I thought I completely forgot English...
I said to them in English, yes I thought I forgot English but I still spoke to them in English, what language are you speaking???
They both looked at me and said they were speaking Greek and were from Greece...
I was so relieved!!!
When I returned to the States and was finally discharged from service I went to college and there I decided to study conversational Mandarin which also included reading the written Chinese...
After three years of study I was able to translate the 20 Analects of Confucius from the Chinese into English, also several other great Chinese works including the Tao...
I also studied German and studied both languages for three years simultaneously, I had enough credits for a language major but I declared a minor in philosophy anyhow with a major in psychology at Miami...
I went on to graduate school and got my Masters and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in Chicago...
I never forgot the languages I studied because I find languages themselves very fascinating...
Well, that sort of explains it in a nutshell...
GZ |
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