Foreword

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Yes, you read that title correctly. This blog is rooted in my recent journey through the discovery of how I should refer to myself when speaking Japanese. However, it’s heavily inspired by this recent Kaname Naito video. Please go watch it to hear an actual Japanese speaker’s perspective on this same experience. Also, huge shout out as always to my tutor, the main man himself, 遼先生。

Who Am “I” Really?

So, if you’re one of the twelve people who may have seen my previous blog post, it’s been about a year since my Japanese learning journey began. Japanese has been the slowest language learning experience that I’ve ever endured. This came with some interesting surprises when learning to work on speaking and producing the language.

Early on in the bowels of N5, you’ll roughly learn about the options for first person pronouns, the big hitter being 私「わたし・watashi」that you’ll hear almost everywhere. It’s what textbooks teach and you’ll hear it all the time in media. Outside of “arigato” and “sayonara”, “watashi wa” is probably the most well known phrase in Japanese. But note at the beginning of this paragraph, I mentioned that there are options. Just some examples of those being:

• 私・わたし = watashi, the standard first person pronoun, gender neutral in polite speech and text, but generally considered to sound feminine in a casual setting.
• 僕・ぼく= boku First person pronoun, typically for males. Used by boys, and men in professional settings
• 俺・おれ = ore The “toxic masculinity” pronoun. Commonly used by older boys and men in casual settings.
• あたし = Typically used as a back-up by girls
• わたくし
• 自分・じぶん And the list goes on.

The Language Psychology of 6-7 and あなた

When learning a language, we’re typically taught safe defaults. It would sound strange for a non-native English speaker to attempt to load their speech up with highly regional, dialect-driven, slang-heavy language. That aspect of language exists in its own context and tends to apply itself to the speaker; as opposed to the other way around. In fact, even if we define the group as native English speakers, we can still see this phenomenon. Every generation brings about a new slurry of slang, when I was in high school, “swag” was added to the dictionary and it was a moment of virality. Words like “lit”, “fam”, and “bae” also come to mind, and just make me cringe thinking about the world circa 2013. These terms don’t really hold water today, and there was an implicit in-group and out-group.

Any parent, then or now, trying to use chained phrases like “lit fam” in such a painfully wrong situation could earn a healthy laugh. An older person who understands current jovial linguistic norms strangely well? They’re not part of the in-group, so it doesn’t feel natural… or they’re an educator.

Today, in classrooms everywhere “6-7” has spread like the plague. Older people can’t stand the idea of suddenly being thrust into the out-group, but it’s not their decision to make. The youngsters of today are filled with impressively long streams of brainrot, ala “67 sigma skibidi rizz…” while there is some context to each of these terms individually, it’s nothing more than the youth experiencing language development and creating their own linguistically bound in-group. It’s easy to attempt to paint the generation of today as brainrotted, but ironically, the composing of speech with these brainrotted terms shows quite the opposite in regards to language and social development skills.

Grade inflation, declining reading comprehension, and ever-poorer math and science aptitudes would like to have a word.

So what does TikTok-induced speech have to do with Japanese pronouns? It’s about the application of language and how we choose our lexicon, versus how it gets applied to us. I have a lot of titles to choose from when describing my line of work. Am I a software engineer, a programmer, a coder, do I work in IT? This is now less about a binary in-group out-group, but rather, a decision matrix depending on the listener.

This goes through my head as a context-heavy response every single time. When speaking to someone from Japan, it’s very easy to just say that I work in IT, in many places outside of the US, programming is perfectly understood to fall under the “IT” umbrella. Here in the States, using the term “IT” typically carries the connotation of a more support, troubleshoot and administrative role. Nothing negative, it’s just not the clearest term to convey my occupation. Coder has fallen by the wayside, but I’ll still fall back on it after a few failed attempts, and calling myself a software engineer has made more than one Iron Ring-eligible engineer upset. Programmer it is.

I could call myself “hacker codewizard extraordinaire,” or some of the other ridiculous titles that were cropping up a decade ago, but I wouldn’t want anyone to have to experience hearing that. My title was applied to me through context-driven decisions. This is exactly how Japanese pronouns work, and many people often use more than one in their daily lives. A decision tree might look something like this:

• Am I wanting to sound more masculine or feminine? Masculine
• Am I in an professional setting or am I with friends? Professional
• Am I an adult? Yes
• Do I want to sound like I’ve got half a mind? Yes

僕 it is then. It sounds obvious with hindsight, but after 8 months of getting 私 piped into my brain from all of my learning materials, it wasn’t so clear.

Okay, but who is “I”?

Being months into Japanese before attempting to go out and speak anything at all was difficult for me. With Spanish and French, speaking was a part of the process from day zero. But, I finally worked up enough confidence, and went to the only place I knew to find Japanese people. A randomized video chat site? That’s right. Through swaths of all of the typical user-generated horrors you may expect, and loads of friendly Chinese netizens utilizing VPNs in Japan to get through The Great Firewall, I was finally able to find 3-4 genuinely kind Japanese people over the course of an hour or so, and only one who spoke no English.

This was my moment. My time to shine. Over 25,000 reviews in Anki. Forcing myself through children’s books, street interviews, and unbelievably jarring J-Dramas would finally pay off. And I let it rip by starting a sentence with 私 “watashi.” And while the person on the other end was perfectly kind, the first word out of my mouth was obviously off. I sounded like a robotic, textbook-parroting idiot, and that was my biggest fear in this moment. However, it was also a relief, as I was able to feel like I suddenly “earned” my new first-person pronoun. 僕. おれ just sounded rough and 僕 checks all of my contextual boxes.

• Using Japanese in a largely non-casual capacity? ✅
• Masculine? ✅
• Makes me sound less textbook-y? ✅

So that’s settled for now. However, language doesn’t just depend on a single word to mark my speech. So…

Who Did I Want to Be?

When I learned Spanish, Mexico was the focus. While I was working on French? Trying to speak like a Parisien only made sense. When it came to “choose” a dialect in Japanese, it wasn’t so straight forward. It would be like choosing to study American English and deciding that you wanted to sound like someone from the Deep South. While you could pick up on these mannerisms, terms, accents, etc. and people would adore you for it, it wouldn’t feel legitimized. These hyper-regional dialects are so culturally interdependent that it’s disingenuous to force yourself into learning it instead of the culture applying these parts of speech to you. The same goes with AAVE, Chicano, etc.

When I realized that I was having many poor interactions with people from Tokyo (都民の皆さん、ごめん) and many positive interactions with people from around 関西 and 近畿 (Osaka and surrounding areas), it was decided that I would just pick up Kansai-ben(and more specifically the Osaka dialect.) It’s distinct enough from standardized Japanese, it felt comforting that I would be speaking in a regionalized dialect, just like in English and Spanish, and I was already speaking to people from Kansai all the time. It just made sense. Right…?

If Only I Knew

It is exactly the problem that I described as above. I wasn’t from the region, and even if a native speaker in their casual life chooses to speak 関西弁 with friends and family, I fall outside of that social proximity. I’m a 外（国）人, not only by nationality, but by the Japanese principle of 内・外. Linguistically reinforced in-grouping and out-grouping, feels like home. And that’s right. I’ve spawned into the out-group. It’s not negative or gatekeeping. I simply don’t carry the culture with me, and I haven’t spent some extended period of my life interacting with people in a way that lends itself to a level of acceptance. It’s the disingenuous language acquisition process that I mentioned previously. It creates an inauthentic baseline of conversation where the entire tone is set upon a feeling of not-quite-right.

The End

This is meant to be an earmark in my process through Japanese. I’m currently shaping my own “sub-language” and building a lexicon and way of speaking that feels authentic. Something as simple as figuring out who “I” am in the context of the language is a major milestone in my journey to become a real-deal 日本語喋る人.

P.S. それでも関西弁は続けて勉強しますよ。読んでくれてありがとうBYEBYE.