If I give it another 15 minutes, there might be enough caffeine in my blood to begin working on something other than staring blankly at the computer monitor.

Yawn.

I'm taking this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December. Registering is sort of terrifying.

I'll be taking the 2nd level test, with level one being the most difficult. It only takes 60% correct answers to pass, which doesn't sound bad at all, until you hear that only 40% of applicants pass the thing.

Pretty strange. I mean, who would have thought that I would be flying to Chicago right before finals to take a test? Certainly not me. But they only provide one test a year, and Chicago is the closest testing center...

Though my comprehension of written Japanese is probably a lot better than my comprehension of spoken Japanese, I still think this will be tough, because, unfortunately, I have an amazing vocabulary when it comes to street slang--complete with those impossible-to-teach suffixes and intonations that are learned only through listening--but my "business nihongo" is lacking a bit.

No big deal.

I never really wanted to talk to the business types anyway.

I always wanted to be able to talk to people my age and not sound stupid doing it.

I get a lot of surprised looks when I use words like "buchake" and fillers such as "sa" ... suffixes like "jyan" and the confusing Osaka-ben "wa".

It's nice to be able to speak it again.

Learning language is probably the greatest thing ever.

I keep asking myself when I'm going to start on Spanish.

I keep thinking to myself how neat it would be to interpret, something I'm getting a lot of practice doing lately.

The thing, though, about translating--especially from a language like Japanese to a language like English--is that you have to train yourself to abstain from that irritating tendency to translate things literally.

I've seen the word "Atom bomb" translated as "Original Child Bomb" before (for a movie, actually), because the translator took the word and simply did a character by character direct interpretation.

It's wrong.

It's not profound.

It's just atom bomb, so translate it that way.

Basically what I'm getting at is that in order to be a good, functional interpreter, one needs to not think in terms of words, but rather strictly in ideas. Getting caught in a word slows you down, convolutes your dicussion, and in a lot of cases provides a translated expression that sounds a lot like broken English.

Lately I've realized that I'm thinking in this manner a lot more: in ideas. Because though it's possible to speak English and Japanese nearly sumultaneously, it's not really within most people's abilities to think in two languages at once.

It's a lot of fun.

It's the best.

Learning language, I mean.

I'm going to keep doing this for a long time.