Saturday 11 January 2014

Starting off

One day, you wake up in a strange room. However, the room for some reason, looks like yours. When you come downstairs, your mother begins talking to you in your second language (In my case, Japanese). You think you can manage it at first, but it seems to be more difficult than you thought it would be. Then she starts speaking about a "Saihorn". You look up what it is then you see a picture of a Rhyhorn. Then you make new friends and they too speak the same language your mother was speaking. Now, you've just received your second badge and each day, you are gradually understanding more and more. In time, you will be able to manage the language barrier with the occasional need to look up a word.

In the previous paragraph, I was talking about a challenge I am taking with Pokémon X (which I recently bought). The challenge for me is to complete the game in Japanese. Even though I do not have the Japanese version (Unfortunately, the Nintendo 3DS does not like using games not from its region), you can choose from a list of languages for your game. From the top of my head, there is English, French and Japanese as well as some other languages.

By the way, for anyone living in a country where the national language is/ blogging/reading blogs in a language that is not your mother tongue, what were your experiences at the beginning in terms of the language barrier? Did you formally learn the language beforehand or did you have no knowledge of the language previously?

Speaking of, this relates to my experience of starting to wear Lolita as I have to learn how to create co-ordinates even though you have seen many of them done by others. Also, as in playing Pokémon in Japanese, you start off with a vocabulary/pieces that you think would be sufficient but they end up being a bit insufficient. For example, For my first Lolita outfit, I did not have a petticoat and everything I was wearing was offbrand/handmade. Also, the cutsew I was wearing was too long, in my opinion (Do clothing manufacturers think that all Australians are tall?).

In the future, things will improve. Now, armed with a petticoat (and a slowly improving knowledge of Japanese) as well as more experience, I feel that the next Lolita co-ord will be better (as well as my ability to be immersed in Japanese).

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