Dear Japanese-Born Students of My Community College,
I too am a student of a language not my own, and I understand that it’s difficult to learn a second (or third, etc.) language. It must be especially trying to simultaneously adapt to the need to interface with new people in a new world entirely in that language, especially when it’s in a strange alphabet, with a grammar structure that must seem totally off-the-wall to you. I feel your pain, brothers and sisters.
Please return my favor and understand this: that I am nowhere near as good at your native language as you are at mine. In fact, the Japanese language might as well be Martian to me. I have no understanding of the language, written or verbal, beyond “Konnichiwa” and “Hai”. I have no concept of its grammatical structure, nor do any of its characters mean anything at all to me. I could not communicate my way out of a paper bag if I had to do it in Japanese. Clearly, this puts me at a deficit should I be called on to navigate this world’s wide web in the Japanese language. In Japanese, my familiar and much-loved Google turns into a harrowing maze of strange strokes and symbols; not only do its in-site links turn into undecipherable strings of cryptography, but so do the titles of the pages it finds. But that’s not the worst part.
Oh, no it isn’t.
The worst part is that I could not in a million years figure out how to change it back to English. And since the library computers can’t be logged out of and logged back into, I can’t just wipe the slate clean and start over. No–if I have the bad luck to sit down at a library computer after someone who prefers searching in Japanese uses it, I have no choice but to hope that someday another speaker of the language sits at same computer and has enough kindness in his or her heart to change Google back into English. I can’t just pick another computer, because usually if I can find an unoccupied library computer it’s either because I had lottery-winning luck to happen upon it three seconds before its occupancy, or because I’ve killed five guards, three ninjas and two fellow students to earn the use of that computer.
If you need to search the Web in Japanese–and I understand, believe me, I understand your needs–have the courtesy to change it back to English when you’re done. Have the common courtesy! Hell, put it in Spanish–I can figure that one out! I could probably even find the “Switch to English” link in French, German, Italian or Portuguese. But not Japanese! Argh!
And PS, while you’re at it, I appreciate that you had the courtesy to open up the Windows language bar, pull it off the taskbar and change it back to English, I rather wish you would close the language bar (at least put it back on the taskbar!) when you’re done so that it doesn’t take up useful and rare space on the all-too-low-resolution library monitors.
Get it? Library monitor. Heh. Heh. ARGH!
Please, I have high blood pressure as it is. Just let me Google in English!
Sincerely,
fetus.
