Thinking Way Too Hard

For whatever reason, there are certain subjects I never managed to study during high school or college, including chemistry, philosophy, world religion or the history of classical music. I also never took Latin, which I’ve heard is a cool subject to study because you get a sense for how the words we use today have evolved from the languages of the past. While I may have no particular experience with the etymology of English words, I recall going overboard with my Japanese studies, trying to learn more about the grammatical structure of the language than was necessary to use it. For example, you probably know that arigatou gozaimasu is a polite way to express “thank you” in Japanese, but I’d catch myself going beyond the simple phrase, parsing the grammar and kanji to better understand why it meant what it did. Similarly, the phrase yoroshiku onegai shimasu (yo-roh-shkoo oh-neh-gai shee-MAHS) is used when meeting someone for the first time (making it similar to “nice to meet you”), or when asking something important of someone (“thanks for doing this for me”). I’d try to come up with the most accurate English representation for the phrase I could, which worked out to be something close to “I humbly beg your favor” — potentially interesting on a linguistic level, but quite useless when trying to communicate with people. I also caught myself going overboard learning every kanji I encountered, despite the face that many weren’t in active use in the Japanese language at all.