Ten Years of Saying My Name in Japanese

はじめまして。わたしはマルセルです。どうぞよろしく。 That’s roughly a decade of study, distilled. My name, a greeting, and the information that the chair is cold. Maybe the tea too. The vocabulary of a man who got stuck at furniture and never fully recovered.

I’ve been to Japan twice. Both times I navigated convenience stores and ramen counters on a diet of はい and ありがとう, nodding with exaggerated confidence at things I didn’t understand, trusting that enthusiasm would read as fluency. It kind of worked. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka—cities I loved immediately and a language I consistently failed. There’s a specific kind of low-grade humiliation in wanting something badly for ten years and still being mediocre at it.

So I started a side project: a blog called Marcel Lernt Japanisch, which translates with zero ambiguity as Marcel Learns Japanese. The idea was to make the practice visible—writing exercises, vocabulary notes, the occasional Japanese music video that’s burrowed into my skull. Inspired loosely by a blog where someone named Fiona was teaching herself to code in public. That kind of low-stakes accountability works on me. Put it somewhere. Look at it. Be embarrassed into not quitting.

Last Tuesday I started a new intensive course, back to absolute basics because I’d lost half of what I thought I’d retained. Twice a week, an enthusiastic Japanese teacher will attempt to build something in me that lasts longer than six months. I’ll write it all down. If anyone out there is also learning Japanese—or if it’s your first language and you want to watch a grown adult relearn hiragana with grim determination—I’d like to hear about it. Shared suffering counts as community.