I've been asked a variety of questions regarding my competence of the languages I've studied.
Questions usually don't bother me, unless I respond with, "I don't know" because I genuinely don't know and am subsequently told, "What do you mean you don't know? You should know! You studied this language." Studying a language for a period of time doesn't mean I know everything about that language.
I decided to put together a bit of an FAQ for the questions I've received the most and even continue to be asked.
"Can you read this?" *after showing me text written in a non-Germanic language*
Probably not, and even if I can, most likely I'm not sure what it means. Check the next question.
"What does this mean?" *after showing me text written in Japanese or Korean*
I'm willing to bet that most likely I won't know, but I can probably look it up for you! If you're patient and can wait a minute, I'll pull up Jisho or Naver and try to find it. Unfortunately, I can't always figure it out. If it's just a lot of kanji (Chinese characters; Japanese uses a lot of them), I might not be able to help you because it could actually be Chinese, or it might take me a while.
"Can you understand them? What are they saying?" *after hearing someone speaking Japanese, Korean, or even another Asiatic language*
Most of the time they're speaking so fast it's difficult for me to understand what they're saying beyond a few words and grammar points that I know, but that's not enough to decipher the conversation. My understanding is limited to what I know and can remember, and their breadth of the language is much more advanced than mine. Even if there is a lot that I know, there is so much more that I don't know. Studying a language for a few years or less doesn't make you fluent. It probably won't even get you close (unless the language is very similar to your native language; then learning it will be much easier, but I chose languages that differ from English from the writing system to sentence structure to the cultural foundation of the language).
"How come you didn't continue studying Japanese?" *in regards as to why I took Korean in college despite studying Japanese all through high school*
I wanted to learn some Korean. I also didn't want to go through a placement interview for Japanese. I thought having AP credit would have allowed me to bypass any type of "placement exam" and just let me sign up for second year courses upon entering college. Unfortunately, AP credit wasn't enough to let me automatically skip past the introductory first year courses, so I would have had to take a placement interview rather than a placement exam to determine my level of proficiency. It sounded really daunting, and there was a questionnaire I had to fill out before one of the Japanese language professors would contact me to schedule the "placement interview," whatever that was.
"Why do you study Japanese? Japanese is stupid. French is so much better."
This was only said to me once early on in high school but people can say a variant of it. I've never managed to forget this because it's impossible to swallow. How can you say an entire system of communication used by a group of people is stupid? For millions of people, Japanese is their native language. Are you saying they're stupid? What even makes one language better than another? How can you even measure that? Every time I remember this I get so ticked off. Seriously. No language is stupid.
Again, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I once had a professor encourage students to ask questions by telling the class, "There are no dumb questions. There are only potentially dumb answers." I think that applies here as well.
