Category: Me

Some people have expressed an interest in looking over my shoulder while I learn Japanese via Rosetta Stone. With that in mind (and because I really didn’t have enough blogs yet, it seems), I’ve started a new blog just for that. That way, those of you who find it amusing or interesting can follow along, but the rest of you can stay here with my more library-centric musings.

Here’s the first post from the new blog, and the last one that will be posted here.

On Sunday, I cracked open my brand new goody box of Rosetta Stone materials and got ready to learn Japanese. Of course, first I had to figure out which of the two CDs needed installing first, and how not to blow my ear drums out with the headphone volume, and how to make Vista play nice with the Rosetta Stone application. I also thought I might read the user manual, since I want to do this right, but I realized that I’m just not a manual reader at heart and gave up after flipping past most of the first 10 pages.

Finally, everything was in tip top shape, I’d regained my hearing after an initial misunderstanding with my volume controls, and it was time to begin. Only I didn’t. I cleaned up my kitchen instead, wondering all the while why I was nervous about this. That done I… no, I didn’t get started. I called home and caught up with family news for a while instead. But by this time the sun had set and I was in serious danger of not meeting my own goal of getting started over the weekend, so I screwed up my courage, sat down at the computer, and began lesson one.

I quickly realized I’d have to get over my analytical “must know why things work” mentality. Presented with “Teeburu no shita ni ira otokonoko” there were just so many questions! Why is the “boy” at the end of the sentence, when I’m pretty sure the picture meant that the boy is under the table (and no, the boy was not drunk, he was playing under the table)? Are there cases in this language like there are in French? What if he “was” under the table? Is “to be” irregular in Japanese just like it is in other languages? Do nouns decline? If “to be” is irregular, how am I ever going to learn it based on these pictures? What if I forget these vocabulary words?

Clearly I’m having trouble sitting back and trusting Rosetta Stone to do it’s thing. I will work on trusting it. When it gets to be too much, I’ll reach for my dictionary and look up a couple of the words to see what they mean in a dictionary-type way, but every once in a while I’ll try to just let things flow. After all, this program has a pretty good reputation. Maybe I shouldn’t second-guess it too much.

Rudy answered Barbara Fister’s call and then tagged me to be the next explain why I am a librarian. I’ve been putting off responding for a few of reasons. First, I was preoccupied this weekend with the beginnings of my Adventures in Japanese. (I now know how to say several random phrases that will never be useful in real life, but that thrill me to no end.) But even when I popped out the language CD and took up my laptop to think about this, I still couldn’t quite compose anything coherent. But I’ve come to realize that this is because I don’t have a coherent answer. So, setting coherence aside, here are some of the bits and pieces of my answer that form the framework on which my professional life hangs.

I stumbled into librarianship rather accidentally, and made it through to graduation by virtue of my rather entrenched stubbornness. I’d been working my way through a Ph.D in Literary Studies and even passed that crucial step of passing my masters thesis defense and being accepted as a full-fledged Ph.D student. What a point to reach only to find out you’re not very excited about the prospect entering the over-full ranks of semi-talented lit professors, and not talented enough to join the illustrious ranks of truly engaging and inspired lit professors.

Unfortunately, after casting about for a new calling for a while, I began to worry that I wasn’t cut out for anything else. That’s when my mom suggested librarianship. I remember the moment she suggested it. She was doing dishes in the kitchen, and I was lying on the family room floor with one hand buried deep in the family dog’s neck fur. I remember asking, “What? It takes a masters degree to be a librarian? Really?” And I remember thinking that this might be the perfect job to give me plenty of free time to pursue my other interests (this memory makes me giggle, now). What I don’t remember is how that suggestion blossomed into a grad school application, especially since I’d never worked in a library and never even asked a librarian a question. But it did.

So that’s the “why I became a librarian” part of the story. The next chapter, “Why I am still a librarian,” is almost as grounded in sheer luck. It started when my current director called me to offer me a job, and when I was introduced to a set of librarians that taught and continue to teach me what this job can become. And while there are all sorts of joys in my job (my friend, Boolean… the thrill of the hunt… thesauri… the way that everything from LC to citation styles grows out of a time, a place, and an ideology… the freedom I have to try almost anything I think might be beneficial to the library or my students… the MLA International Bibliography)… while these keep me happy in my current position, they aren’t my driving inspiration. No, what drives me to actually be a librarian is much more fundamental and much less specific. You see, I love helping students make sense of the mess that is our information universe. I love it when learning the language of research helps students think more clearly about the questions they confront, and present their ideas in a way that resonates with their audiences. That is why I’m still a librarian, and why I don’t foresee a future when I will no longer be a librarian.

Now I want to know why Steve and Rikhei are librarians.

I was probably in my teens before I realized that didn’t like the fact that I don’t know Japanese. Until then, it’d just been another language that other people knew and I didn’t. My dad knew ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew (and a whole host of other long-dead languages), and I didn’t, and that wasn’t a problem. My ballet teacher and his pianist spoke Russian, and I didn’t, and that wasn’t a problem (though I did learn a few words, and the alphabet). I was learning Latin and French, but I didn’t know them as well as my dad and my mom, and that wasn’t a problem. My parents both spoke Japanese, and I didn’t, and all of a sudden, this was a source of frustration.

I realized that it wasn’t okay with me that I needed parents to mediate if I wanted to talk to one whole branch of my family. At the same time, though, it seemed like such a monumental task to learn that particular language. I knew I’d drive myself nuts by not getting the accent right. (I can’t understand many words, but because I grew up around the language, a bad accent is like nails on a chalkboard.) I was also intimidated by the challenge of learning two syllabaries and a character set. And I think there was an element of not wanting to struggle to learn something that my parents just knew. I’m also just not really great at learning languages, though I do love them.

Well… yesterday I took the plunge and ordered a course in Japanese from Rosetta Stone, and today I bought a Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary. I think it’s finally time to admit that I’ll never learn this language by wishing it. It’ll take work. And it’ll be worth it.

I’m so excited. Why am I also nervous?