By Yo Sakakibara
President
LEX Japan

I want to tell you about John from Kenya who, after arriving in Japan, learned Japanese very quickly (in three months). In Africa, where over 1,000 tribal languages are spoken, it is common to encounter languages that you have never heard before. If you try hard to understand someone who speaks a different language, you would understand the general meaning of what the other person is saying, even if you have never heard his or her language before. And if you become friends and see each other frequently, you gain comprehension of each other's language very quickly. Then you begin to speak that language.

For John, who grew up in that kind of environment, the Japanese language was merely another one of the human languages that could be acquired through immersion. Surprisingly, John could not read any Japanese at all. "If necessary, I will be able to read and write, too," he said casually, because the letters and characters were created from the oral language; it was not uniting the written forms that created the verbal language, which is how traditional language study is approached. But the moment human beings convert sounds into letters, they start looking at languages as English, Japanese or Swahili, looking at the outside appearances and concentrating only on the differences between them. I believe this was the birth of the concept of "foreign languages." Which are the foreign languages, and which are the native languages? All languages are human languages. By participating in LEX activities and actually experiencing many languages, many people come to recognize this commonality. And at the same time they are reassured that there are no boundaries, and we are all human. Because we are human, we understand each other's differences and learn from those differences.