Essay: The Struggle to Learn English: How to Learn English the Hard Way: Get Ignored in Shops

 

Permit me a moment of reminiscence—an old woman’s soliloquy, if you will. This is a story from some forty years ago.

For a brief three-year period, my family found itself living in Britain in the late 1980s. It was the height of Japan’s bubble economy, a time of exuberance and affluence. Britain, by contrast, was struggling with economic stagnation. The rapid growth of Japanese imports and the expansion of Japanese businesses were, at least in some quarters, a source of unease. For people who had grown up in an earlier era, Japan’s sudden economic prominence could be an uncomfortable sight.

There was also, of course, the legacy of the Second World War. Britain, once a global imperial power with colonies across Southeast Asia, including Burma and Singapore, had fought Japan directly in those regions. Even in the late 1980s, the memory of that conflict remained strong among some people of an older generation. The sight of a once-defeated, non-Western Japan becoming an economic power might, for some, have felt like an uncomfortable reversal of the old balance of power.

At the time, Britain was receiving not only Japanese expatriates but also migrants from Hong Kong and short-term language students from Japan. I say “so I was told” because much of my own knowledge was second-hand, gathered from my parents, who spent their days travelling around London. They often remarked on how frequently they encountered Japanese speakers in the streets. Whether Japanese residents actually outnumbered people from Hong Kong, as I was led to believe at the time, I cannot say. What I remember is the impression of a growing Japanese presence—a small reflection, perhaps, of the wider movement of Japanese people, businesses and money overseas during the bubble years.

Economic changes do not occur in a vacuum. They eventually find their way into everyday encounters, sometimes in ways that are difficult to measure but impossible to forget. For Japanese people living in Britain in the late 1980s, I remember some of those encounters taking place at the most ordinary of places: the shop counter, the ticket booth and the supermarket.

It sometimes took little more than a hint of Japanese identity for a shopkeeper to treat us differently. A cashier might beam “Yes!” at us while making it clear that no transaction was going to take place. A woman at a till once slammed the register shut and said, “Nothing for Japs here.” A shopkeeper would sometimes turn the sign to “Closed” as soon as we approached. Even in the Underground, I remember a ticket booth suddenly acquiring a “Break Time” notice when we stepped forward. These were not experiences I encountered every day, nor can I say how representative they were. But my siblings and acquaintances told me of similar incidents, which made them feel less like isolated misunderstandings.

It was one thing to encounter people who were simply unaccustomed to Asian faces. But sometimes the hostility was explicit. At a supermarket deli counter, for instance, a worker announced, “I’m sick of selling to Japs. I’m heading to the back,” before disappearing from view.

At the time, I was a newly arrived schoolgirl. My exposure to English had been largely confined to the classroom; I had had little real opportunity to use it in everyday life. And so I listened. I absorbed. I returned home and pored over dictionaries, trying to decipher the phrases I had heard that day.

This was language acquisition by necessity.

How to place an order. How to ask for an alternative. What to say at the till. How to buy a newspaper.

These transactions, mundane for local people, became small exercises in survival and adaptation. I learned to stand at a careful distance, catching fragments of conversation without drawing attention to myself, and mentally storing useful expressions until I could look them up at home. In time, I no longer needed the dictionary for many of them. Mimicry was often enough to navigate the basic functions of daily life.

Perhaps this is an unspoken rite of passage for many people living in a foreign country: the things that seem trivial to everyone else become lessons in language.

Proficiency gradually altered the landscape. The more I frequented certain shops, the easier the transactions became. Familiarity softened some of the awkwardness. Shop assistants began to recognise me, and perhaps to realise that I was one of the easier customers to deal with—someone who could communicate, however imperfectly.

Yet the threshold of acceptance could remain surprisingly low.

One stationery shop had once displayed a “Closed” sign when I approached, only to reopen when a white customer arrived. I followed the man inside, seized the opportunity, and asked—deliberately and carefully, in the most English-sounding English I could muster—whether they stocked what I needed.

“Oh,” the shopkeeper said, visibly relieved, “so you do speak English, then.”

The transaction proceeded smoothly after that.

Such moments were tedious, but they were certainly not universal. Still, in some establishments, I came to feel that proving I could communicate was an unspoken price of entry.

Language, I gradually learned, is not simply a means of communication. It can also become a marker of social position and, in certain circumstances, a form of protection.

During my years in Britain, I became acutely aware of pronunciation and intonation. The closer my speech sounded to the people around me, the fewer awkward encounters I seemed to have. Fluency was a shield—or at least, that was how it sometimes felt.

After about a year, however, a different kind of problem emerged. I began to encounter people who seemed unable to let an apparent incongruity pass without comment.

One afternoon, after PE in a large park, we were making our way back to the school building when an older man directing traffic positioned himself in the middle of the road. As we walked past, chatting among ourselves, he suddenly grabbed my arm and yanked me back with such force that my feet nearly left the ground.

“Why do you speak English?” he demanded.

I explained that I was a student at the nearby school and asked him to let go because I had a class to attend.

“Never heard an Oriental speaking English before,” he muttered, finally releasing me. “Right then, off you go. Watch your way.”

It was not the only time something like this happened. It happened often enough for my classmates to become accustomed to it. “Again?” they would sigh when I was stopped, questioned or pulled aside.

My hyper-attunement to language did not end outside the classroom. Inside, it took a different form.

Unlike my peers, I had never written an essay in English before arriving in Britain. At my international school, however, assessments required short explanations and essay responses. To cope, I took almost verbatim notes in nearly every class.

A lesson lasted just over an hour, and although I struggled, the teachers generally spoke slowly enough for me to capture much of what they said. At home, I rewrote my notes in full, turning the day’s fragmented phrases into a coherent record. It was a double process of transcription and revision, and it became both a survival mechanism and a form of self-imposed discipline.

Beyond school, I relied heavily on radio. I was fortunate that Britain had Radio 4, with its wealth of drama, discussion and spoken-word programmes. I recorded broadcasts on cassette tapes and listened to them repeatedly, even when much of the meaning escaped me. I would repeat phrases aloud, trying to match my voice to the rhythm of the actors and presenters, shaping my mouth around the contours of the language.

Three years passed quickly. The time was short, yet by my final year I could shop without much stress and, to some extent, follow more complex discussions in class.

Fluency, it turned out, was not simply about learning a language. It was also about learning the social terrain in which that language operated.

Perhaps the most challenging period of my time in Britain coincided with the transition from the Shōwa to the Heisei era in Japan. The Japanese Emperor was, at that time, still a distant and largely enigmatic figure to many people outside Japan. But while scholarly knowledge of Japan might have been limited, everyday encounters on the streets of London sometimes made Japan and its wartime history an inescapable subject for me.

The scrutiny directed at East Asians in public spaces was palpable. Some of it was casual; some was openly confrontational. On occasion, people would approach me and tell me that they had lost family members to the Japanese military. Others—strangers on the street or fellow passengers on the Underground—would ask direct questions about the Second World War.

As a seventeen-year-old, my defence was simple:

“I’m taking history at school, but there’s still so much I don’t know. I’ll keep studying.”

That was usually enough to defuse the situation.

But another question—one that seemed innocuous at first—became a persistent irritation.

Four years later, when I was on a university exchange programme, I found myself hearing it quite frequently.

“So, where do you actually come from?”

I initially misunderstood and answered, “Japan,” only to be met with:

“No, no. I mean, where do you actually come from?”

It was tedious. My default response became disengagement. I would simply repeat, “I’m from Japan,” and leave it at that.

Over time, however, I began to understand that the question could have a history of its own.

I later learned that “actually” can sometimes be a marker not of simple curiosity but of an assumption that someone’s appearance and stated nationality do not quite fit together. Similar questions are routinely directed at people of Asian heritage who were born and raised in English-speaking countries, including second- and third-generation immigrants. They may speak English perfectly naturally, yet still find themselves asked to explain where they are “really” from.

In that sense, the question reminded me of something I had encountered in Japan as well: the experience of people of mixed Japanese heritage being asked, “You don’t look Japanese—so where are you really from?”

The two situations are obviously not identical. But both can involve an assumption that appearance, ethnicity, language and national identity ought to correspond neatly.

I never took issue with accented English. But in a country where I sometimes felt that Japan was viewed with suspicion, I quickly realised that mirroring local speech patterns could function as a form of protection. The less foreign I sounded, the fewer obstacles I seemed to encounter.

Even the smallest shift in pronunciation could elicit surprisingly strong reactions. Looking back, I wonder whether some of those reactions reflected how unfamiliar East Asian faces—and particularly Japanese faces—still were to some people in London at the time.

For short-term residents like my family, our role seemed clear: we were guests, not immigrants. My parents drilled this into me. Our job was to conduct ourselves with courtesy, never to offend and never to cause unnecessary disruption.

That mindset shaped our entire approach to living abroad.

Looking back, I see it as more than a matter of politeness. It was also a kind of survival strategy—a tacit negotiation with a society that was changing rapidly and had not necessarily adjusted to the new presence of Japanese people.

Forty years ago, at least in some of the places I encountered, it was still surprising to people that someone who looked like me could speak English.

Time passes, and with it, language evolves.

A friend of mine who spent two years in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic remarked on the sheer diversity of accents in London. She found it striking: so many different national intonations and speech patterns coexisted in the city.

To me, this was not entirely new. Nearly four decades earlier, when I lived in London, I had already encountered Indian Londoners speaking with Indian-influenced English, African immigrants carrying the tonalities of their countries of origin, and Europeans bringing their own linguistic imprints to the city.

What struck me, however, was my friend’s own linguistic background. She had spent part of her childhood in the United States.

Her observation therefore seemed, to me, slightly surprising. When I asked her about it, she explained:

“In America, everyone adapts to the beautiful local accent.”

This made me think.

I had assumed that linguistic pluralism was simply a natural consequence of living in a multicultural society. Her comment reminded me that different societies may have very different expectations about how newcomers should speak.

London, shaped by centuries of migration, has long been exposed to a wide variety of Englishes. I sometimes wonder whether this familiarity has been connected, at least in part, to Britain’s own imperial history. Speakers from India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, South Africa, Jamaica and many other places arrived through historical networks linking Britain to its former colonies.

The history of those relationships was complicated, and so were the identities they produced. I once heard from my mother about an Indian woman at a language school for foreign learners of English who insisted, quite unequivocally:

“I am British.”

It was a simple statement, but one that seemed to carry the weight of history.

For Japan, the historical relationship with Britain was very different. Japan was never part of the British Empire, nor was Japanese migration to Britain shaped by the same colonial networks. In the 1980s, some Britons I encountered seemed to have difficulty distinguishing between Japanese people and people from Hong Kong or elsewhere in East Asia.

Within that context, perhaps it is not surprising that Japanese-accented English sometimes sounded unfamiliar to people who had little previous experience of it.

Perhaps that is what I remember most clearly now.

Language is never merely language. It carries assumptions about who belongs, where someone comes from and what sort of person they are expected to be.

More than twenty years into the new millennium, I sometimes find myself wondering what London sounds like now. How many accents can be heard on a single Underground carriage? How many different versions of English coexist in the city? Would anyone still turn to me and ask why I speak English?

Perhaps I should return one day and find out.

For now, I can only hope that London has continued to make room for people to speak English in whatever accent comes naturally to them.

And perhaps that is the real lesson I took away from those three years: learning a language is not only learning how to speak.

Sometimes, it is learning how to be heard.