The article below from Aiki News #90 (Winter 1992) has been selected from the extensive archives of the Online Aikido Journal. We believe that an informed readership with knowledge of the history, techniques and philosophy of aikido is essential to the growth of the art and its adherence to the principles espoused by Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba.
An infant begins to utter his first few words at about the age of one. But that’s all—only words. He doesn’t use sentences in the beginning. The child is, in effect, learning a foreign language. We would regard an infant who could manage a few score words before reaching the age of 18 months as a quick learner. Yet an adult learning a foreign language who could only produce a few words after several months of study would be considered slow. We have a double-standard for evaluating learning which is weighted heavily in favor of the child. Far less is expected of him.
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I read that we learn foreign languages in the right side of the brain in a region shared with music. So perhaps musical skill enhances foreign language learning. My wife Johanna is a trained vocalist. My French grammar is a bit better than hers, but her pronunciation passes for native speaking.
Took French for, maybe, five years in school. When I got to the Marquesas was pretty helpless in the language. In a few months I became fairly fluent. In school, if you open your mouth and make a mistake, you get dinged. So you open up as little as possible. In the world, that makes it hard to buy the groceries.
Learned about 100 words of Turkish in a three month teaching stint there a few years ago. If I had actually taken classes, am certain I would have done better.
Thanks Stan, You’ve said about this vital subject, as well as can be said. To “motivation and effort” I may add: self worth and a willingness to simply try and keep repeating. As with all things, to learn to swim one has to eventually stop looking and thinking and fearing and simply get in the water. The rest is repetition.
When I get discouraged trying to learn something new (right now it’s the guitar ;o) I remember what my sensei would tell me when I started training in aikido: 1) “Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Focus on what you know and the rest will come”. 2) “If you give up, you’ll never know how close you were to succeeding”.
In gassho,
Mark
Budo is language. Aikido is a language. BJJ is a language. Judo is a language. Karate is a language. All buki arts are languages. Kendo, boken, iadio are languages. Yabusame is a language. Archery is a language. And so on. The process of learning skill is mainly see and do. And repeat to refine skill. The basics are the alphabet. You can join them to make syllables for exchanging messages by way of asserting a proposal and evincing a response, counter proposal and counter response leading to resolution. A fight may lead to a sentence. (in more ways than one) The spin-off fringe benefits of self improvement through Budo training, tends to restore the practitioner’s dormant faculties to enhance and to enable other skills, which when well conjoined, lead on to unique stories of life. The “multilingual” budoka develops multiple perspectives and approaches. The aiki budoka, striving to discover the aspects of most optimal efficiency, learns to notice myriad alternatives and nuances than bluntly struggling with adversity, and thereby to navigate life more smoothly. Or something like that.