If you are studying a foreign language, I highly recommend keeping a diary. You might make grammar or spelling mistakes, but try not to worry too much about that and just enjoy writing as much as possible. You may find that you're able to write freely about things that you might feel too embarrassed to write about in your mother tongue. As you do t

When my usual vocabulary is broken apart, and reconstituted, something new flickers forth. It feels like a flash in the dark, or a chain that had been wrapped around my brain snapping. Sometimes the joy I feel escapes me in a burst of laughter.

The actors would repeat the sentence over and over again until it took on weight and, released from its obligation to deliver meaning, entered the realm of music. As I was showered with these fragments of language, I could take my time putting them together and slowly forming my own images. What began to materialize was not "meaning" in t

I'm inspired in different ways by languages that are more similar to Japanese and more distant. Sometimes when I look at Chinese, I'm overcome by an odd "lag," like I should understand it but I don't. It almost feels like I'm dreaming.

As you write, something invisible flows out of the surface of your skin and language begins to move like a living creature. Your body temperature may become slightly elevated, and you may enter into a slightly euphoric state as you abandon your ego altogether.

Maybe what I am really searching for is a language that has been freed of meaning altogether. Perhaps the reason why I ventured outside of my mother tongue to begin with, and why I keep seeking a world where multiple cultures overlap, is because I am searching for that state just before individual languages are dismantled—freed from their meanings

When you are immersed in a foreign language for several years and are taking in a new language system, part of the theoretical basis for your mother tongue breaks down, changes form, and a new self is born. Some writers strongly dislike this immigrant condition, in which one's "original self" gets broken down.

English exists inside German and Japanese. It's not just individual vocabulary words that have been imported, but the general manner of speaking. Which means that even monolingual people are unknowingly speaking multiple tongues.

In these kinds of performances, the reading and piano improvisation occur simultaneously. It's more than just a combination of words and music. When I'm reading, the area from my toes up to my throat is completely absorbed in and responding to the music; while the area from my tongue to my brain is pursuing the meaning of the words. Or maybe it's t