On Being Left Out of Conversation as a Non-Native Speaker (or why I’m starting a simple-language, bilingual social justice discussion community)
As someone who grew up in Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S. in my teen years, I have been in the situation many, many times, where I was in a group discussion and could not keep up with the conversation because I didn’t speak the language everyone else was speaking fluently enough.
It started in the world history class in a high school in Auckland when I was 17. “Go back to your ESL class,” said my history teacher on Day 1. That was my first year in an English-speaking country. I didn’t have an ESL class to go back to. Since I had done pretty well in the writing and reading assessment test, which all incoming international students took, I was supposed to take all my classes in English, not for English. Hence my enrollment in the world history class.
It took me 5+ hours of juggling with the textbook and the dictionary every night to barely keep up with the class. Since I didn’t understand a word in class, I had to rely on the textbook, the only source of information I had access to. It was 2003. Yes, we had the Internet, but no Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or Spark Notes, let alone Google Translate. On top of that, I had lost the electronic dictionary that my parents had bought me, so all I had was a tiny, pocket-sized paper dictionary from the nearest bookstore in Auckland.
The class were supposed to read about 4–6 pages every day. Imagine reading a sentence when you don’t know half the words in it. Imagine looking up each word you don’t know in a paper dictionary, only to forget the meanings of the first few by the time you reach the end of the sentence. That’s what I did for the entire year, and it only placed me second to last in the grade at the end of the year. For that entire year, I did not speak up at all except few times when I had the audacity to, only to later feel embarrassed, regretful, and even——this is the worst part——bad for wasting other people’s time by making them hear my bad English that didn’t make any sense.
My English has since improved tremendously, in large part thanks to friends and teachers in Ojai and Pleasant Hill, California who would patiently listen to me without making me feel like I was a charity case.
Today, I still feel more comfortable writing in Japanese as I know more words in Japanese than in English, but I no longer feel hesitant to strike up a conversation, be it a casual interaction with someone queueing behind me at an ice-cream stand or a philosophical discussion with scholars attending the reception of an academic conference. But I still know what it feels like to be left out of a conversation. It makes you feel small, stupid, and less important.
Language Barriers and Marginalized Populations
Since returning to Japan, I’ve had the good fortune to meet many wonderful people, some of whom are originally from countries like Nepal, France, the Philippines, China, and the U.S. Not all of them speak Japanese fluently. They speak Japanese more than well enough to get by in everyday life, but not well enough to hold a discussion about serious topics like politics, probably due to a lack of vocabulary.
I am a queer essayist and public speaker. I engage in public discourses about social issues. I attend conferences. I join activist spaces. I’ve made friends with scholars and activists. One of the topics we often talk about, both at public events and in private, is immigration. It’s a very important topic for me since I have friends and family who can easily be deported if ISA (Immigration Services Agency——Japanese equivalent to ICE) one day for some reason decides to take away their visas. But I have been unable to reconcile that raw brutality with the fact that some of my friends and family are not included in the public discourses about immigration in Japan because the public discourses are operated in Japanese.
Immigration is not the only topic where such exclusion becomes a problem. We can easily imagine a Nepali queer girl who migrated to Japan two years ago at the age of 17, trying to find a queer community she can join. We can easily imagine a Chinese trans woman in her 40s with a thick Chinese accent hesitating to join the local trans community in Japan as she fears anti-Chinese xenophobia. We can easily imagine a French wheelchair user in Japan trying to connect with other wheelchair users here to exchange information about accessible restaurants and restrooms.
Resources are not scarce——I mean, yes, they are scarce and we need more resources out there——but to those who do not fully understand Japanese, they are blocked, stored away, and kept inaccessible.
Now, when we zoom out to see the bigger picture, we notice that the same thing is happening on a much larger scale with English. We don’t need to read Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English to see how English is the de facto lingua franca in today’s world.
Mizumura discusses the implications of the global domination of English to Japan’s (or any locality’s) language of gakumon (academy/scholarship) and language of bungaku (literature). As someone who’s long been involved in activism, when I read the book, I grew concerned about how the domination of English might also have implications to the language of undo (activism).
In fact, in Japanese, we have so many loan words, like reishizumu (racism) and disabiriti (disability), that we regularly use in our political conversations, but it is especially so when we’re talking about queer politics: kuia (queer), feminizumu (feminism), akutivizumu (activism), sekushuariti (sexuality), aidentiti (identity), mainoriti (minority), jendaa (gender), misjendaringu (misgendering), kamuauto (come out), kuroozetto (closet), toransu (trans), komyuniti (community), rezubian (lesbian), gei (gay), asekusharu (asexual), poriamorii (polyamory), and the list goes on.
While every local activism is different as it has its own rich history and context, when it comes to queer politics, the framework and lexicon of the U.S. queer activism has pretty much infiltrated the large parts of the local movements in many countries (and yes, by the way, no matter how hard Trump tries to erase our words that describe us, it’s too late; those words have crossed so many borders and are very much alive outside the U.S.). That means, for many activists and scholars outside the English-speaking countries, a knowledge of basic English is a prerequisite. And if one wants to dig deeper or learn something too new to have been translated into Japanese yet, they have to learn English.
Why AI Translation Won’t Help
With AI and adjacent technologies, reading things in a foreign language has become easier than ever. But machine translation is not perfect, nor do people trust it 100%. Maybe very well-written articles in English can be translated into good Japanese via Google Translate or DeepL, but anything more casually written or politically/emotionally charged like Queers Read This cannot be translated into another language and still make sense (I did quickly run DeepL on the first passage of Queers Read This and the result was horrible). And that’s about English-to-Japanese. I cannot even start to imagine how embarrassingly wrong and even nonsensical the translation will be the other way around.
“This morning, as I was walking to the station, I saw a huge hole in the road by the school.”
That sentence, in Japanese, would be “asa eki ni mukatte aruitetara gakko no tokoro no michi ni ookina ana ga attesa.” The word-to-word translation would be “morning station toward walking when school’s place, street by which, huge hole in which, existed hey.” I know. It doesn’t make sense. And even if you try to connect the dots to make sense of it, you realize that there are missing pieces of information.
The Japanese sentence doesn’t specify on which morning this happened, who was walking toward what station, what school is being referred to, and how many holes there were… but as long as one is conversing in Japanese, they don’t care. In their head, they automatically make assumptions, perhaps subconsciously, about those things.
Maybe they saw one hole (and if not, I might find out as we keep talking). Maybe it happened this morning (and if not, I might find out as we keep talking). Most likely they were walking toward the station nearest to their house (and if not, I might find out as we keep talking). Et cetera, et cetera.
But what if you are given the task to translate the Japanese sentence into English? You have to know the answers to all the questions aforementioned. You will need to read the entire text, in which the sentence resides, hoping to find any clue from which you can form a sufficiently accurate guess and go back to translate that sentence.
Well, maybe AI can do that, too. But what if there is no clue in the text? A human translator can ask their client or the original author for clarification.
Well, maybe AI can ask you questions, too, if they’re so programmed or prompted to, to clarify things before they produce a translation. But what if the original author is dead or not reachable?
The Japanese text can be read, understood, and even critiqued without issue by a native/near-native speaker. They wouldn’t get hung up on the lack of specific details like “how many holes?” However, AI often struggles with these nuances, sometimes prioritizing a potentially inaccurate guess over true understanding.
All that means that… no, AI is not gonna give us free pass to the massive library of English-language resources.
A Community of Simple Language
As someone bilingual, politically progressive, and quite known to queer and adjacent social justice circles in the country, I feel like I have the obligation to help bridge the gaps——the gap between native/near-native speakers of Japanese and those who are not as fluent, and the gap between activism in the English-speaking world and activism in Japan. And to do that, we need more spaces that are inclusive of various proficiency levels of the language being spoken, spaces where everyone feels heard without feeling like a charity case.
So, this year, I’m starting a new project called ProgrezTribe. It is a Discord community that offers an online space & physical events for progressive folk to discuss social issues in simple English & simple Japanese. Members are expected to strive to keep this community a safer, inclusive space for people with various backgrounds, not just people of different language proficiency levels.
(In case you don’t know, simple English is treated as a separate language on Wikipedia (Simple English Wikipedia). Likewise, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK has a dedicated news website in simple Japanese or yasashii nihongo.)
On the ProgrezTribe Discord server, you’ll have free access to channels for sharing language study resources, asking/answering questions, studying together in a silent voice chat, and sharing study logs.
Premium members can join (and even create) online audio/video discussion events where simple Japanese and simple English are used. They can also join occasional guest events where I invite prominent activists and scholars to talk with us. Text-based discussion forums are also in place.
On ProgrezTribe, you don’t learn the language, but you use it in real discussions. You can make mistakes. You can pause mid-sentence. Take all the time you need. Ask for assistance. Ask for clarification. You’re not even expected to understand everything other people say.
It will be officially launched on the evening of May 10, 2025 at the launch party in Koenji, Tokyo. There will be DJ performances, open mic, and a bilingual talk session followed by an open floor discussion about language and marginalization.
If you are interested at all, please subscribe to our Substack so you will start getting new posts, not only about the launch event, but also about all future events and guests, directly in your email inbox!
(And yes, I’m trying to make money in this project. But that’s not because I am some kind of an entrepreneur. It’s more like I need to make money out of it in order to keep dedicating lots of time and energy to it. I strongly feel about this new project and I want it to be completely sustainable. Actually, to be totally honest with you, I hope this can become my full-time job because if it does, I can devote all my time and energy to making this space a better place every day. I mean, that would be a dream come true, but that’s how serious I am about this.)
