Ah Ha Moments

I went to Germany for a year as a teenager. I lived with a German family (Hi Sharad, Nikhil and the Hochschilds!) and attended a German gymnasium.

Since I was immersed, more or less unprepared, into a German-speaking environment, it was sink or swim. One of my recurring experiences was the language ah ha — when a random sentence or phrase would suddenly click and I’d “get it”.

In Japan, I’ve not had as many of these moments. I think it’s a function of working in English all day long and being older — I’m well beyond the critical age for learning another language.

Even so, I had one of these moments in Japanese recently. I was talking to Yukari about her job — covering Japanese telecommunications — when it suddenly hit me that DoCoMo, the name of the largest cell phone provider in Japan, meant “everywhere” in Japanese. What a brilliant name for a cell phone company! And what a smart guy I was for figuring this out!

When I breathlessly explained this discovery to Yukari, though, she was less than impressed. She pointed out that she includes this detail as a matter of course in her NTT DoCoMo stories. She then crushed my ego further by pointing out that if Verizon had a cell phone service called “Verizon Everywhere”, everyone in the US would be aware of the derivation.

Luckily, my ego is not easily bruised. I still think I’m pretty clever for figuring this out.

Posted by pmk at February 24, 2005 11:46 PM | TrackBack