Japanese 8-week Immersion Program at Middlebury

As someone who, for better or worse, weighs all their decisions, I can say without risk of hyperbole that the best one I’ve made (as an “adult”) was to apply to the Summer Immersion program at Middlebury School of Japanese all the way back in 2017, which feels like yesterday and also a decade ago.

Decisions like that do not happen in a vacuum, so I honor all of the smaller decisions that constitute the weave of that larger pattern.

Though it all truly begins with my 12-year-old self insisting my family rent a VHS of AKIRA from Hollywood Video, I will start this particular chain of events when, upon visiting Japan for the first time as an artist in residence, I realized how profoundly I wanted to pursue a more reciprocal relationship with Japan, to stop being an onlooker and step inside the culture in as responsible and wholistic away as I could.

Learning Japanese Culture through Immersion

The best way to grasp at that amorphous goal was to finally grapple with the Japanese language beyond the N5 fundamentals I had gleaned from a hodgepodge of self-study and community college courses.

Trivial as it sounds, I asked my Facebook community if anybody knew anything about Japanese language immersion programs?

When a friend reached out about Middlebury’s Summer Language Schools, I went from saying I’d buckle down and study Japanese “for real” now, to applying to an educational institution for the first time in 12 years, to holding an acceptance letter in my hands, to walking into the Axinn Welcome Center on Old Chapel Rd in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

I had been swept into a current that would carry me for the next three years as a returning student.

Summers at Middlebury Language Schools

That first summer at Middlebury in 2018 as a level 2 student in the Japanese School was an adventure I could only compare to my freshman year at Tyler School of Art.

Entering into the practical, emotional, and psychological rigors of the Language Pledge surrounded by strangers would be my first real deep dive into language learning.

What shocked me the most was not the totality of the Language Pledge itself, but how easy it was to uphold it. What I mean by “easy” is that while it was incredibly difficult, I was able to take my native English completely off the table by virtue of sharing that commitment with my classmates.

I understood we were all doing our part for ourselves and also for each other. Camaraderie was swift, and empathy held as a core value as we merged our respective skill levels into a common pursuit of understanding and shared growth.

By virtue of that prevailing empathy, I have never felt more seen, accepted, and safe as a visibly trans person than during my time at the Vermont campus, which allowed me to put my whole attention into learning and not into protecting myself. Whatever fatigue I experienced, it was from expanding myself, not contracting.  

Middlebury Language Schools are More than Just Learning

The reality of students and faculty living and learning together, taking meals together, struggling with each other, encouraging and enriching one another, can only be described as a kind of intentional community, wherein lies the uniqueness of Middlebury altogether.

It is also what makes leaving Middlebury so incredibly difficult after those formative 8 weeks. I’d be remiss if I did not say that returning to my “regular life” was characterized by a pang of grief, but one that I turned into fuel for a forward momentum.

As a returning student with level 3 ambitions in 2019, I realized something quite new: I was good enough to know how bad I was, which is to say I was deep enough into the learning process to activate the machinery of self-criticism and hold myself to unreasonable expectations.

Navigating those impulses and dismantling expectations was the greatest challenge of my second summer. Between the resilience I was able to muster through the support of my teachers, fellow students, and bilingual assistants, and the elegant structure of level 3 that waded us into in-language content-based learning, I found myself relatively calm in waters where I could barely touch the bottom.

Ok fine, I had the occasional freak out too, but when I was finally able to answer the age-old question:

“What kind of artist are you?”

I knew I had crested another significant wave in my language acquisition. I could broach the abstract in my target language, and it unlocked a universe. I couldn’t reapply fast enough.

Middlebury Language Schools Moves Online for Summer 2020

This year of 2020, tumultuous and complicated in so many ways, reaffirmed why I was learning a second language in the first place, and restructured what I thought I might be able to do as a bilingual person to propagate empathy and understanding in the world.

COVID-19 was, pragmatically speaking, the wrench in the works of conducting the summer language school, which necessitated either cancellation or conversion of the program to an online format.

Thankfully, Middlebury faculty and staff flung themselves headlong into the latter challenge. But I wondered, how could one replicate even a fraction of the depth of the Middlebury experience in a digital space?

Even with some reservations in the back of my mind, I decided to plunge into whatever shape things took, and I am so grateful for hedging that bet. The result was a dynamic reimagining of the course that was as much an avalanche of content as any of my on-campus summers.

Summer 2020 Online Challenges

The greatest challenge of the online summer program wasn’t so much the technology, rather it was maintaining a school/home-life balance, rife with the intrusion of my mother tongue and day-to-day variables.

Without living together, the inherently organic and spontaneous possibility of in-language communication about things outside of academia was lost in many ways, but through Zoom breakout rooms, the Conversation Table, a silent zoom study room, and Discussion Boards, we were able to make various degrees of progress toward a sense of community.

In retrospect, the online summer session was an incredible measure of what it will be like when Japanese is centermost in my professional life, when I must take the reins of my own immersion and own every inch of my progress, when I must become the architect of my own contextual use of the language. In a sense, I feel more prepared for “reality” than ever before. 

Across three summers, Middlebury has been my north star in what began as a lofty aim at one of the most complex languages on the planet.

But for the first time in my life, I have some semblance of a future vision. It feels like a blessing to have some cardinal orientation as I cling to this rock hurtling through space at 67,000 mph.

I’ve just applied for another summer at Middlebury, throwing my hat in the ring for level 5, which something that also used to seem completely unattainable, something past the horizon, but now seems like it might just be within reach… if I keep putting the work in.