MOUSELING.net

What's a mouse in another language?

Being a linguistics major is just dandy, but I'm stuck at a crossroads of sorts when it comes to the mandatory language learning: I want to study Mandarin Chinese for personal reasons and I want to study Japanese for music reasons. For a long time I've been in this stasis where I've avoided even drilling characters with either language in mind.

I'm allowed to study both as long as I keep my spirits up, but I feel like I can't do any preparation until I know my situation, so I'm still in stasis. I want to hurry and study hard. I can't study hard when I feel so anxious about studying. It's a horrible cycle. I'm really not getting good experience with either language right now.

Japanese is hard when it's not the same three words used in my sparse online communications. I barely know a Chinese sentence aside from what I picked up before I dropped out of high school. I don't speak either language.

This is all fluff which has led to a stranger thought in my restless mind: what kind of name do I go by in a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet?

It's not hard with Japanese. I've gone by マウセッキー which is simply one pronounciation of Mousecky spelt out phonetically, but that's not the name I actually go by. Even when I keep myself as a mouse in plain English, my Japanese friends often call me any variation of 鼠—mouse (or rat), pronounced nezumi. I've been called Nezumin a lot, as well as... a plethora of mouse and rat emoji written in succession where a name should go. I've ended up rotating these in and out of my display names. I guess it's nice to be the mouse guy.

With Chinese, though, I don't know if I could go by a single-character name. I don't even know if that's allowed. I jokingly go by 鼠電将 (mouse-electricity-general) in Japanese when I want to be all chuuni about things, but I don't want to seriously be called that, even on the Internet.

My Chinese friends don't really call me a name, save for one. I used to think that this woman was into me at one point but I think she's just extremely affectionate. It's weird, especially from a female friend. She's often calling me handsome, saying she loves me, switches to Chinese mid-conversation just to call me 宝宝, which Sir Google informs me means "baby". At the same time, she wishes my girlfriend save travels and calls me lucky. I'm shocked she doesn't have ulterior motives.

Anyway, as a name she calls me 鼠鼠, that tricky character for mouse duplicated to become shǔshǔ. She's just calling me "mouse" like everyone else does, but cuter. I don't think I could go by this myself. It's probably too girly.

When I'm back from my holiday I need to study hard and practice harder. All so that I can talk with people enough to pick a name and stick to it...