In the Japanese class at Stony Brook, we often talk about the useless vocabularies that we have to memorize for our quizzes. One of those words were 悪循環 (a-ku-jun-kan) which means vicious cycle. When would it ever be in use? I have never even used it in English (or Chinese). Until one day...A few weeks ago, I was eating Shabu Shabu (the onomatopoeia for boiling water) for dinner with Claudia, Kai, and Lukas, who speaks fluent Japanese after 2 years of studying by himself. I wasn't following the conversation, but they were talking about Catch-22 and such. Lukas turned to me and asked what the English word is for 悪循環. Before I heard his question, I found it humorous that he believes that I can answer his question. His Japanese is far better than mine. When his question finally registered in my head, I thought to myself, That sounds so familiar. I the repeated the word to myself 3 or 4 more times.
Within seconds, I yelled, "Vicious cycle!" Lukas confirmed that it was right. Till this day, I am still surprised at the wide range of useless Japanese vocabulary words that I know and remember.
