Today I paid the accommodation fee as well. Exactly two weeks remain before departure. Once the school and the residence confirm that the money has arrived, the second stage can officially begin.
Before making the transfer, I hesitated. An agent I found online and have never met. A language school I have only ever seen online. Accommodation I know, likewise, from nothing but the internet.
Every point of contact has been virtual. Is that not how the classic fraud story so often begins?
Especially now, when deception and fabrication cost so little—and when I am sending the money of my own accord. Have I been too impulsive, too careless?
This is what business calls the “cost of trust”. To live in a society that still retains a basic measure of trust is something rare and precious.
Twenty years ago, while still in Taiwan, I also found a language school in Germany for myself through the internet.
I deliberately chose a little-known city in eastern Germany. Google reviews were not yet customary then, if they existed at all in any useful form. Whether a school was good or bad was something no one could tell you except those who had truly been there. And for a language school in an obscure city, there was little chance of finding another Taiwanese person whose experience I could ask about.
With that same blind trust, I exchanged a few emails with the school, took the transfer slip to the bank, and paid.
I can no longer remember what one term cost. I only know that although the tuition was lower than at the Goethe-Institut, it was still expensive by the standards of private language schools.
The shared flats were full, so the school placed me with a host family. Rent was two hundred euros a month; dinner with the family cost another fifty.
My German then was in even worse shape than my Japanese is now. Even so, I hauled a large suitcase off the plane, changed to a train and then to local transport, pressed the buzzer at the apartment building on the address, and stepped into the home of a German family I had never met. We are still in touch today.
The accommodation found by the agent this time includes meals. Judging from the photographs, the room is not large—perhaps so small there will be nowhere to open my suitcase. Converted into euros, it comes to roughly 190 a week, close to the price of a studio flat in a major German city.
A German studio may offer more space, but meals are never included, and sometimes neither is a single piece of furniture. In earlier years, even the light bulbs and kitchen had to be purchased by the tenant. Yet as cities have grown more transient, furnished studios with fitted kitchens have become increasingly common.
Thanks to the steep fall of the yen, the language-school fees work out at roughly the same level as a private school in Germany—perhaps even slightly higher.
So yes: travelling abroad to learn a language has never been an inexpensive pastime.
Add the plane ticket I have already paid for, and I am spending money on an experience that may or may not yield any future return. From a utilitarian point of view, one must keep answering the questions of others, or the questions inside oneself: What use is any of this?
By coincidence, yesterday I listened to a psychology podcast about the state of “languishing”. The host observed that in a modern life governed by KPIs, traditional Asian education teaches us that stopping means failing to work hard; that doing something which earns no money and merely makes us happy is liable to leave us feeling guilty.
What a painfully exact description.
It also brings to mind the dilemma of successful companies. A highly successful business often clings to what it already knows—to the work that produces an immediate return—while neglecting projects whose present value is invisible and whose future remains uncertain.
Germany’s car industry, along with many other sectors, has fallen into precisely this trap. An age may seem to change overnight, but more often its signals have simply been ignored for years. By the time the wind truly shifts, the larger the company, the harder it is to turn.
Our lives have more than a little in common with that, do they not?
Human beings fear the unknown and avoid uncertain choices. In recent days, the headlines have still been telling us that leading figures in AI are calling for development to slow, while those working at its frontier warn that AI carries a high probability of destroying humanity.
When I saw that, I laughed.
When the atomic bomb was created, Oppenheimer, too, recalled the words from the Bhagavad Gita about the “destroyer of worlds”.
To cast AI as the murderer that will destroy the world feels rather like an excuse by which humanity absolves itself.
Before AI, we merely lacked an efficient means of carrying out extinction on a massive scale. How is it that, once condensed into a headline, the story reads as though AI itself were some kind of Terminator?
Externalising responsibility is, after all, a thoroughly human habit of mind.
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