Music: 1234-Feist
A Few Comments Re:
1. Learning Japanese
Learning a new language is both fun and extremely frustrating. The amount of times I forget to use particles is bonk-yourself-on-the-head annoying. Every sentence I want to spit out is both mind and time consuming. I knew it would be hard, but since it is my first experience learning a new language, the difficulty of doing so could not have been fully imagined. Japanese has absolutely no similarities to English or French. First of all, once you have mastered their alphabet, Hirigana, you have their second alphabet, Katakana to learn. The two alphabets are not even similar to make it easier to remember. Hirigana is the classic alphabet, full of swoopy lines, and with each symbol I feel like I’m creating an art masterpiece. ‘Fu’ and I are not friends. Katakana is a boxier, romanji looking alphabet, for ‘foreign’ words. I got a childs book to help me learn Katakana, and in it, ‘Ku’ was for “Ku-ro-ba”. Kuroba.. kuroba?…kuroba… clooooooooooover! Ohhhh. Today at a restaurant, I was reading a menu, trying to find a meatless option… sa-ra-da…sarada..(change the r to l) Salad!!!
Then there’s Kanji. I hate Kanji. It’s pretty much impossible, since there are a million symbols that can mean anything from ‘ba’ to a word, or two words. So, even though I can read the two alphabets, kanji pops up everwhere, making everything incomprehensible. Sigh.
Lindzy to student: “How many Kanji are there?”
Student: “Hundreds.”
Lindzy: “Ok, so what happens if you are looking for a city, but the directions and city names are all in Kanji, and you don’t happen to know some of the kanji. What do you do?”
Student gives big mischievious smile, as if to say, welcome to my world and the reason I like English class better than Japanese. “We have dictionaries.”
Lindzy:”But! That’s crazy! Once you can read you should just be able to sound things out if the word is unfamiliar, not try to understand what this birdcage looking robot design for a cities name means.”
More chuckles. He’s right, I understand why most of my students like English class better than Japanese class.
On top of that, even when you know the language, I feel like Japanese people don’t believe you. “This foreigner can’t possibly know what she is saying. There is no way she actually wants a tiny bit of soy milk in her coffee… she must really want lots of steamed soymilk.” “You don’t eat meat? That can’t be right. Here on the menu we have a sarada with bacon, a BLT sandwhich, a pork and rice dish….oh and here’s some salmon, but over here is a chicken sandwhich.” “You should come on this day, we’re having hot dogs”. Thankfully the staff at starbucks and I are all good buddies and they all know how I like my coffee. Whenever theres a new staff member who is second guessing my order, one of my buddies comes by and tells the newby that they have it under control.
2. My Mommy and me classes:
“Ayaka, how are you?” I said to one of my adorable, kidnap worthy little dumplings.
“I’m happy!”
“Oh good!!! Me too!! Ayaka, ask mom!”
She turns to her mom and says with hand gestures, “How are you?”
“I’m thirsty.”
Ayaka looks towards me, and I nod, beckoning her to do as we had practices before.
“What do you want?”
This beautiful, uber classy, Ralph Lauren and Burberry sporting, and fancy jewelery wearing mom, who giggles behind her hand says: “I want a beer.”
Segoi! Hahahah. Ayaka was not impressed that she wasn’t in on the joke. A few minutes later, Ayaka’s two other classmates and their moms show up five minutes late for class. They see all my little hamster feeling cards on the ground and run to pick their favorite feeling, even though I was just about to sing the “Put away” song. Ayano pics a card for her mom. After asking Ayano and Miyu how they are, both girls ask their moms how they are. Ayano happened to pick out the thirsty card for her mom.
“I’m thirsty.”Replies Ayanos mom. This mom also looks to be on the shy, conservative side and hardly looks at me in class.
“What do you want?”asks Ayano.
“I want a beer.”
I look at the other mom and we start laughing, “Me too!” she says.
“Moms, not now! We have English class.”
3. Learning about children’s understanding of jokes (or lack there of…):
I teach three of the cutest girls in the world, a class I have nicknamed the golden girls. They are so bad at learning English, but have so much fun trying. It was a particularly hard lesson, but Tomoka came to class having memorized “taking a walk”, “riding a bike”, “flying a kite” and “singing a song” and ready to add He is or She is. She did a great job all day, and I was high fiveing her like crazy. At homework time, she opened her book with an apologetic face and her homework unfinished.
“(clicking tongue sound) Tomokaaaaa.” I say in a joking way. Homework was to colour. Definitely not a big deal to me, but it was to her. All of a sudden her smile turns upside down, a wail escapes her lips, and nothing is stoping her now. Big fat tears roll down her chubby little cheeks. God I’m such an asshole. It’s times like these where I ignore the “no Japanese” rule, anything to make this kid stop crying. I assured her I was joking and that it was ok, homework is not important, and she can do it next week. She had a tough time calming down and had trouble catching her breath.
I think I have scarred her for life. I bet she never forgets to do her homework again.
4. Nami Sahara: This is a woman from my parent class that you have, most likely, heard all about. She has taken me to make pottery, sushi with her family, her daughters school performances and has been taking me to my Ikebana training (sounds so much cooler when I call it training rather than lessons). After a class based on how to describe foods and explain how too cook (where I got plenty of advice on how to use certain strange vegetables), Nami left me a little surprise at work while I was teaching a class. She had made Oden, a traditional Japanese stew, full of veggies and tofu (made about 20 different ways), hard boiled eggs and other curious items; and she had brought me a tupperware container of it at work for my dinner. It was sooooo good. She also left a little note telling me that she had booked a glass blowing class for us and not too worry, there wasn’t any meat in her dish, even if I couldn’t tell what everything was. What a sweetheart.
This weekend she took Leah and I to do some glass blowing for Hina Matsuri (girl festival). It dates back to the edo period, and celebrates girls and wishes them a long, healthy life, and of course, marriage. Nami also took us to the most delicious sushi I have ever had in my life. Glass blowing was a pretty cool experience. I was talking to one of the artists for a while, and I think I’m going to go back and learn more. Maybe it sounds lame, but messing around with glass so hot its melting and shaping it into an object and adding colours was so much fun. Either way, he said I could learn to make a vase… a glass.. a shot glass.. whatever. What a dude. We ended up making traditional Hina Matsuri dolls which include a prince and princess that we could design ourselves and add our own colours. He said that we took the longest he has ever seen in drawing and picking colours. “You are a foreigner, and don’t want to conform, so you have a lot of freedom. Japanese people usually just pick blue or green for the boy and pink for the girl.” So, I’d like two colours to twirl and intertwine up the body of the dolls, with the gold fleck rising from the bottom, i’d like her hair to be this, and her crown to be this colour…. point made.
Thanks for the Vday gifts and cards guys!!! You made my february. By the way, as February comes to a close, I am on my six months of living in Japan (and sadly, as someone pointed out to me, in the same amount of time, i’ll be on my way home. … :S). Six months!!! Crazy eh?!
