That time...

Well, it’s that time of the month again – the time where I write about how busy I’ve been, trying to finish the work for this month’s Japanese test as part of my correspondence course. Don sent me an email the other day asking how book #5 was going and I replied that I’ve made a lot of friends in the process of its competion. What this means is that I don’t seem to have much of a knack for acquiring new languages and therefore must enlist the aid of the various Japanese people around me. The photo included in this entry is of my 9-year-old friend helping me with my homework on the way to see the plum blossoms in Mito last month. I feel that I have learned a lot of Japanese since I arrived in Japan – more than I would have thought that I could ever learn, but language is a very complex entity and although my vocabulary is expanding, its scope is small, and nuances lacking thereof.

The course itself is quite good. It is comprised of 6 books – each containing 20 lessons and one monthly test that must be mailed in before the due date. Each lesson provides new vocabulary, grammar points, example dialogue recorded onto CDs, and several exercises. Overall, there is a lot of material covered and even the Japanese people I show seem impressed with its content (although most Japanese people are impressed with any level of Japanese spoken by a foreigner). My only criticism of the course is that the Beginner series that I am working with is written all in Romaji. I feel that I am lacking a significant amount of practice reading Hiragana and Katakana that could be had in completing this course.

Anyway, I managed to finish the book on time and I mailed my test off yesterday on-time with only one more book to go.

On another note, classes are just starting for this school year, which is a very odd phenomenon for me this time of year. Usually classes very busy at this time before winding down in a couple of months. Instead, everything has that clean-slate feeling of new beginnings. We have new students, new teachers, and I even have a new school that I’ll be starting at on Monday. All of the new first year students have new school supplies and walk around proudly in their new uniforms; it won’t be long before they’re forgetting to do up buttons or deciding not to wear socks. What’s affecting me most lately though is that all of my first year students from last year are now in second year, which means I don’t get to work with them anymore – yet they look so grown up since I first met them and are all of a sudden very eager to talk to me every chance they get. I get the sense that this is just a prelude to me leaving in a few months.

My new first years are great though – and seem very willing to learn and speak English with me.

So far, all of my lessons have been about introducing myself to the students. The teachers that I’m working with this year have provided me with some somewhat prescribed topics that they want me to share with the class. Typically, I tell them who I am, where I’m from, and then share my favourite hobbies, sports, foods, etc. When it came to sharing my favourite movie, I thought it impractical to throw a list of films at them that they had probably never heard of. My solution was that I would say that “The Dark Knight” is my favourite film. I figured that this would be a movie that most kids in Japan would have seen (I know that many high school students in North America definitely have) and it was also a film that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, although most students know who Batman is, very few of them knew of this movie. As they all stared at me wide-eyed and writing notes – even the teacher said that he would make a point of watching it, images of bank-robbers being shot up, hospitals being blown up, faces being horribly disfigured, and pencils being lodged into eye-sockets, suddenly came to mind and I began to wonder if I made a mistake. At this point I can only pray that Japanese youth are just as desensitized to violence.

I should also mention that I discovered a couple of students today who were big fans of Sum 41 and Slipknot, but had never heard of Metallica. I made sure to rectify this by having them take appropriate notes and assigning the proper Youtube studies for this weekend.