Lesson Planning

Just a quick note as to why elementary school teachers in this country should never be required to teach English. Here is the model conversation from my lesson plan for tomorrow:

T: What’s this?
C: It’s a spoon.
T: I wish spoon
(I boil the water. I make cookies)

And that’s one of the better ones. Only one piece of complete nonsense. It’s nothing compared to one school who always finishes their lesson plans with
‘This is a plan. Except this is sufficient. Please simplify a low grade. You may not be this plan.’

The second school puts effort into their lesson plans, they’re just not always the best. The first one reuses the same lesson plans they have used since the dawn of time, forgets my name and generally seems to not do much in the way of helping me teach (when I’m meant to be the assistant). This makes me feel less bad about planning my own, completely unrelated, lessons.

They also refer to me as an ART, because (obviously) I Assist in the Teaching of Ranguage.

 

While I type up a new post, here’s something I prepared earlier

Yesterday there was a breaking news story about a monkey that was spotted at Shibuya station and, after twenty minutes sitting on top of signage for the Tokyo Tokyu Toyoko line (now that’s a mouthful) managed to elude police and run out of the station, skirted dangerously close to the busiest pedestrain intersection in the world, turned onto a back street and climbed onto the Yamanote Line, heading towards Harajuku. The monkey wasn’t seen after that- if it made it without getting hit by trains it could have either found its way onto Takeshita St (which to this day I still refuse to pronounce correctly) in Harajuku, freaking out a lot of freaks, or could be somewhere in Yoyogi park, which is probably slightly better until the bands start playing. The report, which lasted twenty minutes of live crosses and people with cameras chasing after a running furball, was a welcome respite from Japan’s skewed coverage of the Olympics. I enjoyed the softball though, and the table tennis. I still refuse to call baseball interesting. Not as interesting as a monkey running around terrorising Tokyo.

I have a plan now, a plan that I may have had before but now it seems more like a realistic goal. With a million yen of savings per year for the whole time I’m in Japan (I can do that pretty easily, probably more) which could be two years or it could be five, I would start in Southern Japan during the summer Seishun-18 time, explore the whole of Japan on rediculously cheap local trains, get up to Wakkanai in Northern Hokkaido and then ferry across to Vladivostock, and then from there travel by train across to St Petersburg, etc. etc. onto London. With something like $30,000 to spend that could make for a pretty sweet holiday, and I could come back to Australia in February or Japan in April, to study…this is at least a year away, probably more. Re-contracting information comes out in October, hopefully before I go up to Tokyo to see Radiohead.

The convenience store in Shiomi-Cho is opening next month. Nothing to say there except it will be convenient. Ice cream at any hour of the day or night. And, you know, other conveniences like not-very-good onigiri, small dodgy condoms, hot canned coffee even in summer, and not having to make breakfast every day. And alcohol, because that’s exactly what I need more of. But it will be good to have the after-party option, after the liquor store closes at eight.

On that matter I’m giving up drinking, except at office events. For the sake of money and because I felt like I was drinking just because. Also because my belly is getting a bit more belly-tastic. I’m also trying to cu back on crap, getting rid of one of my surfboards, organising and actually reading my books, finally getting through Guardian Weeklies and London Review of Books(s) that I’ve been meaning to catch up on properly since May.

I’m starting a Kumon correspondence Japanese course, far more expensive than the alternative (just learning it myself and speaking Japanese to people) but I’ve found I need motiviation to study. Hence I also may sit the JLPT again in June or December next year, level 2 again is my score isn’t very good, and a dismal attempt at level one if my score is good.

Meeting an ALT who did my job five years ago made me feel that my time here will have to end one day. The three year rule no longer applies, and maybe by the time I’m here for five years it will have been extended. Who knows. Five years is a long time though- a long time without lasagne, a long time to have the same song stuck in your head (when I get back to Perth I want to blow you all away with my karaoke. It may not be good but it is enthusiastic), a long time to be in a long distance relationship, a long time without real vegetarian food and real cafes. I’ve heard the longer you live here the harder it is to go back to somewhere not so green, not so safe, harder to get away from well paid, easy work. But I have no reason to get away yet.

I’ve made two discoveries that make being vegetarian in Japan far easier- fish stock does not actually enhance the taste of yakisoba, and miso soup doesn’t actually taste very good. Now I’ve just got to find sauces without fish in them.

The yogurt lady is here, reminding me that paisley is an undervalued fabric.

 

Haiku

I was asked to do a short speech on Japanese culture, such as haiku, for my smallest Junior High School, so I thought I’d rattle off a quick worksheet. Here are nine Japanese haikus, with English translations, most of which I wrote this morning. The activity for the kids is to match the English with the Japanese.

Obviously this post just has the Japanese followed immediately by the English translation. The worksheet isn’t quite so easy.

 

朝のコーヒー

美しい日の出

早すぎる！

A morning coffee

A beautiful sunrise

It’s too early!

 

ピアノの音

人がないの部屋

怖いだね

The piano plays

A room with no-one in it

Isn’t it scary?

 

朝の雨

フロントガラス

事故しまった

Morning rain

A car’s windshield

There’s an accident!

 

夏の夕日

西に見ている

目が痛い

The summer sunset

Looking to the west

Hurts my eyes

 

鳥の鳴く

恋しくなった

夏の声

The bird’s chirp

I’ve come to love

The voice of summer

 

白蝶々

暖かい昼

私達の

White butterflies

A warm midday

Are our’s to share

 

夏の夜

蛍の光る

追いましょう

A summer night

A firefly’s glow

Let’s follow it

 

雨の時

蝶々は

どこに行く？

When it rains

The butterflies

Where do they go?

 

携帯の音

授業の間

誰のですか？

A mobile rings

In the middle of class

Whose is it? 

 

Norwegian Wood/ノルウェイの森

Rereading Norwegian Wood by Murakami (and on that note, why does WordPress never let me type in Japanese the first time I hit the IME key? I always have to open up another windows, switch between Japanese and English input, and then go back to WordPress and switch again. It makes no sense) 村上- it worked that time…

Anyway, rereading Murakami I remember first picking up the original Japanese, entitled ノルウェイの森, and thinking that the title makes no sense- It’s a reference to the Beatles song. The line the song takes its titles from is

“She showed me her room/isn’t it good?/Norwegian Wood”

It is obviously a reference to the timber decor of the girl’s room, but the word 森 means ‘wood’ in the (less common, I think) British sense, where it is a synonym for forest. Most English dictionaries list the primary definition of wood as ‘the hard fibrous substance under the bark of trees’ with ‘a small thicket of trees’ as the secondary meaning, while wwwjdic’s definition of 木 is “tree; wood; timber” and the word 木材　(which I’d conjecture is far less common, using the possibly flawed logic that I’ve never heard it before therefore it’s used less) means “lumber; timber; wood” closer to the Beatles meaning.

But it goes deeper- I may have mentioned before the characters that make up 木 (wood), 林 (woods) and 森 – which suggest a growing number of trees, culminating in the compound 森林, which means forest. 森　and 林 are both common surnames (like Wood and Forest in English) in fact one of them is the name of a woman in my office. I thought all this, all these possible meanings would have had to gone through 村上春樹’s mind (not forgetting he is quite a famous translator as well, fluent in English) as he chose the title of the novel. But then I was going through the songs I copied off 惠子’s iPod and there was a group of songs by a band called ビトルズ (ie. Beatles spelt out in Japanese), one of which was ノルウェイの森. I knew that it’s kind of wrong, and I thought there must be a better way to translate the title. Setting myself the task to work it out, I realised two things almost instantly:

1. ノルウェイの木 would be horribly incorrect, because the song is not about a tree from Norway, and neither is the book.

2. The song itself would be incredibly hard to translate- song lyrics always are but this one particularly. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m saying I can’t do it. Take the opening line, for instance

” I one had a girl, or should I say/She once had me”

How could I possibly translate that? I can’t even work out where the punctuation is meant to go in the English version.

So I’ll just go with what The wikipedia page on the book says, that the title is a reference to the most common Japanese translation of the song title, and that forest settings play a prominent part in the novel. But the original John Lennon song is not referring to a forest.

Oh well, oh well. I feel like listening to Rubber Soul.

 

Linking

I have a new favourite blog, and while I don’t know if you’re necessarily interested in the blogs I’ve been reading to pass the long hours in the office between classes, lunch and hometime, this one is of particular relevance to me as a language teacher/linguist.

My attention was drawn to it when I (somehow) found an article about a piece of translation software responsible for Engrish in China. It says something to me about how language is transforming, articles about Chinese slogans where verbs become gerunds by adding the English suffx -ing (for example, 寫ing) and links to a blog about tatoos with bad and horrificly mistranslated Asian characters, but the article I found most interesting was about The new craze in Japan for keitai novels.

It was refreshing, coming from a Uni where linguistics wasn’t a department, a major or even a minor, but one old guy with an interest in Aboriginal languages who sent everyone to sleep with his lectures (honestly, I find linguistics awesome, and would have loved the unit I did it weren’t for the lecturer) it’s refreshing to read a linguist who doesn’t mourn change in language. From the linguistics professor’s rant about the misuse of the word ‘random’ (because professors like to stay in touch, and thus disgusted by, the changes in the youth of today) to my critical thinking lecturer who said (and this is a direct quote) “there is a word for this in English, but let’s just use the Latin instead” my university seemed to be full of jaded intellectuals. And cranky old men.

But the article got me thinking, while most other JETs are considering recontracting (I already decided, and handed in my form on Christmas Day) I was thinking about my future. I have what may be a typical Gemini trait, where I change my mind about what I want to do with my life depending on what I’m reading, who I’m talking to and where I am. It’s not just that I now want to write simple Japanese novels on my mobile phone, it’s that literally I change my life goals a few times a day. During class I think I could be a teacher, or sometimes I think I never could be. Reading I think that I could be a writer, a journalist, or anything- whatever I’m reading about. I’m growing my fingernails longer so I can play guitar. So maybe recontracting will allow me some time to gain some actual clarity about what I want to do.

Maybe.

 

please please me

There’s a quote I like, from ‘Everything is Illuminated’ by Jonothan Safran Foer, it goes ‘It is said the Eskimoes have up to forty different words for Snow; The Jews have eighty words for Schmuck’

That quote is from memory because I don’t have a copy of the book here, and also I decided against editting out the racism. It’s a good book though, I thoroughly recommend it. Ignore the half of the massively contrasting reviews that tend to focus on the author and his ‘flaws’. The quote refers to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which states that an individuals mode of thought is determined by the grammatical structures of their language, and not the other way around.

So, onto the actually topic of this post. Last night at Santa Monica’s, I (cheekily) asked a 31 year old (because everyone seems to be 31…I don’t get it) from Nagano how to say please in Japanese:

The list she came up with is:

下さい-kudasai

どうぞ-douzo

お願いします-onegai shimasu

And one more I’d never heard. In reply I said ‘What about 頂戴?’ Also, すみません　and しつれいします　both have please-like nuances. And each word has different levels of honorifics, depending on the suffixes and prefixes added. I thought 頂戴 translated into English as ‘give it’ but frequently I hear shopkeepers say ｢何何円を頂戴いたします」 which is a formal way of saying please give me X amount of yen, and when one of my Shimizu elementary first graders wanted my magnets, she held out her hand and simply repeated 頂戴. I didn’t know what she was saying. I had to look it up when I got back to the office.

She didn’t get any of my magnets though.

I actually wanted to ask how many words there are for please in Japanese, but I forgot the counter for words, despite learning it yesterday.

So there you are, up to seven different words for please. I’ll let you read into that what you will, because it is now lunchtime.

 

Japanese English

I love Japanese English, and I’m not talking about Engrish (poor written English, or its French equivalent, Flancais) but English which is technically correct but so archaic, anachronistic (oh, I had/am having a hard time explaining those two words…) and far from the average Anglophone’s daily speech that, coming from a Japanese mouth, often perfectly pronounced because of endless practice, I can’t help but laugh when hearing it.

Let’s give you some examples, all of which I’ve heard:

One of my favourites JTEs, Kunishige-Sensei, apologized for kicking over my guitar because she was “So excited to scold” one of the students. Now the Japanese love the verb ’scold’ defined as “to find fault (angrily), abuse, use loud language”; their repeated use of the verb would lead one to believe that there is actual discipline in Japanese classrooms. How wrong anyone holding that belief would be.

Another example using the same verb; I finally got Tomomi to understand vegetarianism. Her realisation came with the exclamation “oh, so you don’t like killing creatures”

For some reason, ‘animal’ seems to not include sea-creatures, but the noun ‘creature’ is all-inclusive. If it gets people to understand vegetarianism, I will be the first Australian above the age of six to ever use the word ‘creature’.

She said when she young she didn’t eat creatures but “my father scold me, so now I eat creatures”

OK, so that time the grammar was a little incorrect, but when your English homework is translating two pages of “A Passage to India” into Japanese you’re forgiven for having imperfect spoken English.

Last example for now; My mug at the French pattisserie/ cafe in Tenjin had written on it, oh so poetically;

“nous vous recommandons
un cafe au lait bien chaud
accompagned’un crousillant
croissant pourvotre pause”

Which (I’m told) translates as ” We recommend a hot milky coffee accompanied by a crisp croissant for your break”

And on the plate, almost as poetically;

“en France, on dit que les croissants
au beurre sont crousillants.
En vie die France, nous souhaitons
Vous transmettre le gout d’origine”

I’m not 100% sure about the grammar, but the message is so lovely and irrelevant. It makes sense but it’s so obviously just there to look good. Like the T-shirts in Australia with Japanese city names, or Asian characters for things like “Sukiyaki, ￥300″ written up-side down.

I know I will find more examples, such as Risa using “By all means” to mean “yes”, not just occasionally, but all the fricking time.

Anyway, here are Some Fukuoka photos And some 携帯　photos

EDIT: Some more examples: Whenever someone at the BOE wants me or Sam to do something (usually eat something) we’re reluctant to, they say “Challenge” like it’s some inherent gaijin inability that stops us from eating meat, and if we only gave it a go we’d find we can eat it. It’s as if their encouragement is a favour to us.

Co-incidentally, our local Okonomiyaki restaurant is called “Challenge” I’m not exactly sure what the challenge is. Perhaps explaining that fish flakes are made of fish (I think I did it this time) or keeping up with the speech of the alcoholic old man whose always there, surrounded by empty beer bottles.

Last night on the way back from Nakamura we passed our local McDonalds (45 minutes away. That feels good) and Chan, being drunk, suggested we pull in. He ordered a chicken burger and I, being designated driver, waited. When the manager (probably the staff member with the most English) handed us the burger he said “サンキュです”

Sankyu desu

But I guess it’s like people who say “thanking you” in English, how annoying is that? Can they not use the regular form, or by explaining that they’re thanking you do they avoid actually thanking you? I don’t know.