Ah ha! After hours of research and testing I have finally discovered it, the absolutely foolproof way to learn a new language. Are you ready for this? It's pretty radical. The bast and maybe quickest way to learn a new language is (drum roll please) to hang out with 3 to 7 year olds. I am now teaching in my elementary schools and today I made the mistake of leaving school early- by early I mean, at the time I am supposed to leave, but when there are still students around. Some how as I went through the door I accumulated 5 or 6 little kids trailing behind me, saying Goodness knows what to me in Japanese. Occasionally I managed to ask a question they asked. They took me right up to the library driveway.
Some lady that was walking by told me my Japanese was good, to which I wholeheartedly disagreed. I have a long ways to go. Which reminds me, I signed up for JLPT level 3 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). 4 is the easiest and I know I could pass that with flying colours. Why I signed up for 3? Who knows? I must be psychotic. Now I have to spend every waking minute in thenext 3 months, when I am not making stuff for the kids I teach, studying Japanese. Oh well. It'll cut a year off my time in Japan. I hope.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Omagari fireworks and Morioka Orientation
Wow! It's been a while. Between having no internet at home and the fact that I have started teaching I can:t find the time. So here I am writing about two weekends ago. Morioka Orientation was great. I was proud of myself for being the next best thing at Japanese after Alex, who is millions of light years ahead. The best thing about the Morioka Orientation was of course, being in Morioka. 4 of the 5 new ALTs are up North in the semi-hickies. Sarah is lucky. She's in a 'city' but then it takes here almost 3 hours to get to Morioka and it's only an hour by train for me. By the way, the reason I put city in quotes is because some of these cities really aren't. It's defined by population and lately Iwate has been mergin some of the really small towns, so that a 'city' might really be 20 small towns.
Any how the first night we went out to dinner with AJET and then we went to Roundup. Round up is a 6 floor sports and entertainment complex. We had a blast. On my suggestion, we went skating. It's funny as hell since I am the world's worst skater. I've decided I need to go back and practice though.
The second evening we went for cell phones, but I chose not to get one since they want to take like 600 US from my credit card. I will try again next month. Then we went to Bryan's, played Guitar Hero and then headed back out for Italian Dinner. Dan, Tyler and Jen joined us and after we went to Karaoke. As you may or may not know, Karaoke is a Japanese thing, so it's all over. We went to a new place and got our own booth. The selection is crazy. I want to go back. Then we went to Faces. If you've read my earlier posts, you'll know I saw black people there! lol! I also discovered my new fave liqueur- the Peach Fizz! Wee left at 3 in the a.m. It was hell getting up in the a.m. to make our train for Omagari. Then the bus was late and we had to catch a cab. The buses are enver late in Japan. That should have been an indication that the 50% rain prediction was going to come true. It rained from about 1 p.m. straight through to 5. I hid in Ken's car. When we got back for the fireworks, the rest were ready to go, but ended up staying til like 8.30. The best stuff was in the last two shows though.
Leaving was hell. It took like 20 minutes to get out. 600 000 people up 2 staircases isn't easy. I overnighted at Ken's (because I satyed for all the fireworks and the others left) and then me and Dean took the train for Morioka in the morning. I got in in time for the 2.10 train but I decided to wait another hour so I could get some lunch and walk around the train station. I found a CD store and got myself a Rihanna, a Sean Kingston and the old Natasha Bedingfield. Happy, happy camper. Then it was back to Ichinohe.
Any how the first night we went out to dinner with AJET and then we went to Roundup. Round up is a 6 floor sports and entertainment complex. We had a blast. On my suggestion, we went skating. It's funny as hell since I am the world's worst skater. I've decided I need to go back and practice though.
The second evening we went for cell phones, but I chose not to get one since they want to take like 600 US from my credit card. I will try again next month. Then we went to Bryan's, played Guitar Hero and then headed back out for Italian Dinner. Dan, Tyler and Jen joined us and after we went to Karaoke. As you may or may not know, Karaoke is a Japanese thing, so it's all over. We went to a new place and got our own booth. The selection is crazy. I want to go back. Then we went to Faces. If you've read my earlier posts, you'll know I saw black people there! lol! I also discovered my new fave liqueur- the Peach Fizz! Wee left at 3 in the a.m. It was hell getting up in the a.m. to make our train for Omagari. Then the bus was late and we had to catch a cab. The buses are enver late in Japan. That should have been an indication that the 50% rain prediction was going to come true. It rained from about 1 p.m. straight through to 5. I hid in Ken's car. When we got back for the fireworks, the rest were ready to go, but ended up staying til like 8.30. The best stuff was in the last two shows though.
Leaving was hell. It took like 20 minutes to get out. 600 000 people up 2 staircases isn't easy. I overnighted at Ken's (because I satyed for all the fireworks and the others left) and then me and Dean took the train for Morioka in the morning. I got in in time for the 2.10 train but I decided to wait another hour so I could get some lunch and walk around the train station. I found a CD store and got myself a Rihanna, a Sean Kingston and the old Natasha Bedingfield. Happy, happy camper. Then it was back to Ichinohe.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
I see black people
I went to Morioka over the weekend and we went to a club called Faces. So I was chilling with Janine and I turned around and the DJ was black!!! I freaked. I ran over and introduced myself. Turns out that he's also a JET. He's from Akita, thew prefecture to the west of us. Then lo and behold another black guy appears. Bryan tells me he's the club owner. Way cool. I went over to say hi and he runs over and gives me a hug. Who knows when's the last time he saw a black person. I haven't seen one since my predecessor left 3 weeks ago.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The Japanese Language
The Japanese language is good, bad and ugly. In and of itself it isn't a bad thing. In fact I think that universally speaking, it's a pretty easy language to learn, but I think that that knowing English may be my biggest obstacle to learning Japanese. In the Japanese language the verbs come at the end of the sentence so for instance, "I a cat have." There are no articles or singular and plurals so it would be " I cat have" but then they usually leave out the subject if it's been mentioned already or is obvious so it would be "Cat have." Lol!
Not conjugating verbs means I don't have to add to the million verb endings I already know between English, French, Spanish and Italian. They only things the do to verbs is make them negative and put them into past tense. So a verb has 4 forms: non-past affirmative, non-past negative, past affirmative, past negative. But there are also different ways of speaking, for different levels of politeness, so there a four endings in each of the forms (plain, polite, and business are all that I know of).
The adjectives also have similar "conjugations", and there are a lot of rules of what you need to do with adjectives. There are even two types of adjectives and the rule differs according to type. You can't usually tell the type right off, you just have to memorise them.
Then there are the counters. In Japanese the suffix you use for counting depends on what you are counting, so for floors you'd use one, for people another, animals another, Long thin things another, round things another, etc. Counters suck!
Something else I guess most people know about Japanese is the way the language is written, the Kanji. Apart from the Kanji there are two syllabic writing systems, the Hiragana and the Katakana. The Hiragana is used for Japanese words and to fill in any spaces that the Kanji don't cover and the Katakana is used to imitate foreign loan words. The Katakana is hilarious as hell. Most of the words come from English and those that don't generally come from Spanish or French, which I speak, yet I can never figure out Katakana words. The problem is that the Katakana only uses syllables that are represented in Japanese. The only consonant that can come next to another in Japanese is n. So any other consonant ends up getting a vowel stuck onto it which is why ice cream is "aa-su-ku-ri-mu." Then there are the letters that don't exist like v, f (although there is fu), and l (although hthe Japanese r sounds like an l anyway so really it's the r that doesn't exist). You can't get "si" or "je" in Japanese either so you get stuff like shi-ru-wa-zo-n. Alex laughed at me for not being able to figure it out. It's Silver Zone. It's the old people crossing. Yes we have an old people crossing. That should tell you something about my town's demographic.
Despite all this, my Japanese is still making some progress.Although I need to get in 25 hours thoretical study time every week to pass the exam I want to do in December. Lol! I'll get there because I am me, and languages and I have an understanding. (I hope!) Anyhow as I just said, I have a lot to cover so I need to get to some studying.
This weekend I head down to Morioka for yet another orientation. Who knows when I'll be online next. Janine and I are staying over in Morioka on Friday night to head out to Akita on Saturday for the most competitive, impressive and biggest fireworks festival in Japan, so I probably won't get back to Ichinohe until some time Sunday evening.
Not conjugating verbs means I don't have to add to the million verb endings I already know between English, French, Spanish and Italian. They only things the do to verbs is make them negative and put them into past tense. So a verb has 4 forms: non-past affirmative, non-past negative, past affirmative, past negative. But there are also different ways of speaking, for different levels of politeness, so there a four endings in each of the forms (plain, polite, and business are all that I know of).
The adjectives also have similar "conjugations", and there are a lot of rules of what you need to do with adjectives. There are even two types of adjectives and the rule differs according to type. You can't usually tell the type right off, you just have to memorise them.
Then there are the counters. In Japanese the suffix you use for counting depends on what you are counting, so for floors you'd use one, for people another, animals another, Long thin things another, round things another, etc. Counters suck!
Something else I guess most people know about Japanese is the way the language is written, the Kanji. Apart from the Kanji there are two syllabic writing systems, the Hiragana and the Katakana. The Hiragana is used for Japanese words and to fill in any spaces that the Kanji don't cover and the Katakana is used to imitate foreign loan words. The Katakana is hilarious as hell. Most of the words come from English and those that don't generally come from Spanish or French, which I speak, yet I can never figure out Katakana words. The problem is that the Katakana only uses syllables that are represented in Japanese. The only consonant that can come next to another in Japanese is n. So any other consonant ends up getting a vowel stuck onto it which is why ice cream is "aa-su-ku-ri-mu." Then there are the letters that don't exist like v, f (although there is fu), and l (although hthe Japanese r sounds like an l anyway so really it's the r that doesn't exist). You can't get "si" or "je" in Japanese either so you get stuff like shi-ru-wa-zo-n. Alex laughed at me for not being able to figure it out. It's Silver Zone. It's the old people crossing. Yes we have an old people crossing. That should tell you something about my town's demographic.
Despite all this, my Japanese is still making some progress.Although I need to get in 25 hours thoretical study time every week to pass the exam I want to do in December. Lol! I'll get there because I am me, and languages and I have an understanding. (I hope!) Anyhow as I just said, I have a lot to cover so I need to get to some studying.
This weekend I head down to Morioka for yet another orientation. Who knows when I'll be online next. Janine and I are staying over in Morioka on Friday night to head out to Akita on Saturday for the most competitive, impressive and biggest fireworks festival in Japan, so I probably won't get back to Ichinohe until some time Sunday evening.
Small triumphs
Whoever first said it's the little things that count is one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen. Yesterday I had two little things happen that just made me smile. First off, we continued on our school tour. We were at Ichinohe Shougakkou, which is one of my elementary schools, and the principal asked my supervisor if we spoke Japanese. He replied Alex san speaks fluently and Claire san speaks a little!!! Yay!!! Japanese fluency, here I come.
After work I went to the itty-bitty store around the corner from me. I am out of juice and don't feel like walking all the way to ICO, the plaza where JOIS, the grocery store, is. The lady in the shop is under 4 feet tall. She is so cute. She said to me "Kaminoke wa kawaii desu", which for those of you who speak less Japanese than me means "Your hair is cute." Triumph 1: the fact that I understood what the hell she was saying. Triumph 2: the cutesy little old lady around the corner thinks my hair is cute!!! I am buying everything I possibly can in her shop from now on. In fact, I'm going there this afternoon for tomatoes.
After work I went to the itty-bitty store around the corner from me. I am out of juice and don't feel like walking all the way to ICO, the plaza where JOIS, the grocery store, is. The lady in the shop is under 4 feet tall. She is so cute. She said to me "Kaminoke wa kawaii desu", which for those of you who speak less Japanese than me means "Your hair is cute." Triumph 1: the fact that I understood what the hell she was saying. Triumph 2: the cutesy little old lady around the corner thinks my hair is cute!!! I am buying everything I possibly can in her shop from now on. In fact, I'm going there this afternoon for tomatoes.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Olympics in Japan
Yes I know the olympics is in China, but I am in Japan, which means I have the Japanese perspective on the Olympics. At home in Barbados, we get our Olympic coverage from a US or Canadian network and we always laugh about how streamlined the coverage is toward their own country's athletes. Generally coverage is of track, swimming, or gymnastics. If none of these is on, they just pick a random sport or somethign. Here in Japan, I have been seeing the stragnest sports. For the first time in my life, I have seen Olympic Soccer, Olympic Baseball, Olympic Field Hockey, Women's Archery, Judo, Freesytle Wrestling and Greco-Roman wrestling. AND I discovered that Trampoline is an Olympic Sport (funnily translated into Japanese as "jumping").
SO I have all sorts of new revelations. For one, all the top women's archers are Asian. Secondly, Freestlye wrestling is cool beans. Trampoline is harder than it look. I blight a woman. After about 4 participants I wondered aloud what was so hard about trampoline. The woman promptly land on her mouth. I laughed at the way Japan got beat in baseball by Korea (the national sport here is Baseball) and then beat Canada. Japan is apparently really good in Woman's Softball. They beat Canada, but were defeated by USA. Soccer has been fun too, Japan got beat in every single one of their men's matches, even by Holland, who only managed to draw against the USA and and Nigeria. The Japan women's team is really good too. They beat everybody but the US on their way onto the semifinals. Then they had to play the US in the semifinal. They lost 4-2. Well, at least I think they should beat Germany. In the other semifinal which I watched Brazil rinse out Germany. 4-1. Funnily enough both of the losing teams scored first. Women's soccer is funny. But there are occasionally some women who are great. The funniest thing of it all is the Japanese woman with an afro! She and her hairdresser deserve a Nobel Hair Prize or something.
SO I have all sorts of new revelations. For one, all the top women's archers are Asian. Secondly, Freestlye wrestling is cool beans. Trampoline is harder than it look. I blight a woman. After about 4 participants I wondered aloud what was so hard about trampoline. The woman promptly land on her mouth. I laughed at the way Japan got beat in baseball by Korea (the national sport here is Baseball) and then beat Canada. Japan is apparently really good in Woman's Softball. They beat Canada, but were defeated by USA. Soccer has been fun too, Japan got beat in every single one of their men's matches, even by Holland, who only managed to draw against the USA and and Nigeria. The Japan women's team is really good too. They beat everybody but the US on their way onto the semifinals. Then they had to play the US in the semifinal. They lost 4-2. Well, at least I think they should beat Germany. In the other semifinal which I watched Brazil rinse out Germany. 4-1. Funnily enough both of the losing teams scored first. Women's soccer is funny. But there are occasionally some women who are great. The funniest thing of it all is the Japanese woman with an afro! She and her hairdresser deserve a Nobel Hair Prize or something.
School- It's why we're here
Sometimes I think my town is really small, then something happens to remind me that it isn't, like when Janine comes through and goes "Blimey, you've got a mall!" at the half a shopping centre. (Smaller than Dacosta's Mall.) Yesterday we went out into the Netherworld of Ichinohe. See, I live in Central Ichinohe, where all the life of Ichinohe is (lol). The "mall" is here, the fire station, the police station is here, most of the shops are here. So we went out Okunakayama, which is like 30 minutes drive away from where we work to visit two of Alex's schools and get introduced to the Principal and staff, then we went to Ichinohe Minami, another of Alex's schools which is here in town at the edge. Then we went up to Chokkain Elementary, in the valley up the mountain I started to run up the other day. (Imagine that there is life up there.) And the village there has literally nothing to do. Except for joining the Self Defence Force which is Japan's version of an army. Apparently after World War 2, America wrote Japan a Constitution which does not allow them a standing army. Sound familiar. 50 plus years later nothing has changed. Anyhow, after Chokkai we went to Torigoe, (Tori-go-ey) which is one of my schools. It's a bit far and I am supposed to catch the bus but it'll only be like 10 minuttes.I think it's only about a 40-50 minute walk, and I think the bus is expensive although I haven't checked, but I am seriously considering hoofing it. One thing that was common throughout, the kids seem really nice (but then they always do). In case you're wondering why the kids are even at school, it appears that the Japanese hyperactive, overworking attitude starts from young and in the summer the kids go to their clubs at school.
We just got back from more school tours. We went back up to Chokkai for Dan's Junior High, then we came down to my two Ichinohe Schools. My schools are big as hell!!! They're the biggest of all the schools we've seen, but then they're the down town schools. The Ichinohe schools will be my main schools 4 days a week, every other week. I am only at Torigoe twice a month. After we went to Kozuya to Dan's 2 remaining schools, one of which is under construction. It seems nobody speaks English at Kozuya Sho-gakko- (elementary) so Dan is a bit worried. No one speaks English at Torigoe either, but I am not at all worried. My Japanese is coming along slowly. I actually understood all of what my Supervisor was saying in our introductions today!!! For some strange reason there is an English teacher at Ichinohe Elementary (normally there are only English teachers from Junior High and up) and my other school is Junior High so I only really need to worrry about Japanese twice a month anyhow.
We just got back from more school tours. We went back up to Chokkai for Dan's Junior High, then we came down to my two Ichinohe Schools. My schools are big as hell!!! They're the biggest of all the schools we've seen, but then they're the down town schools. The Ichinohe schools will be my main schools 4 days a week, every other week. I am only at Torigoe twice a month. After we went to Kozuya to Dan's 2 remaining schools, one of which is under construction. It seems nobody speaks English at Kozuya Sho-gakko- (elementary) so Dan is a bit worried. No one speaks English at Torigoe either, but I am not at all worried. My Japanese is coming along slowly. I actually understood all of what my Supervisor was saying in our introductions today!!! For some strange reason there is an English teacher at Ichinohe Elementary (normally there are only English teachers from Junior High and up) and my other school is Junior High so I only really need to worrry about Japanese twice a month anyhow.