Answering Questions

Today is a Q&A post, discussing some elements of teaching. Thanks go to Michelle for these great questions:

"How are classes going?"
Classes are going well. I've finally gotten into the swing of things...for the most part. There are some things you just can't ever be truly prepared for, which makes this job excellent for developing ad libbing, improv, think-on-your-feet skills. For example, one class that is usually very strong could wind up getting more tripped up on a lesson topic that the other classes had no problem with, and I have to quickly conjure up some new way of explaining myself, drawing on the board, pantomiming, cross-referencing a different concept, customized to the problem that this group is having.

I try really hard to involve as many elements of learning as possible into the lesson. I know that some students are audio-learners, some are visual, some are hands-on, some are logical, some need other ideas to connect to, and some just have to manage through a brick wall in their brain. So, my lessons are designed to cater to as many of those as possible, featuring worksheets, fill in the blank, progressively increased challenge, response to audio queues, student oral response, illustration, mathematical/logic based grammar equations, and cross-reference-able memory queues, to name a few.

"What is your biggest hurdle at school so far?"
One of my biggest challenges is the need for patience. I have been learning that slowly and painfully, but have made leaps of progress. Another major obstacle is thinking of meaningful content for my oral conversation class. I teach seven 1st-year English grammar classes a week, and those are easy to prepare for because there are a million grammar points to cover, and a million ways to cover them. However, I teach a single 2nd-year Oral Conversation class, which has no text, no syllabus, no curriculum, and no clearly defined set of goals other than "to encourage communication." On top of that, this particular class is especially difficult to reign in and get to focus, despite the fact that it is only 11 students. I have to prepare extremely interesting, engaging topics, while maintaining a relatively low level of English. Some of the more simplistic/"childish" subject matter that works for 1st-year students just doesn't interest the 2nd-years, yet their English skills aren't quite developed enough to discuss things like politics, history, and more intellectual culture, despite the fact that those topics would probably appeal to them more on the intellectual level.

"What level is your highschool - meaning what percentage of your students will go on to University?"
Well, it depends how you define University. If you mean 4-year college (四年制大学 - Private, National, and Public), then the answer is ~61%. If you throw in vocational schools and such, that number goes higher. More than 50% go to 4-year Private University. I'm not sure how that ranks my school nationally.

************************************************************************************

That's about it for today. Also, I had reservations about even mentioning it on this blog, but I recently posted a video to my YouTube channel about the progress I've had in terms of getting in shape since coming to Japan. I've chosen not to embed the video on here, as dieting really isn't relevant to this blog. If, however, you would like to see the video (warning, it is 7:20 long), you can click here. In the future, I won't be mentioning YouTube videos that I've chosen not to embed, so if you are interested in other video content I might be posting, then:

You can check out my YouTube channel to see all of my videos, subscribe to my channel, post rating and comments, etc. by clicking here. (Note: you'll need to register for YouTube to post comments there, subscribe, and rate videos).

Learning Japanese

I made a regular video blog, embedded below. Here, I discuss the different elements I am using to further my Japanese language education. As many of you know, my goal is complete fluency, so really getting the most out of this immersion experience is a high priority for me.



Edit: I apologize to anyone who saw the original posted video. Its audio ended up going way out of sync when it actually uploaded to YouTube. I've since fixed the problem and re-uploaded. Let me know if there are still any problems with it. Thanks!

Chilling with the Band

Last weekend, I went to a monthly party held at the local okonomiyaki shop. It was my first chance to meet young Japanese people in my area (where most everyone is highschool age and younger, or 30+). Everyone was really nice, and I managed to keep contact with a couple of the people I met there throughout the week. One girl, who works at the shops near my station, plays in a band called Brownsugar, and she invited me to see their performance last night.

I headed to Suma Beach, near Kobe, around 3 o'clock. The venue was a beachside grill and bar, with a stage for DJ'ing and nightly live performances. When I first arrived, I was introduced to the band and several other friends of the girl who invited me. Throughout the evening I met probably 30 different people. The performances started around 5 and were pretty eclectic and...well....weird at first. However, they got better as the evening went on, and I have to say that Brownsugar was by far the best act of the night.

There were small fireworks getting set off on the beach throughout the evening, and the whole beach was pretty alive with young people. After things wound down there (which happens really early in Japan, although things start early too), I was invited to join the band and friends at an izakaya that took us well past last train. From there, we went and bought fireworks and set them off at a nearby park. It was a really fun time hanging out with them, and they were all great people. I'm not going to lie though, managing the language barrier was really really hard. Admittedly, the biggest challenge was starting/joining a conversation and showing that I could somewhat understand and communicate. I have to imagine I'm a huge pain, as conversations can sometimes slow to a crawl with me as we attempt to simplify somewhat complicated concepts enough to mutually understand each other.

In any event, I had a really good time, and it was a really wild experience. It's also totally not like anything I've ever done before.

One of the most interesting people I met throughout the evening was a Brazilian Japanese guy named Fabio. (For those who don't know, Brazil has the largest population of Japanese emmigrants of any country in the world. Over the last couple generations, there was a flow of people migrating back into Japan, the country of their parents and grandparents. As a result, Brazilians make up the 3rd largest foreign resident population in Japan, after Korea and China.) Anyway, he has been living in Japan for a while, and I would say he's probably the kind of fluent I hope to be in a year or so. However, because Japanese is his second language, and not his home country, we ended up having a LOT in common, and he was very capable of speaking my level of Japanese, so that we pretty much 100% understood each other. It was also really interesting because unlike any other foreigners I've met here, English isn't our common language, Japanese is. In that way, I almost see him as one of the most valuable friends I've met so far, as we are very close in linguistic ability, and yet forced to communicate in Japanese and not fall back on our native tongue.

Blue means go???

I'm waiting at an intersection in Tokyo a couple years ago, speaking with a friend. She looks up, and says "Oh, it's blue, let's go!" referring to the pedestrian traffic light. "Don't you mean green?" I say as we hurry to cross the street, double checking to confirm that I haven't missed a major difference in Japanese traffic signals. The light is in fact the exact same shade of green I'd expect from back home in the U.S. "No, no, street lights are blue; red, yellow, blue." From this exchange, I wondered, do Japanese people have some unique sensory perception where in specific contexts only, they perceive the world in a different color than everyone else?

Well, the reality is, in the Japanese language, traffic lights are 赤 (red), 黄 (yellow), 青 (blue) while their actual physical colors remain rather consistent with international standards (in English: red, yellow, and green). This especially came as a surprise to me because I knew that there existed a word for green in Japanese, 緑 (green).

As it turns out, there are a number of languages around the world that do not distinguish between green and blue. To speakers of these languages, you would use the same word to describe the color of a leaf and the color of the sky, or else you would qualify it as "leaf blue/green" or "sky blue/green". Linguists use the attractive word "grue" to describe this unspecified blue/green color designation.

For Japan, this very phenomenon was the case, only having the word 青 (read "ao") which today is used effectively as blue. Prior to World War II, this word was used to describe everything we would regard in the realm of blue and green, and it was not until the occupation following the war that linguistic distinguishment between green and blue arose. It is from this era that the word 緑 (read "midori") arose as more than just a shade of "ao" and instead came to distinguish green colors as different from blue ones....for the most part.

There remain a few culturally lasting exceptions where the traditional term "ao" is still used to describe what would technically/perceptually fall under the category of green. These exceptions include traffic signals, grass, leaves, as well as a few others. So, when a Japanese person says that a traffic light is "red, yellow, and blue", they are literally translating a culturally lingering linguistic vestige, not indicating a unique sensory perception.

For more information regarding linguistic distinctions of color, as well as descriptions of various languages that have their own versions of "grue", click here.