Learning English

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I promise to commit to updating more regularly! I also apologize if this post is exceedingly boring. If you don't want to learn about language difficulties, than skip to the bottom, where I quickly recap the past two weeks.

I am constantly impressed with Japan's commitment to learn the English language. It is the only foreign language they teach at any level (except, possibly at college), and it is particularly difficult for the Japanese to learn. First of all, it uses a completely different alphabet, though it is pretty easy to learn, and the Japanese have grown up seeing those letters everywhere they go. The biggest hurdle is the speaking of English. There are many sounds found in the English language that are not found in Japanese, whereas pretty much all the sounds in Japanese can be found in the English language, so it's not too terribly hard for us to speak it, if we know what to say. The Japanese language does not have the following consonant sounds: "th", "v", "l". Also, with the exception of the sound of "n", all of the letters in their alphabet are either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel, so sometimes they have trouble not adding a vowel on the end of a hard consonant sound. e.g. "boat" becomes "boato". The "th" is replaced by a "z", the "v" with a "b". They have an "r" in their language, but it is very soft, and actually sounds half-way between an "r" and an "l". Therefore, when my students say "right" and "light" it sounds exactly the same, and they cannot hear the difference between the two when I say it. I have to admit, it can be kind of funny at times, like if they wanted to say "I'm having a problem with my vowels" it would come out "I'm habing a problem with my bowels". Also, they don't have an "s" followed by an "ee" sound, but instead have a letter "shi" which sounds like the English word "she". So "Seattle" becomes "Shiaturu" and "city elections" becomes "shity erections". Most of my students work hard and like the challenge of English.

So, as I have said before, Tessa and I are attending a class and working on learning Japanese. I think we can now finally read the two easier scripts, hiragana and katakana, and I am even picking up a few kanji here and there. Below is a picture of various friends and family members' names in katakana that I wrote while bored passing time in the teacher's room. Below the names is what they would sound like phonetically in English. You probably need to click on the picture to make it large enough to see whose name is whose.

Remember, vowels in Japanese are consistent, so "a" always sounds like "ah" as in "car", the "i" always sounds like "ee" as in "keen", the "u" always sounds like in the word "tune", the "e" like in "get", and the "o" like in "toe".

OK, enough with that stuff. What have we been up to? Last weekend we celebrated the 4th of July in typical American fashion by0 swimming in the ocean, BBQing tasty meats, and lighting off fireworks on the beach that I purchased at 7-11. Our crowd was a surprisingly diverse group of fellow English teachers that (with us) included 5 Americans, 1 Canadian, 1 Italian, 1 Irishman, 1 Japanese, and 1 Australian. It was a blast. Literally. Then on Sunday we actually went to our local cineplex and watched the new Transformers movie. Apparently they regularly show American movies everywhere here, and in English to boot, with Japanese subtitles. It was pretty expensive at $17 a pop, and the movie wasn't that great, though entertaining at least. It is nice to know we won't have to miss out on our must-see movies when they come out in the theatres, though sometimes we will have to wait a few months for them to get here. One movie we don't have to wait for though, is the new Harry Potter, which comes out next week. Can't wait!

This weekend has been pretty low-key. We went to the one landmark in Namegata, a 4 story tall tower in the middle of nowhere. There is a nice panoramic view from the top, but there is not much else to it aside from a very large and random collection of hundreds of different spherical objects, from salmon eggs to old glass buoys to ball bearings. There was a cool vegetable market nearby though. OK, that's enough for now, more to come later. Bye!