英語の話(January 13)

Let me just say that I LOVE being an English teacher to Reiko. Right now I’m warming my feet under the kotatsu, listening to Reiko read from her practice English exams and coordinating with her questions to me about the vocabulary and her mother’s explanations of what she doesn’t understand in Japanese from the answer book, and my sudden understandings and clarifications in broken Japanese. I hope we don’t confuse the poor girl too much, especially when Reiko changes what she says from the full English that we speak together to the Japanesese-ified English that she translates to her mother. “Arrival” becomes “alaibaru”, “laptop” becomes “pasokon” (personal computer). And her mistakes are sometimes amusing. “Distinction”, she asks me. “That’s like the animals that are dying, right? No! It’s the animals that are already dead. No?”

But it’s incredibly interesting. As Reiko translates the example sentences from English to Japanese so that her mother knows she understands, I learn a lot about simple ways to express ideas in Japanese. Answering her questions about the difference between words can be fun – I got to brush up on my Japanese in explaining the difference between “interpreter” and “translator” (「通訳」と「本訳」). But it can also be really difficult. It doesn’t help that my brain is getting increasingly confused by using Japanese so much, so that I start to forget idiomatic English and natural pronunciation.

I asked Reiko a difficult question today. I’ve been wondering how my friends and I sound to Japanese speakers when we’re chattering away in English. I’ve been told that it’s the hard “r” in English that speakers of other languages make fun of, since it’s not present in too many other languages. I feel like English probably sounds pretty crude. I also asked Reiko about how it sounds to her to hear foreigners speak Japanese, like me at the dinner table. She said that she knows how it sounds different, but she can’t explain it. She asked Kaori, who had to think for a bit before responding “かわいいと思う” – “They sound cute”. Well, I certainly would prefer to sound cute than crude. This only contributes to my general preference for Japan over anyplace else.