January 28, 2008

January 28, 2008

Reiko had her English test yesterday. As soon as they got home, Kaori asked me to check her answers. The structure of the test was pretty strange. There were a bunch of choose-the-word-to-fill-in-the-blank questions, and then a set of weird problems where you were given a short dialogue with a five-word blank, and five words, and you had to put them in order and then mark the second and fourth word. Reiko was the best at that section, mostly because it wasn't either incredibly idiomatic English or difficult business jargon. Then there was some reading comprehension on boring and technical subjects, and a listening section that I wasn't able to check. I'm sure she did best on the listening, though. The answer choices were incredibly simple compared to the complicated choices in the reading sections. I was at first really surprised, because I assumed that reading would be simpler since that's the way it is in Japanese. But reading comprehension in English doesn't involve memorizing kanji, and the Japanese educational system is such that kids can "know" English and be completely unable to speak it. Besides that speaking practice doesn't start until 13, Kaori also said that although they're bringing in foreign teachers to teach English conversation, a lot of the teachers are still native Japanese who can't speak English without an accent, and bringing in more native English speakers would put them out of a job.

So although I keep worrying that I sound as bad in Japanese as they do in English, that may not be so. There are far fewer sounds in Japanese than there are in English, and most of them, with the exception of the r/d/l sound and the n/m sound (Jeremy, what are these called?) are sounds that we make in English, so it's not hard for us to speak. But we have so many different vowels, and overwhelming combinations of consonants, and weird sounds like "th" and "v" that aren't in Japanese. And then there's the r/l difficulty. Kate or Ksenia said that apparently the problem is that they honestly can't tell the difference at all. It's been tested, and both sounds apparently register as the same. I find that hard to understand since they sound so different to me, but I guess it's possible.

There are many mind-bending things like that. It's hard to get used to the idea that gestures don't necessarily have universal meaning, or universal implications. We were talking about confusion about Japanese gestures. The "come here" hand wave takes a while for me to get used to, because it looks just like the motion you would make to tell someone "no, no, stay there for now". Ksenia said she had the exact same problem. But some people get it right away. Likewise, a bunch of us found the crossed forearms accompanying "だめ" kind of offensive. In English, doing that is really strong, about as much as yelling at someone to get away from you. The other part of our discomfort is that when people do it, they appear to be trying to illustrate what they mean, even though だめ is one of the easiest and most important words. I get that feeling with my host mom, and it's awkward. In an effort to make me understand, she uses English words when she can, but because she doesn't know a lot they're all simpler words and thus I know them in Japanese. It feels weird, because I feel like I'm being talked down to. It also makes it harder for me because I have to constantly figure out whether her sounds are attempting to make Japanese words that I don't know or English words that I don't recognise. Muzukashii.

だめ (dame): uh.....I tried to explain this one before, our textbooks define it as "no good", but it really means bad, don't do, not good, broken and various other words in that general category
難しい (muzukashii): difficult