Culture Festival and Language Learning

School Culture Festival

Bunka-sai, or the Culture Festival, was two Saturday’s ago. And yes, occasionally you have to work on a Saturday, for the price of a Monday off. At least they got rid of the 6-day school week a few years ago. Though most students, and most teachers still end up at school 6 or 7 days a week.

After each class performing two songs in a singing competition, the real fun began. Each class then competed for the most fun and interesting room. My job was to walk around and have fun.

My three favorites were
-Target Practice: One class created a horse out of a rolly-chair which you then got pulled across the room on, shooting arrows at targets for prizes.
-A giant board game with mini-games like guess the weight, mini-fishing and transferring beans with chopsticks.
-A Spring theme where I got my photo as Totoro.

I also lost in an arm-wrestling to 15-year old, with lots of people watching. In my credit, he’s the only one in the school who seems to have already hit and probably finished puberty, and it was a real battle.

The day ended with most of the losing 3^rd grade class crying because they lost. I’ve been told the time spent in Jr. High school is considered to be the best years of ones lives and each class wants to go out with a bang. Tough to celebrate and listen to the winning song while hearing sobs and sniffles.

Learning Japanese and English

Today I had no classes because of end of semester exams. So I studied almost 6 hours, all from a grammar textbook. This drive to study has only just arrived for me. I think I realized I could be putting a lot more effort into learning Japanese. Also that learning grammar is much more essential than learning vocabulary or kanji (characters). Now it still takes me a little time to plan out what I’m going to say, but I can make quite a variety of sentences. I think it takes additional time because one has to rearrange the sentence components in order to translate. For instance...

I want to say. At 3pm, I read a book in the library.

In Japanese, the order is I, at 3pm, in the library, book, read

So in Japanese Watashi wa, gogo no sanji ni, toushokan de, hon wo, yomimashita

Sticking with language, while drinking in Tokyo, some dude mentioned speaking Spanish, and I said I could. I was wrong. When I tried, nothing but a 50 50 mix of Span-nese came out; Japanese must be pushing Spanish out of my brain’s foreign language center. I had always heard you should try to learn a 3^rd language in a 2^nd language and so forth. Pretty interesting.

Another funny thing is that most Japanese have a lot of trouble with saying English syllables. Which is not a surprise. I’ve come to realize the great difficulty of speaking and learning English. In Japanese, there are about 80 or so distinct syllables which are strung together to make words, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t. English must have at least double that, and then there's the combining of syllables together and the choice of which to stress or draw out.

How do Japanese people deal with this?

They use their syllabary to create the English syllables which works surprisingly well, but still with far from perfect results. Thus words like oh-sue-tah-rah-lee-ah, (Australia), which look ridiculous can sound like English when the syllables are combined. Also, some of the Japanese syllables are perfect matches, but you wouldn’t think so. To pluralize any noun, they had –zu. Zu? Yes. i.e. Speakers. Su-pee-ka-zu, besides that final R it is right on. Well maybe you have to hear it.