15
Feb
In Japan, Trying to Keep Up My Japanese
Topic: Family and Friends, Japan 2007
When I visited Japan in 2004, I met up with a friend of mine who had been working in Tokyo for a year or so. He told me living in Japan was the worst thing for the Japanese language skills he had acquired taking classes in the US. He put in a lot of hours at his job in an English-speaking office, and his circle of friends were Americans. He ended up speaking Japanese mainly just to order food and give directions to cab drivers. At the time I found this hard to believe, but now I find myself having the same experience.
The logical solution would be to try to make some Japanese friends, but taking care of the boys severely limits time for that. My natural social group here is the moms at Kai’s school. They all hang around when school gets out, while the kids play in the school’s playground for a while. I get to practice my Japanese with them a bit here and there, but I spend most of my time chasing Eidan, to keep him out of trouble (Japanese playgrounds are a lot of fun, but - by American lawsuit-happy standards - are really dangerous for toddlers. I’ll probably write more about this later).
Having said all that, I am making advances. I wouldn’t say I’m covering a lot of new ground, but I’m becoming more adept at using the skills I already have. People talk much faster than what I was used to in the classroom, and at first it all sounded like a blur. But now I’m getting better at being able to at least parse out the words I know when I hear people talk. With my own speaking, I can produce some simple sentences naturally, in that I can say them without having to think about the fact that I’m speaking Japanese: asking where something is, ordering food, exchanging greetings, etc. I can put together more complex sentences, but once you start adding adjectives, indirect objects, etc., I have to think about what I want to say before I can say it.
One stumbling block has been dealing with old ladies. Young people generally have no problem understanding my Japanese, but older women I deal with (typically at cash registers) seem to not comprehend even my simple “ie, kekkoo desu” (no thanks) as I try to turn down their offer for yet another pair of chopsticks to bring home with the food I’m buying, as they look puzzled and then stuff them in the bag anyway. I imagine I’d have the same problem with old men, but I don’t encounter them much (you don’t see them in service jobs as often, and, from what I can tell, there aren’t as many of them, as they don’t live as long).
I’m doing a few things to at least maintain my Japanese skills:
- I’m taking a Japanese class that meets once a week. It’s offered by the Minato International Association and cost only 5000 yen for 10 classes (that’s about $40). It’s their “Step II” class - about half of it is familiar from my class at Penn and the other half is new. The teaching style is also quite different: the students in the class are from all over the place, and many don’t speak English, so there is no common “fallback” language for the students. The instruction is almost entirely in Japanese, and the teacher compensates for the lack of a common language by using a lot of visual aids. Just about every new word we learn is accompanied by a picture.
- I’ve finally worked out a good, efficient daily routine, so I’m now starting to squeeze in half an hour a day to study.
- I’m listening to JapanesePod101 podcasts on my iPod while I stroll Eidan back and forth to Kai’s school. I’ve tried out several different podcasts, and JapanesePod101 is by far the best. The lessons are usually fictional stories play-acted in Japanese, and they are often very funny. After listening to the scene they then break down the key lines to analyze the grammar and vocabulary. Highly recommended! You can download the podcasts for free through iTunes.
- I’m keeping up my Katakana and Hiragana by trying to read all the signs I walk by. This is actually a lot of fun - it’s kind of like doing crossword puzzles on the go. The Katakana signs are especially enjoyable, as they’re almost always transliterated English words, but they’re usually changed just enough that it takes some thinking to figure out what the original English word was. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of signs like these and will post some of the best ones soon.
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