Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning
I am a native Japanese speaker teaching Japanese in a university somewhere on this planet. This blog is usually written in English, but sometimes Japanese and Chinese appear. Please don't care what you cannot read. They are for my students.
I took a walk after nap today. Though I wanted to take a picture of trains running on the bridge, someone told me that trains operation was being halted. He was also waiting there with his cameras and tripod. Thanked him, I left there soon.
It is difficult for me to do blog posting everyday. Let me make today’s post simple. Please don’t ask me whether the “Arida Mikan” in the photo is sweet or sour.
In the dream, I was going to marry a lady. I hadn’t expected such thing happened to me. And it seemed that things were going well. I was surprised there was one person who would be with me.
But soon, I found that she was no longer there. I mean she just disappeared. Actually I felt like that I had just confirmed again there was no one who wanted to be with me. To me, it’s just a usual thing.
So that was the time I woke up this morning at usual time. Now my mom is staying at my sister’s house near Tokyo. I don’t have to prepare breakfast for my mom. Besides, there is one hour time difference between me and my students, I don’t have to get up early. In this opportunity, I should have slept more in order to get rid of my tiredness. But the dream made me wake up. That was a dream that I didn’t need to see.
Of course I know that the more meat, the better taste a curry becomes. But the amount of meat is predetermined because I always buy one package of meat from supermarket. On the other hand, the amount of vegetable can be increased as much as I can cut because there are a lot of vegetable that I harvested from my garden.
So, every time I cook curry, it results in big portion of vegetable and small portion of meat. It is not so good in view of taste. The same thing happened to today’s chicken curry.
It is Saturday. I planted some lettuce on the ground in my garden in morning hours. And I cut and threw the Bitter Melon away because its season is over. I finished gardening at 11 a.m.
Since then I proofread students’ drafts for monthly newsletter kind of things. A student overlooked (or neglected) the same corrections twice. So I had to point out the same thing three times.
I took a nap around 2p.m. and then I continued to send feed-backs to my students for the tasks that I told them to do and submit during the class this week.
And…
It was just a normal weekend for me. I kept working for my students.
Some years ago, I have planted several persimmon trees in my garden in order to pollinate each other. But None of them got fruits like this one, this year. I don’t know why. But I know that it is reality that I cannot do what other people can.
Several years have already past since I quit the company. I used to be a company man. Some times I dream in the night in which my company and coworkers appear. But I am too sleepless to see a dream in the night recent months because of exhausting hard work as a Japanese language teacher.
The dream that I saw this morning was quite a weird one. In the dream, I had to start working in a company in U.S. I am Japanese and not good at speaking English. To my surprise, I saw many of my old coworkers in Japan were working there. They had moved from Japan to U.S. prior to me. Those Japanese were quite good English speakers and were communicating as bilingual. I thought I could never speak English as well as they do. Since I didn’t know how to work in U.S., I became really anxious if I could work there. And then one Japanese lady teased me saying my English was very poor.
She made fun of me. That was the time that I woke up this morning. It was already 6:40 a.m., a little later than my usual getting up time. I got up with mixed feeling but tried speeding up cooking breakfast for me and my 83 year-old mom.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 