月: 2024年4月

Today is the thirty-second day of the spring semester 2024, and happens to be the second day of spring holidays. Still, I continue to work. I recorded my voice to make it part of the final examination for the listening course. There are two problems with recording; noise and reverberation. Of course, these must be minimized for the listening materials in the exam.

If I could record by the built-in microphone of my computer, it would make editing easier. But a certain level of noise is recorded in this way. The noise comes from the fan to cool down the computer. It is impossible to stop the fan during recording. I think I should have brought the noise cancelling microphone that I had used in my on-line classes during the pandemic. In order to record with less noise, I recorded by my mobile phone. The mobile phone doesn’t have a fan to cool. Probably sound quality is not so good. And I have to change the audio data format from m4a to mp3 when transferring from mobile phone to my computer.

The next problem is reverberation. My room has concrete walls. The walls make reverberation on my voice with echo. This problem also didn’t happen when I was in Japan, because there was no concrete wall in my room of traditional Japanese house. What I did in this morning was that I recorded my voice under the futon. On the bed, I put the futon on me, or I’d say I got into under the futon. Reading a book with a flashlight, I recorded my voice with a mobile phone. I felt less oxygen.

I always try to solve these technical issues that I get while working. No one knows it, no increase of salary because of it.

I finished recording and editing by 10 a.m., though it was just about 10 percent of recordings for the entire examination. Then I started making the PPT presentation for Sunday class. Of course, Sunday is usually weekend, but today (Friday)’s classes were rescheduled on Sunday. Thursday classes were not rescheduled, they were simply cancelled. I have three classes on Thursday and one class on Friday. So, no-rescheduling Thursday and rescheduling only Friday do help me.

I didn’t take a lunch, and I went outside in the afternoon. I wanted to go shopping in the grocery store where I go every Saturday. Today is Friday, one day earlier, but I wanted to go there because it is not good for my health if I just stay in my room all day. When I got to the campus gate, still I was inside, I remembered I didn’t bring my passport. If a foreigner doesn’t carry his/her passport, it will result in punishment. I have hardly seen any police officers on the way to that grocery store so far. I don’t think it is likely to be asked ID card by police officers. Having said that, I worried the worst case. So, I gave up going outside campus.

Instead of going back the same way, I turned to the campus cafeteria. It was afternoon and already late for lunch, but I ordered “Ramen”. I can usually get a discount for teachers in that noodle shop. But the guy there told me something that I could not understand. Probably he said that the card reader for teacher didn’t work, so I had to pay by students’ card reader. I put my card on students’ card reader and paid normal charge without discount. I just wanted “Ramen”, but he charged me “Beef ramen”. Of course, the latter’s price was higher. But what I got by the different price was just two or three of very small pieces of beef. It was already 2:30 in the afternoon and noodle was much in volume. I didn’t cook my supper tonight.

On the way to my room, I bought 12 litter of bottled water. I slept in late afternoon for two hours. The long hours of nap mean that I was tired. By 10 p.m. I completed PPT slides and other preparation for Sunday class. I started another PPT making for Monday class, but I gave up continuing work tonight.

I checked the pedometer on my mobile phone. Today I walked 3982 steps that are not enough for healthy daily life. Steps a day should be more than 8000. Actually, I feel I am losing my muscle on my body because I have been working all the time, sitting at desk for these five years. I want my body get my muscle back and healthy life style.

Today is the thirty-first day of the spring semester 2024, if I count days correctly. This Thursday and Friday are holidays here. This is a good chance for me to prepare for the final examination. Usually, I make questions and answer sheets during winter or summer breaks before the semesters. But there were a lot of documentation tasks in the winter break, I could not make materials for the final examination of this spring semester. The question-and-answer sheets are required to submit to the university in the 11^th week of the semester. So, now is the time to prepare for it in addition to daily preparation for ongoing classes.

I haven’t been outside today. I thought I’d better to walk outside for my physical and mental health, but I missed a chance in afternoon. When I looked at “Moments” of Wechat, I found many photo images in which many students were having fun. Some of them were in sightseeing spots, some were even in abroad.

I have been making questions and answers for the examination of the listening course all day today. I wanted to write “Your Laoshi is hard working even in holidays” on Dingtalk. But it has nothing to do with my students. So, I didn’t write a such complaint on where the students could see. Now I am writing my complaint here.

From the year 2020, I have been using Dingtalk. It is a kind of Social Networking Service. A user can communicate with members such as sending messages and talking on videophone. Dingtalk seems to be a suitable platform for company managing. Thanks to such trait that it works well for an organization like a company, it is also good for me as a teacher to carry out on-line teaching. Now I teach students in classroom. On-line teaching is no longer needed. But I still use Dingtalk. And I have made new groups of the second-year and first-year students’ groups to communicate with them. It is useful for me to give instructions, homework assignments, and feedback.

I make one group for one class. There are two classes in one grade, so, two Dingtalk groups for one grade. Counting the years, I’ve just found that the current first-year students are of the seventh year, or the seventh grade. Under the condition that I use Dingtalk, I can register up to 500 students in my group. So, if I keep the groups and continue to have all the students, someday, the number of members is going to reach the upper limit and not be able to register a new member. Besides, many students stop visiting my group after his/her graduation. Therefore, I delete the groups of fourth-year students at the beginning of April every year. Although the graduation ceremony is in June or July, I am a Japanese, April 1^st is the starting day of a new school year.

Today is April 3^rd, I don’t have any class, so I implemented the deletions of fourth-year students’ groups. There are still students who frequently visit the upper group of my Dingtalk organization. Some are important person who represent the class. I moved such students to another group for alumni. To be honest, selecting a student to move is depending on my preference to some extent. I glanced the name list and decided who to move and who to delete. But there are several students whom I could not make decision easily to keep or delete. One student was excellent and communicated more often than other students. I was at a loss about her. The last message was on December 2022, that meant there was no communication in 2023. I sent the last message to say good-bye and QR code to rejoin my group.

Finishing moving some students from the fourth-year students’ group to the alumni group, I deleted the groups of two classes. In most case, there will be no communication with students after their graduation. Even if I keep them in the alumni group, four fifth don’t come to see the messages. It is sad to say, but relationships between students and a teacher don’t last long. But there are also students, one fifth in the alumni group, who come to see my messages. I want to continue to communicate with them.

I finished these things in morning hours. And I found that that student has read my last message. Dingtalk has a function that displays if a message you sent has been read or unread. There had been no direct communication with her more than a year, but she opened my message at once. I regret what I have done. I should have added her into the alumni group. That was a thing that I could do with two or three clicks. On the contrary, if I delete her, I should have done it without saying anything. Perhaps leaving the last message simply hurt her feeling. I am really sorry for her.

Na-adjective “Kirei” causes many confusions between Japanese Learners (JLs). It is because the Na-adjective “Kirei” has the letter “i” at the end of the word. The following deals with this issue by estimating the damage on JLs’ utterances that contain adjectives. The Conclusion is that the damage on I-adjectives is more serious such that the Japanese teachers have to make efforts to correct the JLs’ errors.

1. Error Types

Two types of error E1 and E2 are described below. Considering the numbers of the words that are affected by each error type, it can be concluded that E2 causes more serious damage.

E1: Errors on Na-adjective “Kirei”

Some of JLs think that “Kirei” is an I-adjective. Such JLs conjugate “Kirei” as if it is an I-adjective. This type of damage is expected to happen only on conjugation of “Kirei”. It is not clear if the same errors occur or not on similar Na-adjectives “Kirai” and “Yukai” that end the word with the letter “i”.

E2: Errors on the entire word group of I-adjectives

Some of JLs think that I-adjectives conjugate identically to “Kirei” which is actually a Na-adjective. This type of damage is expected to happen on all I-adjectives that JLs know.

2. Occurrence of Errors

The author conducted quizzes to measure the occurrence of errors on I- and Na- adjectives. The result indicates that the error type E2 occurs slightly more than the of error type E1.

(1) Quizzes

 The Quiz was conducted in the fourth week of the second semester for the first-year students. 55 students answered. The quiz asked the proper ending of two sentences as below;

Q1: A sentence of predicative Na-adjective “Kirei”; past-negative

Q2: A sentence of predicative I-adjective “Omoshiroi”; past-negative

(2) Q1

 There are two selections in Q1; I-adjective ending and Na-adjective ending. Choosing I-adjective ending is wrong. Choosing Na-adjective ending is right because “Kirei” is a Na-adjective. The error indicated that the student thinks “Kirei” is an I-adjective.

(3) Q2

There are two selections in Q2; I-adjective ending and Na-adjective ending. Choosing I-adjective ending is right because “Omoshiroi” is an I-adjective. Choosing Na-adjective ending is wrong. The error indicated that the student thinks I-adjectives conjugate as “Kirei” does.

(4) Quiz Results

 Students’ answers are classified into four patterns as shown below. Numbers of students who answered for each pattern are also shown. 29 students answered correctly for both questions Q1 and Q2. On the other, 26 students answered one or two wrong answer(s).

A1: Two right answers for both Q1 and Q2; 29 students

A2: Wrong answer for Q1 and right answer for Q2; 10 students

A3: Right answer for Q1 and wrong answer for Q2; 13 students

A4: Two wrong answers for both Q1 and Q2; 3 students

3. Consideration of Quiz Results

(1) Error types and answer patterns

  29 students of answer pattern A1 are expected to have a knowledge about proper endings for both I-adjectives and Na-adjectives. 3 students of answer pattern A4 are likely that they have neither recognize differences between two adjectives nor correct forms for each yet.

  Answer pattern A2 corresponds to Error type E1. 10 students applied I-adjective ending to Na-adjective “Kirei”, while answered correctly to the I-adjective sentence of past -negative. Although these 10 students answered wrongly to Na-adjective, however, they know a conjugation pattern of I-adjective which “i” turns to be “ku”. It shows a progress on students’ so-called “interlanguage” to some extent.

  Answer pattern A3 corresponds to Error type E2. 13 students wrongly applied Na-adjective ending to I-adjective “Omoshiroi”, while answered correctly to the Na-adjective sentence of past -negative. The letter “i” of “Kirei” does not change by conjugation. These 13 students answered wrongly to I-adjective without changing the letter “i”. Therefore, they do not know a conjugation pattern of I-adjective which “i” turns to be “ku”. It seems that these students’ so-called “interlanguage” is still in the early stage.

4. Conclusion

The Conclusion is that the damage by not knowing conjugation of I-adjectives is more serious than the damage on “Kirei” by applying I-adjectives’ conjugation.

In order to estimate the magnitude of damage, severity and occurrence of errors must be considered.

(1) Severity by error types

The followings conclude that E2 is more serious in quality and quantity.

E1: Errors on Na-adjective “Kirei”

  Damage only happens on the word “Kirei”. And JLs making this error knows I-adjectives’ conjugation. Probably they can conjugate I-adjectives correctly. The numbers of words affected by this error are limited to one or very few. I-adjectives are not affected.

E2: Errors on the entire word group of I-adjectives

  Damage happens on all I-adjectives that JLs know, because JLs making this error do not know I-adjectives’ conjugation such as “i” turning to be “ku”. The large numbers of I-adjectives are affected by this error, while Na-adjectives are produced correctly.

(2) Occurrence of errors

  Students’ answer patterns indicated that the numbers of E2 are slightly more than that of E1. Answer pattern A2 corresponding E1 is observed in 10 students. Answer pattern A3 corresponding E2 is observed in 13 students. Since sample number is small, the author does not prove that there is a significant difference between A2 and A3 in numbers. However, it seems to be safe to say that E2 happens with the same occurrence or slightly more than E1.

(3) Magnitude of Damage

 E2 is more serious than E1, and E2’s occurrence is the same or more than E1. Therefore, E2 has the bigger magnitude of damage from both perspectives of severity and occurrence. Japanese teachers must pay more attention to how a student conjugate I-adjectives. If a student thinks I-adjectives’ conjugation is the same as “Kirei” that is a Na-adjective, the teacher needs to make effort to correct wrong conjugation of I-adjectives that the student makes.

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クイズに用いた2問は以下のような２択問題です。

Q1: きのうの旅館は きれ｛くなかったです  or　いでは ありませんでした ｝。

Q2: きのうのテレビは おもしろ｛くなかったです  or　いでは ありませんでした ｝。

Today is the twenty-eighth day of the spring semester 2024. If it were in Japan, today is the first day of the school year and fiscal year. But here, it’s middle of the semester now. I have three classes today because it’s Monday.

One class lasts 95 minutes. It consists from 45 minutes of the first half, 5 minutes of break, and 45 minutes of the last half. I usually go to a bathroom during 5 minutes break. After what I do in the bathroom, I wash my hands. So many people (men) don’t wash their hands, but I wash. There are three faucets in the entrance of a bathroom. And I found that water runs from  only one tap out of three. Two don’t work. At first, I thought it might be some kinds failures. But it is not likely to be a technical failure. Because the same things are happening in all the bathrooms in the classroom building. There is no bathroom that two taps work and one doesn’t, let alone bathroom in which all the three taps work. Only one tap runs water in every bathroom of the classroom building in this university.

So, it must be an intentional thing. Obviously, it saves water, good for water conservation. But I just imagine that there may be an educational purpose on this. You should not think that everything is favorable to you. If there are three faucets in bathroom, don’t expect all the three taps run water. Two are useless, only one works for you. This is a message to young university students. In their future life, they will encounter many difficulties. Not everything works for you, some are even harmful to you. Only things of less probability work for you. In order to survive and get along with difficulties, you have to think like this.

Do I imagine too far? Anyway, only one tap runs water; this is common to all the bathroom. The next problem is which of three gives me water. Usually, a tap on right or in center works. I haven’t seen so far that a tap on left runs water. It depends on each bathroom about which of right or center works. Probably this has another effect. That is to enhance your memory.

Today is the twenty-seventh day of the spring semester 2024, and happens to be Sunday that should be the day of rest. But I had to prepare for Monday’s two classes. I have to teach three classes on Monday, but two are the same subject. As of morning, only a half PPT slide was completed for one class. As for the other class, I had done nothing for PPT slides. Making one and a half PPT presentations in one day is obviously tough thing to do.

I also had to go the administrative building to print answer sheets of quizzes that would be used on Monday. I am going to give them to the first-year students in conversation class and the second-year students in listening class. Printing about thirty A4 paper didn’t take much time, but I talked to the chief about the situation in the classroom. I spent one hour in the teachers’ room.

In the afternoon, I talked with one student via videophone on Dingtalk. He asked my advice for his interview in the entrance examination of a graduate school. I don’t have much experience nor knowledge about academic world like graduate school. But through one hour talk, I think I gave him much advice such that he could get high score in the interview. I talked with him from 2 to 3 p.m.

After the talking, I worked very hard to make PPT presentation. I cooked my supper, but I decided to eat it after I finish today’s PPT making. I ate my supper at 10:50 p.m. I thought that if I could have eaten the supper one hour earlier, it would be much better for me to prepare for the new week. Perhaps I could have got one hour if I didn’t talk to one student in the afternoon. But I shouldn’t think like this because he needed my help.

I ate apple in late night supper. I felt the apple tasted unnatural as if artificial flavor was injected. I stopped eating those pieces of apple and threw them into garbage. Those apples were that I bought in campus supermarket, not that I bought in the store I go every Saturday. A small piece of seal was put on the apple, so I will try not to buy the same apple again by checking the seal.