Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning
I am a native Japanese speaker who used to teach Japanese in a university somewhere on this planet. Currently I don't work but stayed in my house in Northern part of JAPAN. I hope that you could enjoy reading my posts and know what life in Japan is like.
The new semester will commencement next week. But I haven’t prepared for the semester at all, because I had quit the job as a teacher for Japanese language.
I have written nothing on my blog for these three weeks. It’s probably because heat of the summer is very severe and I am exhausted for six years of hard working.
Anyway, soon the students will come back to the campus, although I will not be able to see them.
Amid the heat of 35 Celsius, I walked more than 30 minutes. I had an appointment with a telecommunication company at 10a.m. Like other rural area, the shopping district is always located in remote area from the old town. All the customers are supposed to come by own vehicles to a shopping mall. So, people like me without a car have difficulties to buy a thing or get services which other people can get. I am a minority, and people having a car are majority in this society.
I bought a Samsung’s Galaxy. When I said this on the video call, my older sister seemed to laugh at me. Actually, I don’t understand why she looks down Samsung products. I just bought what a store clerk recommended me and I thought it had enough performance.
When I got out of the store, the sunshine had become even stronger such that I could worry about heat stroke and damage on my skin. It would have taken another thirty minutes for way back to the JR station. I walked, but stopped frequently under the shades. I called my mother using the mobile phone that I had just bought, to say I could not get back home by noon. She told me not to hurry to come home, rather, to take a rest somewhere in the town.
So, I got into a Rahmen restaurant near the railway station. And ate “Vegetable Rahmen” of 880JPY there. Other than me, there was an old man in the restaurant, drinking alcohol in the middle of the day. It was around 12:30 on week day. But there were only two customers in the restaurant. I could hear only sound of cooking and voices from TV. It was very quiet. Clearly it showed to me the declining of a local town in Japan.
Today I went to Niigata because I wanted my ID photo. Actually, I had tried to take my photo by myself with my digital camera. But it was so difficult to make my photo a good one with right lighting, straight direction of face, and good color contrast. I wasted more than two hours yesterday and I gave up the idea to take my photo by myself. So today, I went to a photo studio in Niigata. The studio told me to wait for 30 minutes for processing my photo.
The outside, under the summer sunshine, was too hot. But I walked to Bandai area of the downtown Niigata. An idea came to my mind and that was to go to the observatory in the nearby tall building. There is a 20-story building which is also an office of the famous local newspaper company. I remembered that there was an observatory at the top of the building. I thought it was good to kill thirty minutes.
There is a tall building in the photo above. That building also has an observatory. I have been there several times. The observatory has a good view from south-west to north. But you cannot get good view from North east to south.
You see a tall building with sharp triangle roof on top. That building also has an observatory. But the view from there is limited only from north to South. You cannot see the west. That means you cannot enjoy the view of the sea and Sado island on the west. Actually, if you are male, you could see them by going to men’s restroom. I am a man, so I am not sure whether or not female people can see the west through toilet window. If they can’t, I think it is clearly one of sexual discrimination against women because man can get ocean view while women can’t.
Today’s my conclusion is that the best observatory in the downtown Niigata is where I went to today. It is on the 20th floor of the “Mediaship” building in Bandai area. The second best is of Toki Messe. If you want to take a good picture of Shinano River, Toki Messe is better than Mediaship.
Mr. Shinzo Abe was a politician of Japan. And I should say I didn’t like him at all. Anything he did and said was against my belief and political preferences. But I think he should not have died in that way. He was shot dead by a handmade gun about three years ago.
Two weeks ago, I found his photo on an old newspaper dated on July 11, 2019. Since I was going to quit my job and come back Japan, I was cleaning my room. At that time, I had already finished grading my students for the semester and had registered the scores on the university system. In order to leave the residence, I needed to throw many things as much as I could so that I could pack my stuff into two suitcases and one bag.
Old newspaper is sometime useful to wrap a fragile stuff. But there were many newspaper. I just thought throwing them as trash. And then found Mr. Abe’s photo between the pages. At first, I thought I would throw the page with other pages, but I changed my mind. Even though I didn’t like him, I wanted to take his photo back to Japan with me. Just one page of newspaper wouldn’t increase weight of my suitcase; it’s just a few gram. So, I folded the page and put it into one of my suitcases.
Since two suitcases are too heavy to carry by myself from Narita Airport to my house in Niigata, I asked a shipping company “Kuroneko Yamato” to deliver them. I received them three days ago. I opened one, and found Mr. Abe’s photo again.
There is a small field to cultivate vegetables in the back of my house. Since I had been working abroad in these two years, now the field is covered with weeds. I need to pull them out and cultivate soil by my hand in order to plant vegetables in autumn.
Now it’s the end of July, and summer continues in August. When I came back here two days ago, I quickly realized that there had not been rainfall for long. Everything was dried. Probably three weeks or even one month, my area hasn’t got precipitation. Many leaves became yellow, some trees were withered and died.
Another problem is heat. In addition to drying weather, temperature is high in this summer. It gets 35 Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) every day. I don’t think it is good for my health and safety if I work in my field in the middle of scorching heat and under strong sunshine.
So, I got up 4:30 a.m. in this morning, went to my field, pulled weeds, and gave water to trees. When I approached to grape trees and gripped weeds with my hand, I was stung by two bees. I felt sharp pain on my left hand. Luckily enough, my left hand hasn’t got much aching nor red swelling after that.
Anyway, I know I have to work a lot on my field to make it again well managed vegetable field.
Today is the fifteenth day of the spring semester 2024. Yesterday I gave one class of the first-year students a quiz about Japanese verbs. The quiz was to distinguish five verbs if it was a transitive or intransitive verbs. Actually, a transitive verb and an intransitive verb are different for most of the Japanese verbs even if their actions are similar. In the quiz, I showed an example, that was “Taberu (=eat)”. And I put two images; A= a person is moving him/herself to the direction of arrow, B= a person is exerting his/her force onto an object at hand. I didn’t use the terms “transitive- / intransitive verbs” because the students were still the first-year. Five verbs were; Get-up, Go, Drink, Get back, and Speak. All were basic ones.
I marked the quiz last night and found many strange answers. Many answers said “Nomu(=drink)” is an intransitive verb. Several answers even said “Iku (= go, but also with some nuance of come)” is a transitive verb. I started wondering why this could happen.
In the morning today, I brought the same quiz to another first-year student class. There are two classes in one grade. I made my students answer at the beginning of the class. Right after I got all answer sheets, one of students said that the example was incorrect. Looking at the example “Taberu (= eat)”, I found that there was a tick on the image for intransitive verb. The verb “eat” is, of course, a transitive verb. That was my fault that made my students answer a lot of funny selections about transitive- / intransitive verbs. I apologized to my students.
If I find something’s strange, the first thing I need to do is to check if it’s my fault or not, before thinking it as someone’s fault.
In order to stop my students having wrong concept about transitive- / intransitive verbs, I have already made another quiz with twenty verbs today. I will use this new quiz on Thursday and Friday classes.
I am a native Japanese speaker, teaching Japanese in the foreign language department in a university. Today (actually yesterday) March 4th was the first day of the second semester of school year 2023-2024.
I taught three classes today. Two was listening course for two classes of second year students, and one was conversation course for one class of first year students.
Since we Japanese teachers had been assigned a lot of documentation tasks during winter break, I couldn’t start teaching with textbook materials for listening class. I was ill-prepared for the class. I just did a feedback thing of the last semester.
For these four years, I had been teaching second- and third-year students only. But this time I have got an opportunity to teach first year students. Actually, I am not good at so-called “teacher talk” that is a speaking style for foreign language learners to understand easily. I need to practice teacher talk rather than relying on my poor English.
In order to know the level of the first-year students, I gave them a small quiz at the beginning of the conversation class. The results show that they could not learn well Japanese characters Hiragana and Katakana during the first semester. I need to think of way so that my students can write Japanese characters well.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 