(no subject)
Last week I corrupted a woman's mind. It wasn't intentional, but the opportunity provided itself and I took it without thinking. At the time it seemed like a small thing, and I certainly didn't give it much thought. We could say that she was partly to blame for believing everything I say, but that doesn't take much of the responsibility from me.
Every Saturday at two thirty, this woman meets me for an English lesson at the Saizeriya by the Hotel Nankai in Namba. I'm not really sure why she wants to learn English. My best guess is that she's lonely. She says that she'd like to learn more English to give instructions to the underage Eastern European models that she photographs at work. Though she pays me 1800 yen an hour to speak English with her, almost every time I use Japanese to explain a sticky grammar point or clarify what I want to say, she jumps in and starts up a conversation. The last time this happened we ended up talking about Michael Moore's movies.
She's also embarrassingly thoughtful about buying me drinks. If one of us is a bit late I don't mind going past four o'clock, but she always suggests ending early and paying me the full 2700 yen. Even accounting for Japanese social customs, it's a bit much. I try not to take advantage of her generosity, but this didn't stop me from corrupting her mind last week.
The ability to speak English well, or at least fake it convincingly, is definitely a plus in Japanese society, but nobody really wants to admit how long that learning would actually take. Instead, the current trend is an "every little bit counts" attitude that floods bookstores with English books to teach you one hundred vocabulary words. What you're supposed to do with those words is anybody's guess. Students always react with a mixture of surprise and dread when I tell them that they will most likely need to study grammar to speak English effectively.
There was a woman at the company where I worked who I would probably pick as the representative of this attitude. Her father, in an act that could be construed both as incredibly thoughtful and immeasurably cruel, had forced her to go to high school in Minnesota for a year. Her English pronunciation was quite good, and she had a fair grasp of grammar. While studying English definitely wasn't her favorite thing to do, she lacked the willpower to really give it up. Instead, she looked for a way to keep just busy enough to convince herself that she was doing something without expending any real effort. Her reasoning was that any amount of learning, no matter how small, was worthwhile to her. This is how she justified listening to the beginner level NHK English radio programs even though she had mastered them long ago.
I certainly couldn't deny that she was getting something out of those programs, but I also couldn't help thinking that her learning would grow exponentially if she was willing to put in a meager amount of effort. Effort alone won't do you much good, but you're not going to get very far with unless you have a lot of it.
I know that I'm not going to get away without giving you an analogy, so here we go. It's like baking a cake. There are a certain number of necessary ingredients that you need to assemble, but the exact amounts are going to vary. You need to put them together carefully and then allow time for baking if you want a cake that tastes any good. It's not a very good analogy, I suppose, but it's the best I've been able to come up with. Whenever I hear that kind of person who complains about studying a language for years and not being able to speak it, I always imagine them baking a cake by sloppily mixing in the ingredients and not following the recipe, and then complaining that "I baked this cake for the right amount of time and it still tastes like ASS!"
I don't see this as a particularly Japanese problem. Media perceptions contribute to this view of things, but basically most people aren't really willing to approach another language on its own terms. Probably the most difficult thing to do is avoid the temptation to equate what you learn into your own language all of the time. I've seen many people put in a lot of work without changing their mindsets in this way. The results, whether "foreigner Japanese" that's the rage on TV here or the more familiar stilted English we know, speak for themselves.
Lots of Japanese people complain about English like that, but that type of complaint certainly isn't unique to them. There is a powerful delusion in Japanese society that everyone knows English. The giant, corrupt English conversation schools secure their place in the market by reinforcing this delusion and reassuring Japanese people that they have a huge latent English speaking ability that will be drawn out by sitting down and talking to foreign people. This view is pushed subtly and overtly, but I've seen it outlined fairly openly in a NOVA advertisement on the Hankyu train line.
The woman that meets me every Saturday seems to have a similar mindset. Nearly every week she asks me for suggestions on what she can do to learn. I usually say "do what you can, try watching some movies in English, and don't give up." Every week, she's been too busy or forgot, or didn't bother. It really doesn't bother me. I mean that in the nicest way - what is she going to get out of me screaming at her every week and overworking her? Motivation is something that I can help her with a little, but it's mostly something that she'll have to take care of herself.
Ironically enough, I ended up hurting her out of a desire to motivate her a bit more. We were walking around Den Den Town after our lesson finished up, and we stopped by a giant used video store. I was amazed to see a lump of subtitled episodes of South Park for only 1200 yen. She picked up on my amusement, and when I recommended them to her she bought them.
I honestly don't know how she'll react to them. I suppose at worst she'll be puzzled, but I still kind of feel bad about the whole thing. Here was a thirty-two-year-old woman who just wanted to learn a little English, and now because of me she's going to watch this show filled with words like "bitch," "cockmaster," and "ass," along with plenty of references to American culture that she probably won't get unless she spends a few years in America. She might mistakenly watch it for hours, trying to understand the secrets of the English it contains. The humor of the situation is not lost on me, but on reflection maybe I shouldn't have gotten her hopes up. I'm waiting to see what her reaction will be.
Every Saturday at two thirty, this woman meets me for an English lesson at the Saizeriya by the Hotel Nankai in Namba. I'm not really sure why she wants to learn English. My best guess is that she's lonely. She says that she'd like to learn more English to give instructions to the underage Eastern European models that she photographs at work. Though she pays me 1800 yen an hour to speak English with her, almost every time I use Japanese to explain a sticky grammar point or clarify what I want to say, she jumps in and starts up a conversation. The last time this happened we ended up talking about Michael Moore's movies.
She's also embarrassingly thoughtful about buying me drinks. If one of us is a bit late I don't mind going past four o'clock, but she always suggests ending early and paying me the full 2700 yen. Even accounting for Japanese social customs, it's a bit much. I try not to take advantage of her generosity, but this didn't stop me from corrupting her mind last week.
The ability to speak English well, or at least fake it convincingly, is definitely a plus in Japanese society, but nobody really wants to admit how long that learning would actually take. Instead, the current trend is an "every little bit counts" attitude that floods bookstores with English books to teach you one hundred vocabulary words. What you're supposed to do with those words is anybody's guess. Students always react with a mixture of surprise and dread when I tell them that they will most likely need to study grammar to speak English effectively.
There was a woman at the company where I worked who I would probably pick as the representative of this attitude. Her father, in an act that could be construed both as incredibly thoughtful and immeasurably cruel, had forced her to go to high school in Minnesota for a year. Her English pronunciation was quite good, and she had a fair grasp of grammar. While studying English definitely wasn't her favorite thing to do, she lacked the willpower to really give it up. Instead, she looked for a way to keep just busy enough to convince herself that she was doing something without expending any real effort. Her reasoning was that any amount of learning, no matter how small, was worthwhile to her. This is how she justified listening to the beginner level NHK English radio programs even though she had mastered them long ago.
I certainly couldn't deny that she was getting something out of those programs, but I also couldn't help thinking that her learning would grow exponentially if she was willing to put in a meager amount of effort. Effort alone won't do you much good, but you're not going to get very far with unless you have a lot of it.
I know that I'm not going to get away without giving you an analogy, so here we go. It's like baking a cake. There are a certain number of necessary ingredients that you need to assemble, but the exact amounts are going to vary. You need to put them together carefully and then allow time for baking if you want a cake that tastes any good. It's not a very good analogy, I suppose, but it's the best I've been able to come up with. Whenever I hear that kind of person who complains about studying a language for years and not being able to speak it, I always imagine them baking a cake by sloppily mixing in the ingredients and not following the recipe, and then complaining that "I baked this cake for the right amount of time and it still tastes like ASS!"
I don't see this as a particularly Japanese problem. Media perceptions contribute to this view of things, but basically most people aren't really willing to approach another language on its own terms. Probably the most difficult thing to do is avoid the temptation to equate what you learn into your own language all of the time. I've seen many people put in a lot of work without changing their mindsets in this way. The results, whether "foreigner Japanese" that's the rage on TV here or the more familiar stilted English we know, speak for themselves.
Lots of Japanese people complain about English like that, but that type of complaint certainly isn't unique to them. There is a powerful delusion in Japanese society that everyone knows English. The giant, corrupt English conversation schools secure their place in the market by reinforcing this delusion and reassuring Japanese people that they have a huge latent English speaking ability that will be drawn out by sitting down and talking to foreign people. This view is pushed subtly and overtly, but I've seen it outlined fairly openly in a NOVA advertisement on the Hankyu train line.
The woman that meets me every Saturday seems to have a similar mindset. Nearly every week she asks me for suggestions on what she can do to learn. I usually say "do what you can, try watching some movies in English, and don't give up." Every week, she's been too busy or forgot, or didn't bother. It really doesn't bother me. I mean that in the nicest way - what is she going to get out of me screaming at her every week and overworking her? Motivation is something that I can help her with a little, but it's mostly something that she'll have to take care of herself.
Ironically enough, I ended up hurting her out of a desire to motivate her a bit more. We were walking around Den Den Town after our lesson finished up, and we stopped by a giant used video store. I was amazed to see a lump of subtitled episodes of South Park for only 1200 yen. She picked up on my amusement, and when I recommended them to her she bought them.
I honestly don't know how she'll react to them. I suppose at worst she'll be puzzled, but I still kind of feel bad about the whole thing. Here was a thirty-two-year-old woman who just wanted to learn a little English, and now because of me she's going to watch this show filled with words like "bitch," "cockmaster," and "ass," along with plenty of references to American culture that she probably won't get unless she spends a few years in America. She might mistakenly watch it for hours, trying to understand the secrets of the English it contains. The humor of the situation is not lost on me, but on reflection maybe I shouldn't have gotten her hopes up. I'm waiting to see what her reaction will be.