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Friday fun
Oct. 12th, 2012 03:25 pmI should have internet at home now! All the directions are in Japanese, of course, but I am confident I can work it out. Apparently the university co-op store has ethernet cables, which I probably should've thought to bring but didn't.
Today was my first time helping with an English class, which turned out to be even more fun than I expected. I MET AN AMERICAN. Straight and younger than me, but a grad student (master's in children's lit) and English teacher at a couple of universities, generally very sweet, totally reasonable to talk to, and blond-blue-eyed-pretty in a way I guess I had been missing.
The class is focused on phonics rather than proficiency, which is why they want our authentic performances of American pronunciation. There are two instructors, who seem to be married to each other, and the man is both really loud and really talented; he's worked in the US as a flight instructor, and you can somehow tell from his overexaggerated drawl that he spent time with military men. They've figured out things that Japanese people actually say that at least tend toward the more mystifying sounds that English has, so they make the students repeat those to get the right feel before trying the English words. And they specifically pointed out that thinking about the words as written in katakana is limiting, since it only includes Japanese approximations of the weirder vowels and of course doesn't include all the exact consonants either.
I got to say individual words out loud for people to repeat, mostly. Sometimes for the whole class, sometimes in small groups, sometimes going person by person. We played Chinese Whispers with single words to practice the vowel sounds, with a surprisingly low success rate since the students had to hear accurately and reproduce the sounds accurately, both of which were trouble. Things like "hat" mutated easily into "heart" or "hurt", and "ran" became "run" or "Ron" (the last was not even an option on their list, oops).
The best part was developing a little bit of a relationship with the students, who were really anxious to do well and had good questions. I was trying to balance being kind with being helpful much more carefully than usual, which I think went okay. Some of us went to lunch after, but mostly the instructor held forth rather than the students getting to practice. Looking forward to doing this again in a couple of weeks.
Today was my first time helping with an English class, which turned out to be even more fun than I expected. I MET AN AMERICAN. Straight and younger than me, but a grad student (master's in children's lit) and English teacher at a couple of universities, generally very sweet, totally reasonable to talk to, and blond-blue-eyed-pretty in a way I guess I had been missing.
The class is focused on phonics rather than proficiency, which is why they want our authentic performances of American pronunciation. There are two instructors, who seem to be married to each other, and the man is both really loud and really talented; he's worked in the US as a flight instructor, and you can somehow tell from his overexaggerated drawl that he spent time with military men. They've figured out things that Japanese people actually say that at least tend toward the more mystifying sounds that English has, so they make the students repeat those to get the right feel before trying the English words. And they specifically pointed out that thinking about the words as written in katakana is limiting, since it only includes Japanese approximations of the weirder vowels and of course doesn't include all the exact consonants either.
I got to say individual words out loud for people to repeat, mostly. Sometimes for the whole class, sometimes in small groups, sometimes going person by person. We played Chinese Whispers with single words to practice the vowel sounds, with a surprisingly low success rate since the students had to hear accurately and reproduce the sounds accurately, both of which were trouble. Things like "hat" mutated easily into "heart" or "hurt", and "ran" became "run" or "Ron" (the last was not even an option on their list, oops).
The best part was developing a little bit of a relationship with the students, who were really anxious to do well and had good questions. I was trying to balance being kind with being helpful much more carefully than usual, which I think went okay. Some of us went to lunch after, but mostly the instructor held forth rather than the students getting to practice. Looking forward to doing this again in a couple of weeks.
