Jean Of mArc

When I first arrived in Japan, waaaaay back in July ‘09, we were taken to Shinjuku, Tokyo, to the Keio Plaza hotel. I wrote about it a bit and posted pictures, but I really didn’t get a chance to look around or explore Tokyo on my own time.

Last week, the Japanese had 3 consecutive holidays in a row for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Naturally, I took 2 days of paid leave on Thursday and Friday to make a whole week of it. And then, on Saturday, headed down to Tokyo to meet up with Samuel. Samuel is another JET who came with the Montreal group; we met at the orientation there and have become travel buddies. He lives quite far from me, so this is really our only chance to hang out together.

Anyhow, here are some of the cool things that happened:

1. On of the first things we did was head to Shinbuya. If you haven’t heard of it, it is the home of a lot of shopping and such, but more interestingly, a TON of people everyday. In fact, it is the home of the world’s busiest intersection. You wouldn’t really tell when the lights are red and there’s only cars on the streets… they alternate so that only cars or people go at the same time here… but as soon as those lights turn green, whoooooooooa!!!! PEOPLE!!! Here’s a picture after the light has turned green:

As you can see, it was kind of busy there. And while being there, we saw a glasses shop that was closing for a bit for renovations, and they were selling glasses for really cheap (about $50 with perscription). I happen to really like glasses, and found a really neat blue pair, and Samuel found the same pair except silver and got them. It’s kind of cool because now we’re going around with really cool glasses. Okay I’m lame. Whatever.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I really like how much people use bikes to get around here in Japan, even in Tokyo. Here’s a picture of a bike rack in a busy area:

On our first night, we decided to be adventurous and stay at a capsule hotel. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Tokyo is kind of famous for having many capsule hotels, so-named because you actually sleep in capsules that are all laid out on either side of a wall. They are for men only, since they are usually occupied by businessmen who need a place to stay while on a business trip. When I read about them, I thought that it was probably pretty crampt and not very nice, considering that it only costs about 28$ a night to stay in one. However, for the sake of adventure, we went and stayed in one, and were pleasantly surprised! First of all, when you arrive, you just pay by the night: they give you a key, a robe and a towel. You can go into a locker room to lock up your stuff and change into the robe, and the towel is for the shower/hot tub/sauna area. They also had a really nice lounge area with lots of chairs all pointed towards a TV that no one seemed to be watching, because they had walls and walls of manga (Japanese graphic novels) that you could take out and read. But because of my limited Japanese-reading ability, it was really no good for me. But still, the chairs were nice and they had free computers with internet to use. But the first night we were quite tired so we just headed up to the beds. They weren’t nearly as crampt as I had expected them to be: there was plenty of room to stretch out, and enough height to sit up. In fact, it was pretty much just like bunk-beds, except with walls around them. And you had a little roll-down screen that you could pull to block the light and for privacy. Here are some pictures of Samuel and I at the hotel!

Unfourtunatly, on the first night of being there, I ate something that didn’t settle with me… I don’t know if it was food poisoning, or there was some shellfish stock in the soup I had or what, but I started to bring it all back up. And then I went to sleep for a while, but then I woke back up to bring some more of it up, over and over for a few hours. After that, I was more feeble than I’d ever been before: I could barely move, and when I did it took all my strength. They only thing I was good at was sleeping… so Sunday was completely out for me.

After I recovered, we went to several other districts in the area. These included:

Akihabara, the electronics district, selling pretty much any kind of electronic, video game, anime, manga, or whatever else your geeky little heart can think of. Everywhere you went, there were cheap gadgets, flashing lights, old and new games, and girls dressed up like anime characters trying to get you to come into the shops and buy stuff. Don’t believe me?

When going around the city during the day, you never know what you’ll see! Take for example this giant hamburger that I ate:

If you think that’s big, you should have seen the fries! Oh, and after you are done eating, eventually you have to use the pooper… or in Samuel’s case, buy a toy at a vending machine that ends up being an Asian-style squat toilet with a “present” already in it!

And everywhere you go, there’s interesting buildings to see, such as the following ones from Asakusa:

And there were others everywhere we went, like this one in Tsukigi. However, it doesn’t look Asian, and we have no idea what it actually is. Somehow that doesn’t bother us though.

When I saw the following, I just had to take a picture; it reminded me of a certain place from a certain university in a certain small town in a certain small province in a certain second-biggest country in a certain world in a certain galaxy of a certain Universe:

And even in the subway stations, there were amusing things to look at, like the following sign:

Truth be told, I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to swing your arms around at a subway station… at least, I think that’s what they are doing, I can’t really tell. At least now I know that I’m supposed to go to a beach first.

Oh, and by the way, we met up with Spider-Man!!! Although it looks like Tokyo’s low crime-rate is making him bored or something, because he’s starting to take up part-time jobs:

Of course, being a city, it looks coolest at night with all the lights lit up!

The following picture was a wall that we saw at night that was completely lit up, and displaying numbers around a corner in Roppongi.

The numbers changed often, but not in any noticable order; they weren’t increasing or decreasing, so we’re not really sure what the point of them was… probably none, but they looked cool!!

Later after that, we went to Yokohama, a city in the greater Tokyo area, but considered a different city. It was a pretty huge minato-shi (harbour city) with one of the biggest China towns in the world. Of course, if you really want a China town, you best go to China. Here is the China town:

And here’s what the harbour looks like at nighttime:

Pretty cool, eh?

Well, I know this wasn’t my best writing ever, but I just wanted an excuse to post a bunch of pictures since I found a newer, easier way to do it and wanted to take advantage of it. Thanks for humouring me.

Many people ask me if I teach every day, to which the answer is simply this: No. I teach classes at Hirosaki High School only on Mondays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, I sometimes have school visits to other schools as a guest English teacher. I haven’t done that yet, though, so I can’t comment on that. However, whether not I have class, I am in the school for at least 8 hours every day. So the logical follow-up question is, what do I do with all that time there? Well, of course (as you read before) I make up lesson plans. But because I teach the same lessons with the JTE to many different classes, I only have to come up with a few activities and then use them over and over with different students. So, I haven’t really answered your question yet. What do I do with all that extra time? The answer is: study Japanese, of course! So, I figured this might be a good time to briefly introduce you to the language, since I think most of you reading this blog wouldn’t do so in your spare time. Learning Japanese, as an English-speaker has its easier points, which are nice but few, and its more difficult points, which are numerous. First, the easy points:

1. EVERY SINGLE WORD in Japanese is made up from a relatively small set of syllables, and the pronounciation of these syllables is consistant. So, for example, every syllable that ends in an “a” sound is ALWAYS pronounced “ah”: “nah”, “kah”, “rah” etc. This makes it very easy to pronounce most words, because we have almost all those sounds in English already. You won’t run across something like this: “hajtagrfroff” and have to pronounce it. It’s usually very easy: “Ta-ka-mu-ra” (pronounced “tah-kah-moo-rah”) or “To-mo-da-chi” (pronounced “toe-moe-dah-chee”). The only more difficult sounds are those like this: “ryo” and “tsu”. However, once you’ve got them, there are no more difficulties.
2. Japanese is not really tonal. I say not really because obviously there is SOME tone to the phrases, but it is almost duo-tone: either up a bit or down a bit. I don’t have to worry about saying the wrong word because my tones weren’t in order, usually. There are a few exceptions, just like how in English “dessert” and “desert” rely mostly on the stress to get it right.
3. Most verb conjugation is consistant. Unlike French and English, which love their irregular verbs, Japanese only has 2 verbs that are conjugated irregularily: to do and to come. Once you’ve gotten those down, which is still very easy, you have what you need to conjugate any verb. That’s not to say it’s always easy to do it on-the-fly, but rather if you follow the pattern, you’ll get it right.
4. For the purposes of speaking, Japanese usually requires less words to make a grammatically-correct sentence than English. For example, in Japanese “itta”, which means “went”, is a perfectly acceptable full sentence for “I went there.” This is assuming that both the speaker and listener were already talking about a certain place. This often makes the burden of creating a sentence much easier.

How for the hard parts:

1. Reading and writing. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works:

Japanese has 3 character sets that they use. 2 are phoenetic (like an alphabet) and 1 is symbolic. The 2 phoenetic sets are “hiragana” and “katakana”. Each set contains 46 characters, and they look like this:

Hiragana: Katakana:

As you can see, hiragana is more curvy, while katakana is a bit more ridged. As I mentioned, these characters are all phoenetic. So for the first example, is always pronounced “tah”, is always pronounced “be” (as in “bed”), is always pronounced “moe”, and is always pronounced “no”. Altogether, it is “ta-be-mo-no”, which means “food”. This character set is used for native words. In the second character set, we have “ which is “su”, which is “pe” (as in “pet”), which is “ee”, and which is “n” (the ONLY non-vowel syllable in Japanese). Together it is “su-pe-ee-n” or, when pronounced quickly and properly, “spain”. This character set is used mostly for foreign words. After having memorized both character sets of 92 characters total (and many are just variations of each other), you can write out any word in Japanese phoenetically. This is the same with English: if you know all 26 letters, you can spell out any word. The main difference is that in English we have weird and inconsitant spellings for things, while Japanese is consistant, as mentioned before. However, anyone who has actually ever SEEN Japanese would quickly notice that they don’t spell out everything phoenetically. They spell out some things phoenetically, but mostly use a lot of Chinese characters, called “kanji”, to replace them. For example:



Which is pronounced “nihongo wo benkyou suru” and means “I study Japanese” turns into:



As you can see, this doesn’t look the same at all except for in the middle and at the end. This means that even knowing all the phoenetic characters, you’d still essentially illiterate, since the meaningful words which means “Japanese” and which means “study”, are unreadable.

For those who are curious and have Japanese script installed on their computer:

• 日 means “sun or day”
• 本 means “origin”
• 語 means “langauge”
• 日 + 本 (“sun” + “origin”) = 日本 (“Japan”)
• 日本 + 語 (“Japan” + “language”) = 日本語 (“Japanese”)

It is said that in order to read a normal Japanese newspaper, you must know about 2,000 of these characters, which is no small undertaking. As you can see, simply having a large enough “palette” to make sense of it all is a bit over-whelming for beginners. To make things more difficult, the pronounciation of the combined words is not consistant. Usually, for each symbol, there are at least 2 or 3 different ways you could pronounce it, depending on the context. So even if you know all the symbols, that doesn’t mean you would know how to pronounce a new word. At the same time, there IS an advantage to these thousands of characters, and that is: if you recognize them, you can guess what the word means, even if you have never seen it before! For example, let’s say I know that “今” means “now” and that “日” means “sun or day”. If I see a new word “今日”, it could either mean “now sun” or “now day”. Now day? It probably means “today”! And then you ask your Japanese friend “does this mean ‘today’?” and they say “Yeah, of course it does. Duh.” And you do a victory lap. This has happened to me a number of times so far, and it’s exciting every time. Oh, and also, they don’t use spaces in Japanese, so you just have to kind of know where one word stops and the next begins. Mericfully, they DO use punctuation.

However, even if you know all the thousands of kanji in existance by heart, you are still missing one important thing: grammar- that is, how sentences are formulated. Which brings me to the second difficult point of learning Japanese:

2. Grammar!!! More specifically, the word order. The word order of a Japanese sentence is often VERY different than that of an English sentence. Here’s an example (without kanji):
   

   

   If I translated this sentence word-for-word and directly into English, it would look like this:

   “friend make whether-or-not worried am”

   Before your mind explodes, let me turn it into a meaningful English sentence:

   “I am worried whether or not I will make any friends.”

   As you can see, not only do the words have to be COMPLETELY re-arranged to make sense, but I also had to ADD the words “I”, “will” and “any” to make it complete. This means direct translation from one language to another very difficult. With French, it’s easy, because you can almost do it word-for-word, save for some exceptions (for example, in French the adjective comes after the noun, so “car red” instead of “red car”). Not only does one learning Japanese have to worry about word order, but ALSO the words that they use at all. For example the following:

   

   Directly translates to:

   “went thing exists?”

   But the meaning is:

   “Have you ever gone (there)?”

   As you can see, even if you know the right words AND you know the order to put them in, you might have to completly change the set of words you are using anyway just to say the correct thing.

3. Finally, one of the other major obstacles in learning Japanese is the idea of politeness levels. In Japanese, you speak differently depending on whom you are speaking to. By different, I mean the way you conjugate your verbs, which verbs you use, which particles you use, etc. If you are speaking to someone with whom you are not well-acquainted, you must speak in “keigo”, which is the polite form of Japanese. If you are speaking to a superior (your boss or a customer at your store) you must speak in a manner that humbles yourself and elevates them. And if you are speaking with family in friends, you use “jisho-kei” or “plain form” to talk to each other. Plain form uses a lot less words per sentence than polite form, in general. This means that not only do you have to learn multiple words for the same thing (there are 3 normal ways to refer to yourself, each one with a different politeness), but you have to learn how to conjugate them differently based on the context. Also, when plain form is and isn’t okay is hard to decipher sometimes.

Although I could continue on the finer points of the Japanese language that I’ve learned so far, I’ll spare you the headache. But I hope you now see now only why Japanese is so hard to learn for an English-speaker, but also why English is so hard for Japanese-speakers to learn as well. Any Japanese person you meet who speaks English well (like Masashi and Yuuko) is exerting an INCREDIBLE amount of mind-shifting from their native language just to say what they want to say. They are obviously very smart and work hard.

But because I love mental challenges (why do you think I took programming?), I’ve decided, with the encouragement of my peers, to take the JLPT. The JLPT stands for “Japanese Language Proficiency Test”, which is done every year all over Japan. This year it is on December 6th, 2009. There are 4 levels for this test: 1, 2, 3, and 4. 4 is the easiest, while 1 means that you are fluent. Because I learned some Japanese years before I even came here, I already knew most of the material in level 4, so I’ve decided to go for level 3 instead. Even if I don’t pass that test, the amount of material I’ll be studying in preparation is sure to improve my Japanese abilities anyway. Luckily, for that test, it is only reading and listening, and then multiple-choice vocabulary, grammar and comprehension answers. You don’t have to write an essay in Japanese or have an interview or anything, which takes some pressure off. Even so, I need to be able to recognize 300 kanji (those Chinese characters), 1,500 Japanese words, and tons of grammical structures to properly put together Japanese sentences. Wish me luck!

So, that’s it for now! Long post, hope you didn’t get bored! And if you are bored, why not try and find out what the kanji character at the top of this post means?

When I first arrived in Hirosaki, the students were on summer vacation. As mentioned before, summer vacation here is very different than it is back in Canada:

1. It is only for the month of August, not July and August.
2. It takes place 3 months after school has already started (the school years here are from April to March).
3. During summer vacation, students and teachers still attend school, but there are no classes. Instead, students do club activities, and teachers prepare lessons and such for the coming year.

It was good to come in at this time because it allowed me, too, to get used to the school and prepare some lessons before I stepped up in front of the students for my first class.

Now, I understand that there is some confusion about what my job is. I am an ALT, which stands for Assistant Language Teacher. From my understanding, schools in Japan (are required to?) have foreign teachers come in to help the students learn English. They are considered a valuable asset because they have native pronounciation, use natural speech, and are already experts in the language, just by speaking it every day. However, we often don’t know the grammatical reasons behind something, we just know if it is right or not. It’s kind of like a musician who can play anything by ear, but doesn’t know musical theory. However, the JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) is well-versed in English grammatical points, and in the proper way to teach to the Japanese students.

Together, these two forces combine to create *fanfare* TEAM  TEACHING!!! In this model, the JTE teaches the students about the grammical points and structures in a way in which the Japanese students can clearly understand, while the ALT speaks in native English, pronounces works, prepares some activities, and sometimes confuses the students by speaking too fast.

So, as you may have guessed, I am the ALT at Hirosaki Senior High School. I teach 5 classes a week, with a visit school on Wednesday, though I haven’t actually started doing visit schools yet.

Anyway, all this is to say that this past week was my first week of teaching in the Japanese classroom. Here is a bit of a run-down about what I prepared:

• It is customary for the ALT to spend the first class on a self-introduction. However, I didn’t want to bore the students by simply saying “I am Canadian. I like drums. I’m not a sumo wrestler.” I wanted to try and engage the students a bit by getting them to guess what is and isn’t true about me. So, I divide the students into 6 groups, and for each group, I have a list of 3 facts, for example “I’m a skier”, “I’m a soccer player” or “I’m a cheerleader”. In their groups, they must discuss which one they think is true AND WHY. The “why” part is to get them saying more than just want is already right in front of them.
• In another class, the topic is on movies right now. So for one activity, we get the students to discuss, in pairs, about their favourite movie with their partner (What kind of movie is it? What’s it called? What do you like about it?). Then afterwards, I thought it would be a good idea to set up a video-store-like scenario in which I am the clerk at the entrance, and the JTE is the check-out clerk. Yes, in real life they are often the same person, but we had to do this for 30 students! So, I handed out video membership cards, and on the back was a little “mission”, such as “rent a comedy movie”. We got the students to exit the class, and then they’d come in, in pairs, with a phrase list of things they could say and might hear from me. I would say “Welcome to Video World, how may I help you?” and the students could say something like “We’re looking for a comedy movie.” I would say “Are you looking for any movie in particular?” to which they could reply “No we’d just like to browse.” and I would direct them to the comedy movies. I had covers of different English movies pinned to some boards, so they had to take the proper kind of movie, and proceed to rent out the movie from the JTE.

So, this past week was my first week actually teaching! And every class was different, both in its reception of the activities, and in its general atmosphere. But in general, the students responded well to the activities, enjoyed guessing the facts (they thought some of the facts were really funny) and then getting some experience that would be similar to real-life in an English-speaking country.

The real test came on Thursday…

I was in the middle of giving a lesson, and while I was teaching the JTE left the room. I wasn’t sure why, but I went on with the lesson as usual. A bit later, he returned, but sat at the back of the class. I assumed that he was evaluating me or something, since it was my first lesson with him. We went ahead and did the movie store activity, which went over pretty well (the teacher later told me that some students came and told him that they enjoyed the activity quite a bit!). Afterwards, the teacher informed me that he wasn’t feeling well, and asked me if I would teach all his classes that afternoon by myself!!

So, of course I said yes, but I had no idea what to do with them! What was I suppsed to teach them? I asked my supervisor and he said that I should just prepare a lesson about anything, it didn’t matter what the subject was. So, I quickly made up a quick lesson plan, taking some ideas from other JETs, as some things I’ve been meaning to teach them:

• First, we started off with a game where the students were divided into 2 teams (left and right) and each team had 3 minutes to write down as many English words on the board as they could. The trick is that they could only have one person up there at a time, each person could only write one word at a time, and the word they write had to BEGIN with the same letter as the LAST letter of the previous word.
• Second, I handed out some sheets with various ways of saying “Hello”, “How are you?”, “What are you doing?” and how to express your state. The students learn greetings from a textbook, so all they know is “Hello,” “How are you?” and “I’m fine, thank you.” If I go up to them and say “Hey, how’s it going?” they just get a terrified look on their face and then run to their friends for cover. So I wanted to teach them ways to say Hello: “Hi”, “Hey”, “Yo”, “Good day”. Don’t worry, I was clear on which ones were casual and which were normal. Then, “How’s it going?”, “How are things?”, “How’s life?” , “How’ve you been?”, and “What’s up?” Finally, I gave them a big sheet with many many different things they could say other than “I’m fine thank you.” I’ve since enforced a no-textbook-greeting rule on the students, since they have the tools now.
• Then we played Pictionary, which was good for me to test out which words the students did or didn’t know. They had never played it before, but they seemed to get into it. The hardest part was getting them to yell out the answer instead of raising their hand first. I kept telling them “Don’t raise your hand, just yell it out!” but I guess that can be a challenge when you’re not used to it.
• Finally, we practiced pronounciation of “r”s and “l”s, since that is very trickly for Japanese students. We also played a recognition game, in which there is a maze and I would say words that sound the same except for the r or the l (for example “collect” vs “correct”, “row” vs “low”, etc) If they heard the words collectly (I mean, “correctly”), they would get to the end of the maze.
• And then I was depending on the bell to ring, which it eventually did.

Overall the reception for this class was very good, and one of the classes especially seemed to like the games. This also gave me a chance to get more comfortable teaching and being in front of the students, and it was great to be able to jump outside the textbook and let them have fun while learning too.

I am continuing with the learning adventure tomorrow with the following new classes!

• In one class, there will be a debate. The scenario is that I can’t decide if I should rent a DVD or go to the movie theatre. One side of the class must come up with reasons why a DVD is a better idea, while the other side must argue why going to the movie theatre is obviously better. For each UNIQUE point that each side can come up with, they get one point. Whichever side has the most points makes the decision for me!
• Also, tomorrow one of my JTEs wants me to talk about Canadian television! I have to show them pictures and explain the shows as a comprehension exercise. They have to tell me some things about the shows after I have talked to them about it. I plan on talking about The Raccoons, Mr. Dressup, Corner Gas, and Road to Avonlea. That seemed like a good mix to me.

I’m really enjoying coming up and execution different ideas. Because it is a language, really any activity done IN THAT LANGUAGE is educational, so it gives a lot of creative lee-way.

Next time I’ll talk about… something else!

If you have not yet done so, please click here to check out pictures of me in Tokyo first!

The previous post included pictures of me in Tokyo, but I was only there for a few short days, and most of my time was spent indoors for the orientation.

Now let me introduce you to my new home: Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan!

This is what the road looks like right outside my apartment.

As you can see, if I need an emergency drink, I don’t have far to go.

This is what a sidewalk looks like.

This is a road. A what? A road!

This is a road, but with a twist: there’s a river next to it!

The view from the Train Station, which is right next to my apartment.

This is where I bought my bicycle! Yes, it really is called “Off House”… I don’t know why.

This is me, happy on my new, $57 bike!

The first Friday night, there was a party with the English teachers to say farewell to Michelle, and hello to someone else… oh wait, that’s me! My supervisor is the one right above me.

A really cool alley way we went down together at night after the party, and somehow ended up in a Karaoke bar.

And then we saw a giant snake eating a turtle!!!

It seems like grapes grow in the wild out here! At least… they look like grapes…

The first Rice Field I ever saw! And then from above, it looks like this:

Yes, that’s a rice field, and no, they didn’t plan that. Crazy, eh?

One of the borders of the famous Hirosaki Park.

I wanted to take a simple picture of the castle, but SOMEBODY got in the way…

One of the many shrines…

I guess you can fish in Hirosaki too!

And of course, because it’s Japan, there are random robots running around…