Eigo-no kyoshi desu. (I am an English teacher.)

Watashi wa Joy desu. Eigo no kyoshi desu. Nihongo-no benskyoshimasu. That’s right, I’m Joy, an English teacher who is studying Japanese. I came to Japan with the ability to count to 10, say apple (ringo) and hiccough (shakri), “Excuse me, I’m sorry for being late (sumimasen, osoku narimashita) and the basic greetings. Useful.. maybe?

Now, my vocabulary has increased manifold, and yet I still feel helpless when staring at menus, signs and any printed matter. Japanese is a difficult (muzugashi) laungage. But I'm learning. I have learned hiragana and katakana (two of the alphabets). I have learned the kanji for “men” “women” “mountain” “river”. Gold star, right? What drives me crazy is that the important words are usually in kanji, which to my untrained eye, look pretty but meaningless.

I am working my way through a correspondence course that JET is a part of and I go to a Japanese class once a week. I am getting better all the time (can’t get much worse) and the more I study Japanese the more I learn about English, and how my students are trying to figure things out. Sentence structure is different in Japanese, so are tenses, plurals, pronunciation etc etc. Today’s lesson that I helped with at Junior high was about pronouncing ~ed on different words, which is something that I’ve never thought about as a native English speaker. But the ~ed sound changes from “cooked” to “played” to “visited.” Muzugashi desu ne? (It's difficult, itsn't it?)

Happily, so far basic Japanese seems to have more regularities than irregularities, (when compared to English) and pronunciation tends to follow a set of actual rules. Which is good for me, but makes things difficult for Japanese people trying to say English words. A common tactic for teaching English in Japan is to put words into “katakana” which is a vague approximation of what the word would be using the Japanese “alphabet”. Words like “cat” turn into kato, door into doa, book into buku etc. Which isn’t English. The more I hear it, the more I understand it, but that does not make it English.

On one hand I want to drill correctly pronounced English into them, on the other, I’m getting increasingly confused as to what actual expectations I have of my students and what is within their grasp. It’s confusing. But I gambatte (do my best, well, that’s not the right way to conjugate that.. but I’ve never been great at verb tenses.) and treasure the kids who say "television" not "terrrrrevison". In an effort to improve my understanding of what English sounds like, I have booked off time in the summer from July 29-August 11 to immerse myself in the English speaking world of Southern Ontario. Till then I'll keep staring at kanji, practice reading katakana, and read my Japanese textbuku.