ダニエルの冒険

I had my first day of my Songs class today. The level is much higher than my other classes and the guys there (they’re all guys except for one) all have great Japanese. Something I’ve noticed is that my spoken Japanese is actually pretty good as far as pronunciation and speed goes. I’m lacking in vocabulary and eloquence, but I guess I have more experience than most others. I think in general it’s difficult to break out of the language school and into the “real world” of Japan. I’ve seen the same thing in UL. I went to a party hosted by a Korean friend and all the people there were from the Language Centre. There were probably about 5 irish people in a room of 70 or 80 people; they were all Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian… basically anyone who doesn’t have English as a first language. It’s a shame but that seems to be the way it always ends up. UL has a programme started by the Students’ Union President, St. John, whereby foreign-language-learners get “language exchange partners” with those foreign students studying in the Language Centre. This is a great programme and I’ve made some really great genuine friends through it, who I’m still in contact with, and in fact I’m visiting some in a few weeks when I go to Gunma. There’s a high school right next to my apartment full of students all learning English. They’d all have about 3 or 4 years of experience learning it by this stage. I’d love to see some sort of programme where students there would meet with students in Yamasa as language exchange partners. Genuine friendships would naturally result from whatever meetings are organised and it would allow students have a learning experience with native speakers. There’s currently a programme that does just that, but it’s with children up to about age 8 or 12 or something… who are not yet studying English and who will not become friends with the 20-somethings of Yamasa.

It’s really a shame because it really helps when you can speak to native speakers like that. I noticed today about 5 times when I remembered learning something from a Japanese friend. Once asking about a word and having its kanji explained to me while walking to the cinema… another time seeing kanji written in a train on an advertisement and having them explained to me by a friend… another time when I brought a friend into her new apartment and she kept using the same words to describe it… a line from an email I got from a Japanese friend about 4 months ago… these things always come back to me and remind me of sentence patterns, vocabulary usage, etc. It’s so frustrating sometimes, because I remember learning a word but I can’t remember the word itself.

We all learn our first language by mimicking those around us. I’m learning Japanese this way too. I do my best to remember every sentence that’s said to me (obviously this is impossible when it’s spoken but you’d be surprised at how possible it is with emails/messages on my phone). When I need to express the same idea in future, I can just take the sentence that was said whenever and swap out the nouns/verbs and I have a new sentence. This is always done to some extent when studying a language in an artificial environment (a classroom) with example sentences provided by texts or the teacher, but the polar opposite would be learning vocabulary from a dictionary. As a general rule, I don’t use words I learn from dictionaries. I learn them so when they’re said I can understand them, but if I use them without hearing a native speaker use them first, I’m almost certainly wrong. Once I hear it once though, it’s usually enough to let me try it and chance a mistake. An example is the word 共通 (kyoutsuu) which my dictionary says is “common”. In class we were asked what this word means and someone in the class said “普通” (futsuu) which means “normal”. Well that’s fine, except that “common” is “common” as in “in common with”. I made the same mistake when I read the definition in my dictionary, but once the teacher gave us a lot of examples, and later in the day my private teacher said 共通言語 (kyoutsuugengo: common language), I became comfortable enough with it to use it.

Oh yes… the songs elective.

It was fun! We studied Precious by Yuna Ito. I’ve linked to a karaoke video so you can sing along. (It took so much strength not to sing along in class.) I already knew the song, as it was on some CDs that a Japanese friend sent me (which I actually listened to in the car with my dad on the way to Dublin). The other song we did was Tsunami by the Southern All Stars. I didn’t know this one but it’s a good song. The teacher gave me a list of songs we’ll be studying in future (which were all requests from students last week) and there are some great songs in there, from artists like RSP, Ayumi Hamasaki, Mika Nakashima, YUI, ASIAN KUNG FU GENERATION (sorry for the caps, that’s just how they write it), and there’s even a version of Shimauta coming up!! Here‘s a version by Gackt which I quite like. Actually, I’m going to sing this next time I go to karaoke. It’s originally an Okinawan song and has a really nice “island” feel to it.