ダニエルの冒険

I’m finally getting my speech together. It’s changed themes many times and it’s now about the issue of the difficulty in finding native speakers of a language you’re learning. I’ve seen this a lot in UL. I went to a party thrown by a Korean and he invited everyone in the language centre. There were about 5 Irish out of the 100 people or so who came. The rest all had English as a second or third language only. I’ve overcome this issue myself by shamelessly approaching Japanese in Ireland and even here. They’re quite a shy people by nature and the society traditionally keeps “outsiders” at arm’s length, though this doesn’t apply so much to younger people these days. Whether you get a friendship or not out of it, it certainly makes train journeys go faster. Many Japanese who I’ve met online have become good friends too. I can think of 3 off-hand, who I’ve been friends with from 2 years to a few months.

Being put into an “immersive” environment is great if you want to talk with shopkeepers and bankers, but to actually have authentic daily interaction is actually surprisingly difficult. It’s so easy to fall into the comfort of keeping with the other language learners when hanging out. Every weekend I meet real Japanese friends, use grammar I learned in class during the week, hear grammar I learned during the week being spoken by a real person, and take some new vocabulary back to the classroom with me. Every week I have something to contribute to class that I learned from applying the lesson to real-life situations. Even last weekend Daisuke said a one-word sentence (common here), and we had just studied the verb and the conjugation that week (くっつきそう – “it seems like they’re going to stick together”, referring to the food in the Chanko pot).

My speech basically talks about this and my experiences of approaching native speakers. I’ve already discussed many of these on this blog (Satomi, Sayuri, the Seijin, the kid at Disneyland, Tomomi). Going to deliver it to the class on Thursday. Actual competition is next week or the week after. Still not confident enough to enter with my speech.