So today was another day at the middle school. Middle of the week...nothing too special going on this week, I guess! I had 5 classes today. Today is my busiest day besides the elementary school days because it's pretty much a full day of class, and then I have an Eikaiwa class in the evening which I taught as well. For the 3rd graders, we did a warm up with trying to distinguish the "R" and "L" sound. As most know, distinguishing those 2 for most Asians is a nearly impossible task...they just don't have the distinctive sound in the Asian language and they can't get the difference, no matter how many times you repeat the words. Below is the grid which I used for the class, which is an idea that I picked up from the conference a couple weeks back.
R Sound L Sound
1 Rent 2 Lent
3 Red 4 Led
5 Right 6 Light
7 Ramp 8 Lamp
9 Rice 0 Lice
You do this exercise by creating pairs. One person thinks of their own or a made-up telephone number. They then tell their partner their own phone, but by only using the words associated with the numbers. For instance, if I said this series of words: Lice, Rice, Lice, Lent, Rent, Ramp, Light, Right, Led, Lent, Lice...
My phone number would be 090-2186-5420. It's a pretty fun activity. The best part is when you're reviewing the words with the students and teaching them new vocabulary if they don't already know the meaning. When you get to "rice" and "lice" ask them how you would say "I eat rice" and then tell them to insert "lice" instead of rice. Then have them look it up in their dictionaries and look at their faces as they change their expression from happy to absolute disgust!
After the activity, the students continued working on worksheets to practice for their high school entrance exams which will be finishing up pretty soon for them. As well, I was assigned a temporary project at my school. We'll see how far I can actually get or if it's even feasible for me! We have a sister school exchange program with Waupun, WI and there was a publication printed by our school talking about the most recent exchange. It's all in Japanese...and our Principal had the idea that it would be great if we had an English version as well...so that we could show it to the Waupun students and visitors when they come this May. So he asked me to be the lucky guy to translate this document and make it nice and pretty in English. Easy? I think not! You're talking to a guy that's pretty much considered illiterate in Japan. I can read all the basic characters but once I get to kanji, I'm VERY limited in what I can read. I can read some stuff adn get the gist of it, but not nearly literate enough to translate well written Japanese into English! There's too much that I don't know right now that would hold me back from being able to do such a job! But the Principal wants to challenge me and says it will be good practice for me since he knows that I want to get better at reading and writing. While this is very true and a good thought, I think getting up to a level where I can translate like that would take a person with more experience and years and years of experience in both languages! Such as a professional translator! I mean, it's not just a document, it's a whole booklet! Well, I luckily have support from the other teachers who think that it's craaaazy and will be difficult....who are all willing to help translate and make sure that I understand what the Japanese means so that I can translate that into some sort of English that makes sense.
Well, wish me luck and I hope that I DO learn some Japanese out of this!
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