Host Family Stay

One of the best ways to improve my Japanese language skills has been to stay with Japanese families for a long weekend. As an English teacher, I live alone. I usually practice the language of the workplace, restaurants, and shops. Not of the home.

The organizations that have given me access to the family life of Japan is WWOOF-Japan. In exchange for working on an organic farm, I am given room and board with a Japanese family. I stayed with a very dear family in Toyama (Junko-san, her husband, and daughter). I brought flash cards and soaked up as many new words as I could. Developing a strong vocabulary base is so important in the first year of language learning. It builds one's capacity to listen to, and therefore recognize, known and new words.

Staying with a host family also gives cultural context to the words one learns. I have a few phrase books with me. Most of the vocabulary and phrases are for business or casual tourists. The words they must frequently use are different from those for everyday Japanese people or foreign residents. In the languages that I am familiar with, the shorter words are usually the native words (as opposed to loan words form other langauges, and are the oldest). Today I learned the word for sandal: geta. Foreigners wouldn't use this word very often, but for Japanese it's a part of daily life, hence the small word.

Slowly I am developing familiarity with Japanese morphology. I hear root words and then a new ending. Some of the words are related, some are not. But it's fun to fact check with Japanese. It's always a good conversation starter.

Japanese Classes

Starting in September I enrolled in a community Japanese class. There were 8-10 of us in the class. One other American, others from China, Korea, Indonesia, Germany, and Taiwan. I had never been in a second language classroom where the lingua franca was the target language. It made a whole new incentive to learn and speak Japanese.

Our teacher provided all of the materials. Mostly they were magnified pages from textbooks. But the pictures were simple enough to use in a beginning class. The class was every Thursday for 10 weeks. At 5000 yen for the course, it was cheap. But it could only be taken once. So make hay while the sun shines.

It was good for me to get out of the house and meet a new crowd of people. I have to admit that I was lazy in studying however. I'd write down the new words I'd learn and maybe the grammar point of the day. But between classes I had my own lessons to prepare and I didn't put in the time to improve. Being in a group class, I wouldn't have to take the spotlight and prove that I was learning. No tests or homework.

Cell Phone Mile Stone

September came with a flurry of work at school. I was pinching yen to make it to the 25th of the month, when I would get my first paycheck. I tried not to be emotional about spending all the money I would get. I only get paid once a month. I only went to essential places: grocery store, maybe out to eat twice, and traveled nearby. I could barely handle routine cash exchanges in Japanese.

I held off buying a cell phone right away because I thought I didn't have anyone to call. I starting collecting people's phone numbers and by the end of September, figured it was time. One Saturday, I impulsively went to a cell phone shop. The salesman explained the pre-paid market as being served by 3 companies, of which his was the smallest. So I went to the next biggest down teh street and bought a Japanese language only cell phone with camera.

I thought it would force me to learn Japanese because it was a vital function that I needed to perform. It ended up only forcing me to be confused! Every time I wanted to use a feature, I had to experiment with teh buttons and double back through menus to get the right thing.

I used it on a few trips, but gradually my use of it became less and less. My co-worker chastised me for not getting an English-menu phone. My ambitions were good, but I just didn't have the written language skill to sustain use of a Japanese language phone. It was a reality check for me. It was okay to function in my language for something while I was learning another one.

I arrive in Japan

After I left the intensive Japanese course, I knew the two Kana alphabets, some formal greetings, and basic sentence structure of subject-object-verb. I spent the intervening month in Moorhead, Minnesota with the English village of Concordia Language Villages. In the second two-week session, we had a group of 15 Japanese high school students come for some English instruction before they stayed with host families in the States. I didn't learn much language from them as I did culture. How they behave in groups, socialize one on one, and talk differently between boys and girls. One example is that girls are always giggling. About what I don't know. But I think I'm digressing.

On my way to Japan, I stayed with my cousin in Hawaii who's 1/2 Japanese, his 4 children who are 3/4 Japanese, and you guessed it, his Japanese wife. Yumiko teaches Japanese at the local school. She gave me a crash lesson in question words. The one that stuck with me was, "ikura" or "how much does it cost?" That's a good first one to learn as I learn to survive on my own.

I arrived at Kansai International airport very nervous about my immersion in a print environment that I couldn't understand. The beginning of illiteracy. My teacher mentor, Aki, picked me up and drove me to my apartment. On the ride back, I tried to read the factory and billboard signs. We whizzed by faster than I could make them out. Aki's fluent in English so we didn't speak much Japanese.

I remember these first few days just being so baffled at the supermarket. I'm a pretty stingy and particular consumer in the States, so when I want skim milk and free-range chicken eggs I require some specific vocabulary. Without it I'm reduced to survival strategies like looking at pictures of chickens in a field and scanning for numbers to tell fat percentage.

I bought a book called "instant Japanese" which has 100 headwords of essential words to be combined to communicate. I set about working to memorize and use these words. I find they're good for businessmen and temporary (as in tourist) visitors, not for talk in the classroom or teachers' office. I set about looking for affordable evening classes in Japanese to improve my ability.

Before I came to Japan

My original plan was to immerse myself in Japan by working on a strawberry farm and living with a host family through WWOOF Japan. But then I had more school work to do over the summer, so I had to cancel my trip. As a consolation, I enrolled in an intensive Japanese course at the local community college. I could only attend 3 of the 6 weeks because I was going to work at a summer camp in July, but I figured that 3 was better than zero. A friend gave me the course textbook and cc courses are very cheap, so I didn't lose too much money by leaving early.

It was odd to have a Master's degree (that's 18 years of formal education) and share the class with junior high students and other students in a mix of academic motivations. Plus the teacher was a graduate of Monterey Institute, the same as me. So the teacher-student distance was awkwardly absent because I could follow along with the methodology. But at the same time I took the experience like a classroom observation: making notes of things she did that I could incorporate into my own teaching practice. So this language learning experience was also developing my language teaching. That cycle will come up again and again I think.