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.