These Are a Few of my Angriest Things

Yes, I know the title doesn't make any sense but:

These are the things that make me angry.

So yesterday was Sunday.  Sunday in Japan means nothing being open for more than a couple of hours - kind of like the west back in 1800; when everyone had dysentery.

This wouldn't be a problem, except I wanted to buy some food.  I am a hungry fellow, that's for sure.

Anyway, I was late to the post office (it closed at 4) which meant I couldn't buy food.

Why do I need to go to the post office to buy food?  Well, simply put, everything is cash here.  I'm sure I've written about it before, but a country that relies on cash is a country begging to fall into obscurity.  It appears to me, that a cash carrying society is ridiculous in every sense in this era.  When we devolve into the spineless soup coloured blob monsters from that cartoon where everyone whistles, and they live on the moon (I can hear my dads impression of it now, but I don't know the name); we will all use cash.  It's such a backwards form of bartering - paper assuming value; that's like using spaghetti to build bridges!  (Or something)

We must start using the digital - credit cards for everything.

Of course there is a problem with that.  The Japanese really enjoy being gouged at every opportunity.  They love a good, solid, cactus based rectal examination - that's the only reason they put up with it costing them more than one pound fifty (current exchange rates may vary; bank of Sam) to withdraw money from an ATM that isn't affiliated with their bank.  In fact, I think they pay that much if they have any bank account other than the post office (I make that assumption because everyone I know complains about the price of accessing their own money, so they're either stupid or compliant).  It boggles my mind.  It really does.  You can feasibly take cash out once every two weeks (taking too much risks robbery, too little risks bankruptcy; this being a situation begging for satire)  which means paying three quid a month.  That's thirty odd quid a year, without factoring a trip to a shopping centre (luckily large purchases can be made on a card) or unexpected expenses.  I get bills through my door every other day, so he-who-shall-not-be-named only knows how many unexpected bills a family must get.

That's a chunk of change given to a company, for the pleasure of them having all your goddamn money anyway.

Anyway.

The other thing that's annoying me right now, in this specific sliver of time, is that one of the kids in my school speaks English.  He speaks English well, having grown up in the Philippines.  He is taking daily Japanese lessons (he's only been here a while, and it turns out his Japanese isn't so hot) during what would otherwise be English lessons.  This is a great idea - he gets nothing out of English lessons (he does an amazing job of looking attentive, even when we're basically teaching the class the equivalent of I like burgers (of course it's american, so it has to be burgers) for the fiftieth time) and he needs to practice Japanese.  Now the problem is that he only gets to speak to his mum in English.  Without actually knowing the facts, I'm going to assume he speaks mainly Japanese at home (his dad is Japanese, dads are always the household leaders, and he needs to practice) which means his exposure to English is going to be, at the very best, limited.

He has another four years of this limited exposure.  While English may be one of his native languages, he will lose it.

I understand that should he stop now, he will maintain a base level that far exceeds anything I might hope to achieve with any other language, regardless of how long I study.  He will be able to speak better English in fifty years with no further practice, than I will be able to speak Japanese in fifty years if I practiced every day.

But it won't be great.

It won't be the kind of English that will land him a job.  It won't be good enough for his doors to remain open - he will have to adopt a recruitment procurement technique (shifting paradigms, business rhetoric like) akin to mugging.  Recruitment by slightly-crooked window entry.  He will have to sneak in the back door, as it were.  This, frankly, isn't good enough.

He doesn't know it now, but he will never be accepted in Japan.  He may well try his damndest to get a 'respectable,' (insofar as that means anything anymore) job in Japan, and he may well get his foot into the door.  He may rise a few ranks, get a few promotions, but his job will stagnate and he will be cast aside - regardless of how well he speaks Japanese.

But if the Japanese education system has its way, he won't have enough English to go elsewhere.  He will be, quite literally, stuck.

I find it morally ambiguous (at best) to take a bi-lingual kid and force him to become mono-lingual.  Regardless of whether there are any specific aims for 'homogenisation,' (a term they love to use in the literature here) regarding this specific child, it's cruel to take an option away from someone.  It seems almost worse than not offering that option in the first place.

The Japanese kids I teach will never be able to speak English.  The education system is laughable, the attitude here is one of indifference (again, at best) which leads to English being a comedy subject (much like R.E in England) which means that no one thinks of the significance of language.  They teach their kids to be wary of going outside of Japan, so it's a self-fulfilling circle that they are happy with.

Bringing a kid who has the potential to 'see the world,' (for whatever that means to you) into such an environment; not cool man.

Then again maybe I'm reading too much into this.  Maybe he'll get to university after four years of no English language study, join a programme that allows him to learn and spread his proverbial wings.

Maybe he won't give a crap about English (an entirely valid point of view taken by the vast majority of people, don't forget) and settle into a life of being a person sized, society based skeleton in the closet.

Who knows?

Of Japanese Education, and Other Things

So I though I'd pretend to do some work today, and scan some stuff into the computer.  Of course it was a ruse, nothing constructive was being accomplished, I was merely scanning in some pages to illustrate a point I'm about to make.

Previously, with ridiculous textbooks, I've felt uncomfortable freely using examples in case someone sues me for defamation or libel or something; the textbooks we use are common across Japan however, and I'm sure an entire nation could care less about one man blogging about them.  Therefore, without further ado:  The problems of language teaching in Japan; part two.

So you'll have to forgive the horrible expressions, crappy cartoons and generally poor layout.  They've modelled this after a Japanese comic book (they're massively popular here) and it was made in 2000.  That aside, what you may immediately notice is that everything has the Japanese pronunciation written next to it.  This is the best page I could find in the whole book, that is to say, this page has the least transliteration.  Most pages have more, with detailed descriptions in Japanese for everything.

For the average student who could care less about English, I'm not necessarily against the idea.  The point being that these students will never speak with an Englishman, or Australian, or american ever again.  Leaving school means leaving English interaction.  Essentially, English is a means of testing.  Including the Japanese pronunciations would, at first, appear fine.

However, Japanese has fewer sounds than English, and all their sounds are accompanied with vowels.  Think about this for a moment.  There is no 'm.'  It has to be accompanied with a vowel.  'M,' becomes one of, 'ma, me, mi, mu or mo.'  That means when learning the letters of the alphabet, no one can initially pronounce the consonants correctly.  This would be fine if the students learnt English in isolation, something along the lines of 'this is how it is, if you don't initially learn English along with Japanese sounds, you'll be fine.'  Of course they don't.  I just had a lesson - teaching the kids English sounds, where the Japanese teacher was approximating the sounds into Japanese.  Some of the sounds were reaching three katakana letters in length, just for a single syllable/sound!  Incredibly stupid.

The particularly annoying thing was the insistence of the teacher and student to pronounce everything incorrectly, after I had just corrected them.  Learning 'm,' instead of 'mu,' took a solid minute, only for the teacher to write up 'mu,' in Japanese on the board, and all the kids to immediately embed 'mu,' in their brains - and there it will stay.  Incorrect for all eternity.

On a side note, the chair I'm currently sitting in, while scanning these pictures looks like this starship.  Geek, right?

So basically there is no hope for these kids to ever learn English - they will forever learn Japlish.

To be fair, I can't think of a single teacher I've met who pretends that they teach English.  They all realise the errors, flaws, mistakes, misconceptions and lies perpetrated by their education system.  Afterall, the teachers I work with have been through the system themselves, and have studied English to a level most of these kids won't.  I would be surprised if a single student in this school went on to study English at university.  There must be four hundred and fifty kids in this school.

So ultimately I have to illustrate my frustrations with another page.  I decided I wouldn't pick a page meant for students, as these things are always full of holes.  Instead, how about some spiel aimed at the teachers themselves, in English.  To preface this, it was obviously written by a fluent speaker, and isn't a typical, crazed translation likening life to falling cherry blossoms, and the transience of youth to a flowing river.

Ok so blogspot won't upload the picture.  Maybe I'll try at home.

To be continued.

Update:

This is the page I tried to upload earlier.

Check out the heading 'Human Education.'

Perhaps I was wrong about the wishy-washy Japanese style of writing; it can be, and is translated directly into English.

'English language teaching should contribute to character building and world peace.'

What the.

The words flow like rivers among an ocean of rocky precipices, deftly dodging...  Ok I can't keep this up.  This nonsense has no place in an English language teaching manual, especially one designed for a syllabus whereby the sole aim is to get kids through tests.

And they still haven't taught the kids how to run properly, but now they're making them jump the hurdles.  Literally.  They're running up to the hurdles, stopping, jumping over them, and carrying on.

Ever wondered why you've never seen a single Japanese sprinter/hurdler/sportsman/athelete?  (Except for sumo, where the native Japanese competitors are beaten by south pacific islanders all the time anyway.)