Planes, Trains and Automobiles (sorry, couldn't resist...)

Evening all.

Had a bit of an adventure the other day...

Yoo (half German, half Japanese friend of mine who I met last September on his gap year in Italy) got back from Germany on Monday morning, so I went to nearby Osaka Kansai Airport to say hi. While waiting for his plane to get in I was having some breakfast in one of the restaurants (THEY HAVE A SUBWAY THERE!!!!), when a bunch of American pilots and cabin crew wander in, looking a little nervous, which is understandable given they spoke no Japanese, and sat down. Amusingly, whenever the waiter said "Gohan" (rice/food), they would instantly reply with "Good Morning"... After the third time this happened I gave them a hand. According to them I'm now a Delta Airlines Translator :-)

Anyway, Yoo arrives and (after literally running to the first vending machine he sees. German/Italian ones obviously didn't cut it...) decides that RIGHT NOW is a great time for me to go to Kyoto and meet his dad and friends (After a flight from Dortmund via Paris... crazy guy...). So, off we go to the not-half-as-fast-as-its-cracked-up-to-be-bullet-train station under the airport, where there's another "You are a foreigner therefore you must speak English"-moment. For Yoo. Yep, Yoo, the Japanese guy who doesn't speak English...

Station attendant (to Yoo, in English): Are you this train wanting to ride?

Yoo (to me, in Japanese): Eh? Thomas, what does this guy want?

Station attendant (to Yoo, in Japanese):Ah, you speak Japanese?

Yoo (to him, in Japanese): I AM Japanese...

Apparently the two old Japanese ladies he was sitting next to on the plane for 10 hours also mentioned his Japanese was really good...

He also said my Japanese is a lot better now :-) (I did apologise for the rather crap standard of it last time around...)

So, off to Kyoto, where we meet his Dad, who is very funny and told me to either shut up and talk normally or speak German when I started speaking in Keigo to him (Keigo is special Japanese polite language. Unlike English, Japanese has a whole, sorry, 2 whole alternate vocabularies to show respect or humility) (And he speaks pretty perfect English as well...) and some other people.

After hanging around Kyoto for an hour or so, where incidentally, I got asked that ever so slightly stereotypical "I see you are a foreigner, would you like to be a model?" question, they insist I come visit their house (I'd never actually been in a proper Japanese house before).

Turn's out what Yoo defines as "In Kyoto" covers most of Central Japan. 3 hours in the car later, we arrive in what I can only say for sure was "somewhere in Japan". Seriously, I have no idea where we were. But it was great! There was snow! and mountains! and trees! And rivers! And fields! And countryside! Yoo's house is a really traditional-style house, complete with paper walls and tatami! And his mother was very kind, and fussed to make sure I wasn't cold, insisted I give the family hot-tub (Not really a hot-tub, but that's the closest thing we have to a traditional Japanese bath) a try and literally piled futon after futon on top of me... She also spoke in really really REALLY strong Kansai-ben (Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe slang, which is a) more relaxed and expressive than standard Japanese, and b) has the handy side effect of preventing the Tokyo foreign students from understanding us :-)), though largely thanks to Ryota and Mayuko I didn't really have a problem with it. Their neighbours, on the other had... I did not understand a word of...

Old lady:何々何々何々何々何はるんやわな。（?????????????)

Me: Emmmm, yea, exactly...

Unfortunately I had to run back to Kobe in the morning, so I didn't get to do much today, but I really really wanna go back! It's so refreshing to get out of the city-sprawl here in Kobe, even if we do have mountains, it's not the same...

From the sublime to the ridiculous, of all things to drag me back to Kobe was my Japanese language speaking test (the 2nd half of last week's conversation-free conversation and listening exam)... Not to have ANOTHER moan about the Uni's language courses, but spending the previous day and morning with Yoo and co, where I spoke only Japanese for pretty much 24 hours (brief bits of German aside), I was entirely not in the mood for linguistic hoop-jumping.

Aside from being a great time, the whole experience really brought to my attention how artificial and vacuous the whole classroom time is. All the conversation drills are so rigid and constructed, not to mention by and large extremely over-polite, that it really doesn't resemble real Japanese. Because of this, I tend not to put much effort into playing along with the game. I know I can speak Japanese, my subject teachers know I can, my friends know I can, so I frankly have little interest in proving to the conversation teacher that I can compare Japanese and British traffic regulations (a genuine lesson topic, I kid you not...)

Our first part was a listening exercise where we had to extract information from a conversation, with the topics and conversation speed getting increasingly harder. Paradoxically, my scores got better as the sections went on. The honest reason why? The early examples took so long to a) actually pronounce the words, and b) get to the point, that I actually couldn't be bothered to pay attention.

Example Question: When will Tanaka-san's friend arrive?

Yamada: Ah, Tanaka-san, I'll be coming round tomorrow, yea?

Tanaka: Oh, yea, Tomorrow isn't in? When about tomorrow? Evening?

Yamada: No, not Tomorrow evening, I'll arrive tomorrow morning.

Tanaka: Oh, I see, I'll see you Tomorrow morning then.

I think it's interesting to compare my current experience with how Yoo and I learned German. I've had now 8 years of German classes, which no doubt have helped, though in realistic terms I think that I've honestly developed much more by having been lucky enough to have a much greater amount and range of exposure to German in a real-life context than most of my classmates did. Yoo on the other hand, had little if any formal German classes, and spent 12 months in a solely German language environment. From what I noticed, while his spoken and written German is still rather shaky, he probably actually understands more than I do.

From this, I've come to see formal language tuition as more perhaps a learning guide, or a source of learning aims, rather than an actually route to progression. For that, you really REALLY need to speak to native speakers A LOT (this is admittedly easier said than done in Japan, given it can be hard to find people willing to have meaningful conversations with foreign learners.). If you don't, I think you run the risk of becoming the kind of German speaker I was before I went to University, basically a proficient reader but shaky at speaking and largely unable to understand anything at native-speed.

On a side note, what really annoys me about today's exam, is that I know it will show that I have distinctly improved over when I took it in October last year, but frankly, that is in now way, shape or form thanks to their classes, and it niggles at me that I'll appear to be a "success story" of their deeply flawed programme.

In spite of this, unlike some other students, I think I will choose take more of the classes (higher level ones) next semester, if only because at the very least it gives me a reason to go to uni everyday and bump into Japanese people...

Hmm, another negatively-toned article... this time I think I am in a bad mood, though only because I was having such an amazing time in the middle of nowhere before I got dragged back to "Now, please tell me something about this picture of Tokyo."...