I suppose I could share with you an "Engrish" funny from this week? "Engrish" is what we call really awful translations, the kind that either makes zero sense or has funny spelling errors... That kind of thing.
Like that. The kind of thing that, as an English speaker, just makes you sit back for a second and go "...What?" So, my first year class this week is doing proficiency test type stuff in groups. I give each group a card that has a picture of five people, and they have to tell me what each person is doing. They discuss it as a group, and then write sentences on the board. They`re doing fairly basic stuff. One of the pictures is of a girl throwing away a can, a man taking off (or putting on) his jacket, a man mopping a floor, a man watering a flowerbed, and a woman cooking what appears to be sausages. In Japan, sausages are generally called wieners. This is a problematic word for the Japanese on multiple levels. First, they have issues with many words beginning with "w" ("woman" becomes "ooman" when spoken). Second, there are no words in Japanese that end with a consonant other than "n", so a word ending in "r" comes out as "ah" when pronounced. Third, plurals don`t exist in Japanese, so these are often problematic for Japanese speakers learning English. Taking all of these points into account, on Thursday I got this gem: A woman is cooking vienna. ... Uh, no, kids. Vienna is a city in Austria. Intriguing mental image, though.
The weekend was also full of nothing. On Saturday it was rainy and gross and I felt exceedingly apathetic so that all of my writing attempts failed. I studied Japanese for a while, and spent the rest of my time reading or knitting. Sunday was much more productive for me. I finished the second unit of my Japanese studies, passed the unit test (after four tries, because I still don`t understand particles), and surpassed 20,000 words in my novel! Go me! I probably could have actually been even more productive with my writing, except that I went to Starbucks and got a dark mocha frappuccino. Anyone who knows me knows that it`s a bad idea for me to have that kind of caffeine, and an even worse idea for me to have it combined with sugar. I had all of these ideas whirring around in my head after a while, but I couldn`t concentrate on any of them long enough to actually type them in my document. And then the twitching started. So I called it quits for the day, went home, and ran the first Week 5 plan of the Couch to 5K program. This is a big deal, since I developed major foot pain due to needing new shoes and hadn`t been running in nearly three weeks.
I did some marking on Monday. Last week I had the kids write about someone who inspires them, since their textbook was talking about a famous Japanese singer, Angela Aki, being inspired by Sarah McLachlan. Most of them were idols, actresses, and pop groups, but one girl wrote about Demi Lovato and her messages against self-harm. It was a very well-written paragraph, and I was really impressed! I also met up with Nakamura-san on my way home from school, so we had a nice little chat while we walked with her dog for a bit.
Tuesday was a lesson about the weather with my lonely high school student at my special needs school. Having just the one lesson meant that I had pretty much all day to work on my novel. I finally passed 25,000 words!
Last Thursday, we were talking about the students` future jobs. One girl said she wanted to work at the Jaws attraction at Universal Studios Japan, because it`s her favourite and she already knows the entire pre-ride spiel. The class pretty much demanded that she perform it for them, which she did, on the condition that I do a Disney one next week. I explained that I was a waitress, but I knew a lot of the rides by heart. I was hoping they had forgotten about it by this week, but they didn`t. So I did a skipper greeting from Jungle Cruise because I love that ride. They understood most of it (I could tell because they were laughing rather than "wow"ing).
And that`s it for me for now. I`m excited for tomorrow night because I`m heading to Nagoya after school to catch an overnight bus. I`M GOING TO (Tokyo) DISNEYLAND!!!!!!! It`s been two years since I was there last, and I`m stupidly excited to see the Christmas decorations. TTFN!
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