Bizarre Teaching Moment #3: Stop the Madness!

~Salutations, readers. The Bizarre Teaching Moment for today comes courtesy of my two most advanced students, a pair of boys who lived in Michigan until three years ago. Because their English is so good, I have a lot of fun in the class. So far, we've done lessons in diverse topics such as cryptography, pirates, and even a unit on car chases! Aside from their good English, they're both extremely intelligent and are easy to engage in conversation. Oh, they're also completely obsessed with explosions and bombs (does that remind you of anyone?).

One thing that we do in every class is read the latest installment of "Prince Valiant", a comic strip that appears in the Sunday edition of many American newspapers, including the Raleigh News & Disturber. As a Knight of the Round Table in Arthurian England, Prince Valiant has been kicking around for over sixty real-life years (amazingly, Val's wife, Aleta, hasn't aged a day), and somehow gets caught up in every major historical event of the last two millennia. Suspension of reality aside, Prince Valiant is my favorite weekly American comic strip, for several reasons: a) great artwork, b) an ongoing plot with multiple story arcs, and c) excellent writing with lots of advanced words

Here's the strip we read in our last class, from May 7th 2006 (click on it for a better look). Thanks for mailing it to me, Mom!:

^ [Synopsis: Val has been captured by Vikings and was being used as a human shield, along with the maimed former chieftain, Skyrmir. But now the Vikings have abandoned them in a mad quest for treasure! Incidentally, Skyrmir is the boys' favorite character, and they refer to the comic as "Prince Skyrmir". And they call me crazy...]

To help with some of the more difficult words and terms ("A horrifying shriek echoes down the grim, dark stairwell, freezing the blood in their veins!"), I always create a set of vocabulary cards before each class. Previously, I attempted to make small illustrations to elicit some of the terms, but my artwork is so bad that the boys always laughed at it. So now I make them draw the pictures! Mwahahahaha!

Comics in Japan, known as manga (your Word of the Post!) are big business and are much more mainstream than they are in America--I see lots of adults reading manga on trains and buses. You might think that's strange or childish, but from what I can tell, the breadth of manga topics is much, much larger than the superhero or slapstick humor genres that stereotype American comics. All of the bookstores here have large sections devoted to manga of every possible genre you can think of.

Because the boys in my class enjoyed reading Prince Valiant so much, I decided to let them make their own. I photocopied a page from a Japanese manga and covered the words with paper, then made another copy...leaving a page without words for them to fill in. The page I used was from "Akira", a famous science fiction manga (later made into a movie) that I managed to acquire (an English translation, no less):

^ The series is basically about superpowered children blowing up Tokyo...repeatedly. Interestingly, there is a student at my school named Akira, and whenever I say his name I can't help but laugh.

After giving the boys a few minutes to create their own dialogue, here is what they came up with (see below for zoomed-in images):

^ Since the pencil writing is difficult to see, I'll give you closeups of each panel:

^ Teacher: "Shut up?! Candies?!" Boy 1: "Stop yelling!" Boy 2: "You stole my candies!" Boy 3: "Uh-huh"

^ Teacher: "This class will have zero on your tests, because I'll give questions that's unable to answer."

^ Boy 1: "Do you have a reckless fever?" (reckless fever was a vocabulary term from Prince Valiant..."Thorwolf and his men rush the stairs in a reckless fever.") Boy 2: "He does." Boy 3: "Yeah."

--I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!!!

^ Boy 3: "We have to stop Mr. Dusto's madness!". Boy 1: "No! Mr. Mario!"

^ Teacher: "Ma-Mario!? Mama mia."

^ Teacher: "Mama mia! You have to die here!" Boy 2: "Shut up Luigi!"

~As you can see, the boys in the class are very "creative". I just wish that all of my classes were this much fun. In just a few hours I have to deal with a class of six five-year-olds (they're more like monkey-mosquito hybrids). Wish me luck!

Comments are appreciated. ~Oyasumi!

Let's Go Canes!

~As you surely know by know, the Carolina Hurricanes are the 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!

^ Everyone sing together: Let's Go Canes! (tip: right-click the link and select 'Save As...', or for you savvy Firefox folks, 'Save Link As...')

The Stanley Cup series against the Edmonton Oilers was extremely suspenseful, and consisted of seven games in a best-of-seven match. The final showdown saw the Carolina Hurricanes against the Oilers at the RBC Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The 'Canes were, of course victorious, with a final score of 3-1!

^This win has special significance for me, because I worked as an usher at the RBC Center for several months. The pay was minimum, but I enjoyed being able to (sometimes) watch the games for free. The staff members were all great and I had a lot of fun working there.

^ In my opinion, the real hero of the series was Cam Ward, the "rookie" goalkeeper for the Hurricanes. In the final game, he blocked 22 shots on the goal! After the game, he was awarded the Conn Smythe trophy, an annual award for Most Valuable Player of the team that wins the Stanley Cup. Somewhat disturbingly, Cam Ward is younger than I am...

Over here in Japan, hockey is virtually unknown. The local sports heroes around here are a soccer team called the Niigata Albirex (official site):^ Ooh, looks like they just lost a game 0-1. Ouch.

Japan hasn't been doing too well in the World Cup. After their loss to Australia, the "Blue Samurai" tied Croatia for a 0-0 tie (not much action there). They're up against Brazil today, and from what I understand, they have to beat Brazil by at least two goals in order to advance to the second round of the tournament. As Brazil is the top-ranked soccer team on the planet, this is unlikely, and most believe that only a miracle will get Japan through.

By the way, today was the summer solstice, when the sun was at its farthest north. This means that today had the longest amount of sunlight, from 14-15 hours' worth depending on your location (so that's why the damn birds were singing when I was trying to sleep! Or maybe I just need to get to bed earlier). It also marks the beginning of summer. In Japanese summer is "natsu" [ 夏, pronounced na-tsu ], your Word of the Post.

^ A photograph of Stonehenge, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Stonehenge was constructed thousands of years ago in England as an astronomical calendar; on key astronomical dates such as the solstices, sunlight shines through holes in the monument. Or, at least, it used to: in the ~4,000 years since the construction of Stonehenge, the precession of the Earth's orbital axis has moved the sunlight slightly out of alignment. I'm guessing that wasn't in the original blueprints.

If you are currently in the southern hemisphere (Ozzie ozzie ozzie!), I humbly apologize and bid you a happy winter solstice. ~Oyasumi!

No Longer (completely) Illiterate!

~Having nothing better to do yesterday, I finally sat down and learned hiragana, one of the three main systems of writing used in Japan. Hiragana is much like the Roman alphabet that is used in English, in that each symbol represents a sound rather than an entire word:

^ One has to be careful when learning hiragana, because the sounds are sometimes pronounced differently than their corresponding English letters. For example, the first five symbols, for a-i-u-e-o, are pronounced ah-ee-ooh-eh-oh, NOT ay-aye-yu-ee-oh like we do in English. This is why I didn't major in linguistics...

Learning Japanese writing has proven to be very difficult for me. My original intention when starting my job was to practice a bit each day, but when I get home around 9:45 pm after work, I'm completely burned out and just want to eat dinner and go to sleep. During my two days off each week, I've so far been carousing around Nagaoka and the rest of Japan. Still, I did my best, making flashcards for each symbol. However, it just wasn't working: I'd forget the symbols by the next day. Luckily, I turned to the internet for help and discovered a number of extremely useful websites.

I used two different websites to learn hiragana. The first site presents each symbol along with a mnemonic: an associated English word or phrase to aid in memory. For example, the symbol for the sound 'ki' is associated with the word 'key', because the symbol looks like a key:
Some of the mnemonics are extremely silly, but that's a good thing because it makes them easier to remember (my favorite is the mnemonic for the sound 'ne', which is 'nemesis!').

The second website has a memory game where symbols appear on the screen and you have to click on the correct sound that the symbol represents. You can enable and disable one or more symbol sets (for example, only activating the symbols you've learned so far). This is a great way to test the symbols that I've learned; I was able to memorize the set of 46 symbols in a few hours.

This morning, I quickly reviewed the hiragana that I'd learned last night, then looked around my apartment, trying to decipher...I mean, to translate any writing I could find. I looked at food packages and appliances and was able to read a little, but not too much; most of the writing is in kanji. Dejected, I sat down to eat lunch, and was able to translate a word! On the side of a box of cookies, I saw the symbols お い し い which literally spell out o-e-shi-e in hiragana, and sound like oh-ee-she-ee:

^This Romanizes into your Word of the Post: 'oyshī', which means delicious! As you can see, translating Japanese writing is quite a process.

Today I rode around Nagaoka on some errands, and I was very pleased that I could actually identify some of the symbols on signs and stores. I spotted お い し い again on a sign in front of a restaurant area (perhaps it said, "Delicious restaurant plaza?"). I was able to sound out many words, but the problem is that I don't know what most of the words mean. Being able to sound out the words is only half of the process; actually translating the resulting word into English is the other half!

Next on my list of things to learn is katakana, a second set of phonetic symbols much like hiragana, but used for words taken from other languages. Katakana is also used to spell out company names, which is why I see so little hiragana and so much katakana when riding around Nagaoka. Hopefully my progress will swift (the symbols are derived from hiragana and are actually easier to write).

Unfortunately, memorizing the symbols and their sounds in hiragana and katakana is only half the battle; I still need to learn how to correctly write them (which is a lot harder than you might think). I found a handy website that has animations of how to draw each symbol.

Once I'm through with hiragana and katakana, it's on to the thousands of kanji! Joy. Well, at least I'm in the right place to practice, since I see this stuff every single day...

Oh, here's some Japanglish to lighten your day:

^ Pocky bitter chocolate, as the box clearly states, is for men only. Presumably, women caught consuming this 'oyshi' confection are breaking the law. I suppose that women are only supposed to eat the 'sweet' version. ~Oyasumi!