Bizarre Teaching Moment #13: The Sumo Gorilla

~A new schedule of classes began this week and things have been a bit chaotic. Aside from the new and changed classes, I've been teaching many "seminar" lessons, which are special courses with a single student that last from one to four classes. From one such seminar comes this latest Bizarre Teaching Moment.

My student was a young girl of seven, who was learning vocabulary words for non-c0untable school supplies such as paper, glue, chalk, etc., and the sentence "I have..." They're non-countable because you can't say, for example, "Three paper"; you have to say "Three pieces of paper". As that's a bit too difficult, we were using the word "some," as in, "I have some paper".

The lesson was going smoothly and she learned all of the school supplies, but we ran into trouble with the sentence pattern. She easily learned the question, "What do you have?", but the answer tripped her up. Every time she tried to say "some", she said "sumo" instead! When I asked her, "What do you have?", she replied with "I have sumo scissors."

Sumo, of course, is one of Japan's native sports. Sumo matches consist of two fat, nearly-naked men trying to push each other out of a circle. That description is, perhaps, too crude; there's actually much more to the sport than that. The nightly news often reports on sumo tournaments and shows some of the bouts, which normally last only a few seconds (but are sometimes much longer).

A typical sumo bout goes something like this: a Shinto priest/referee calls out blessings and waves a ceremonial fan around a white circle in the sand several meters wide. The two sumo wrestlers stomp around in the circle, tossing salt all over the place. Then they crouch down on opposite sides of the circle, glaring at each other, for as long as they want.

Suddenly, they rush against each other...and there's no telling what happens next. One might be instantly pushed out of the ring, or they might grapple for a minute or so until one gets the advantages. The goal is to either a) push your opponent out of the ring, or b) make him touch the ground with anything other than his feet.

Despite their vast bulk, sumo wrestlers have a high degree of agility. The sport is less about slamming into your opponent and more about using judo-like moves to throw him outside of the circle. It's surprisingly interesting to watch, and in February I actually intended to see the Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo with a friend, but unfortunately my work schedule interfered. As my former co-worker Chris said, I'd like to return to Japan as a tourist and see things at my leisure.

Getting back to the lesson: finally, after much practice, my student was able to say "some" correctly. Next, I was helping her read through a short dialog, featuring a girl named Gloria who asks to borrow some paper from her friend. Using Japanese pronunciation, the name "Gloria" sounds remarkably like the word for a certain large ape.

The student again misspoke the word "some", and I had to stop the lesson for a moment so we could both recover from laughing about the "Sumo Gorilla". ~Oyasumi!