The nice thing about my Thursdays is that I have the first three classes, and then I’m free the rest of the day. My classes went just fine, actually. The third year class that I have with Mr. Hayashi has been interesting. At first I just helped out with various English subtleties, but lately Mr. Hayashi has been using the class to help me study Japanese. <\/p>\n
Mr. Hayashi will write sentences in Japanese on the blackboard, and then ask the students to write the translation in English in their notebooks. After giving them time, he’ll ask me to translate the sentences into English. Sometimes I don’t know a kanji, or I’ll get it wrong, but mostly I get them correct. The students take it as a matter of course, but there’s a little pressure in there, and it makes it a good way for me to learn translations. <\/p>\n
Besides the class, Mr. Hayashi is also helping me with sentence translations. I do the translations, and then he checks them and offers suggestions. At first I was always trying to literally translate everything, but the more I relax and just try to get the idea, the better I seem to do. Translation is an interesting skill – looking for all the right clues in the text and providing the proper nuances, trying to guess the tone from the context, and just getting the idea across. <\/p>\n
After lunch a student came to my desk and started stuttering before I realized who it was, the pervert-in-training from my class yesterday. He apologized in English for drawing the picture, and turned tail to run. Before he could get far his homeroom teacher laid into him a little bit more, and then Oki sensei decided to get in some kicks while the poor kid was down. I felt bad, because I had initiated the whole thing by making a comment to the teacher. Now the kid will probably hate me for life, but at least he’ll think twice about female anatomical illustrations during class time.<\/p>\n
The ESS club met after school, but only a few of the students showed up. I gave them my omiyage from my trip to America, and the Spongebob Squarepants backpack clips from Walmart were treated like religious icons. Worth their weight in gold, they were. I also had a new student join the club. She had been on the trip to Australia, and while she was there she met a Chinese student doing a homestay. She said that he is now her boyfriend, and they use English to communicate since neither can speak each other’s language. Sometimes it takes a little love to realize how important learning another language can be.<\/p>\n
After school I came home and cooked up the best damn yakisoba I’ve ever made. Noodles, mushrooms, onions, strips of pork, sesame seeds, and the obligatory hard boiled egg on top made for a top notch dinner. I had a salad on the side with a sesame dressing that I can’t get enough of. <\/p>\n
I talked with Antoine on the phone and we arranged a plan for tomorrow night. I’m going to head to Takarazuka to meet him in his ‘hood – the first time in a year that I’ve actually seen his digs. We’re going to a yakitori that he frequents, and just hang out a little bit. It’ll be a short trip, since the last train leaves around 10:30 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The nice thing about my Thursdays is that I have the first three classes, and then I’m free the rest of the day. My classes went just fine, actually. The third year class that I have with Mr. Hayashi has been interesting. At first I just helped out with various English subtleties, but lately Mr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-7D","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}