Oh, there’s a million-and-one of them. Some of my favourites:

“Americans are…. strong for… war and fighting!”

I think he wanted to say ‘keen’ but now I’m saying “strong for” at every opportunity.

Teacher: “What do you like to do in your free time?”
Student: “I play with my girlfriend”

Ooh la la.

It’s a bit unfair picking on the Japanese people though. I’ve heard of a few occassions where a gaijin has stuffed up, trying to speak Japanese. My favourite story is probably when upon hearing that the student’s mother had recently died, he wanted to say how sorry he was to hear it. And the first way you learn to say “I’m sorry” in Japanese is:

“Gomen nasai”

Problem with that is, it translates into “I’m sorry, I did it”. Funnier still, the woman to whom he just apologised for matricide was a manga-ka, a comic book artist, who promptly retold the episode in a later volume of her manga!

Anyway, if you know of any other funny Engrish quotes from your students, then please share in the comments section :)

One strange thing I’ve noticed about some students is that they take on accents when speaking English. The most common is American accents. It’s not that surprising, given that most of the English they encounter is American English - on television, in music, from their teachers or the many American (mainly military-based) people iving in Japan.

One girl I taught sounded just like a Californian “Valley Girl” - that certain drawl and using the word “like” at least three times per sentence. Her English was a high level, not perfect, but then again, probably most grammatically correct than your average native Valley Girl.

Another student I had sound British - pure Queen’s English. It was a delight to speak with him.

Then, sometimes, you get teachers that change accents. This has happened to me since before I was an English teacher (I’ll copy Irish or Canadian accents subconsciously when I hear them) but some other teachers have had it happen to them since they started teaching. And every time, it’ll change into an American accent. In a way, it helps the students because it’s an accent they’re familiar with, but on the other hand, students have told me that Australian/British accents are much better than American accents because they’re more similar to Japanese.

Take for example, the way that Americans say the word “can’t” compared to the way British-English speakers say it. The British-English way uses the syllable ‘ka’ which is one of the characters in Japan’s syllabary: か. It’s a sound much more recognisable to Japanese people.

Nothing is really good or bad when comparing accents, it’s just one of those oddities you notice as an English teacher in Japan.

One thing I noticed since I arrived in Japan is how my own ability to speak English has gone down the squat-style toilet. When you listen and read to broken English everyday, it’s a given that you’ll start to speak and write it, too.

Does anyone actually ask “What are your hobbies?” in the English-speaking world? Maybe on the forms you fill out for dating services.

My words tend to jumble up, and my grammar ability has given up and stomped off somewhere else where it still gets respected. Writing on my blog and at 3yen.com has probably saved me from a complete Engrish takeover.

I’m not the worst affected teacher I know, though. There have been others that pronounce their words the same way that the Japanese students would - katakana style.

“Wat ah yoor hobbeezu?”

Sheesh. Hopefully it’s not a permanent impairment.

One of the risks of being a teacher - any kind of teacher - is that you can come into contact with sick people. In an eikaiwa, this is especially true, as you are usually teaching between 1 and 10 people, in small, air-conditioned spaces (ideal for re-circulating the germs).

Also, many eikaiwa have kids classes, and most kids haven’t gotten the hang of not coughing into sensei’s face, or wiping their noses after they sneeze on you.

So, if you’re thinking about going into eikaiwa for yourself, it helps if you have an immune system of steel. Especially at this time of year. Rainy season, or typhoon season (depending where in Japan you live) starts in about June every year. But it seems to have started earlier this year. So on top of students giving you their germs (despite the best efforts of alleged flu masks), you’ll have to walk to work in the rain, suffering wet feet and over-zealous air conditioning.

It finally brought me down last week. My housemate isn’t happy with me giving my cold to her either.

It’s not fun recovering when you’re in a profession that requires talking all day either. On two occassions so far, I’ve had to leave my class to have a coughing fit. The students are generally pretty good about it but I have heard from other teachers that students were saying “Ah, Chidade was coughing in class yesterday and today I woke up with a headache”.

Yay.

*cough*

A friend of mine who works for Nova in Yokohama has told me a bit of company gossip. It seems that the company who made 70.6 billion yen in sales in 2004 and has 50% of the eikaiwa market share is still not happy and is cutting back costs further.

As of January, the only supplies that will be paid for in the 600+ branches around Japan are paper, light fittings and cleaning products. That means no pens, staplers, highlighters and so on. My friend also said that he was given a biro pen with his name written on it. If he lost it, he had to buy a new one himself. If it ran out, he had to prove there was no more ink before another one was provided.

He’s apparently been getting revenge by using up the ink quickly by vandalising the desks in the branch. That uses up more cleaning product too, you see. He hopes to run out of ink in a month.

Geez, I’ve heard of cost-cutting measures but surely in a teaching environment, cutting stationary is a bit much?

Link:
Wikipedia’s article on Nova

The eikaiwa do have a good point. The Japanese education system focuses on grammar, reading and vocabulary when teaching English. This means that many Japanese people are left hanging when they actually try to speak English to a foreigner. So the philosophy that eikaiwa teach conversation skills, not grammar, is sound. The focus is on talking, not textbooks.

But after working for one of The Big Four eikaiwa for nearly five months now, I’ve come to the conclusion that Japanese students are 80% of the time there because they want to have fun. They’d like to meet some foreigners, or use their English skills for meeting foreigners outside the eikaiwa (necessary, when schools like Nova ban their instructors from socialising with students outside the school).

I have met many students who have said that their reasons for studying English are that they “want to meet foreigners” or that “English is cool”. I also have a 85 year old woman who comes once a week to giggle and talk in Japanese after being told to “Please repeat: May I have a window seat, please?”. Is she there to learn English? Of course not, she’s a widow with nothing else to do.

Another reason they come in is to socialise with other Japanese students. And that means gossip. Oh, the gossip. They will invent all kinds of theories and stories about you and your life and why you came to Japan. I found the best way to combat this is to tell them all exactly why you came to Japan, who your boyfriend is and how many cats you have. If the reason is silly, like “I came to Japan to watch lots of anime“, then they’ll love you for it, even if they laugh about it.

It’s an expensive way to socialise and have fun, especially if they are students of one of the Big Four. But you can’t fault the eikaiwa. They do genuinely try to teach English. The fact that the students often aren’t interested is a side issue.

There are many, many private schools around Japan. Cram schools are probably most common but there are also many primary and secondary schools here. I often wonder how they are regulated, because many of them are made up of a single room in an office building. After I had the opportunity to teach at one the other week, I only wondered more.

The school I taught at was an international school. The kids had been born or had lived for a period in an English-speaking country, and now that they were home with their families in Japan, they were sent to international school so that they wouldn’t lose their English skills.

So, the first thing you notice is that you are not teaching them English. They already speak it as fluently as a 7-year-old could. You actually teach them things like math and spelling.

Which is a slight moral dilemma for me….I don’t have an Education degree, I’ve never been trained to teach primary school kids. Heck, I hadn’t even been trained for Kids Classes by my eikaiwa!

But apparently I was deemed qualified enough to teach them just this one time. I taught spelling and math, we played a few games…and then I taught them about the U.N. Security Council.

Yes, you read it right. I had to teach a bunch of seven and eight years olds about the U.N. Security Council, UNICEF and the WHO. Why? I have no idea. It’s just the curriculum for this month at the school.

I don’t think I did too badly teaching them that, but I still wonder why someone felt that it needed to be taught to these kids. Most adults would have trouble understanding the intricacies of the United Nations. These kids just weren’t interested, and I can understand why.

Especially since I let slip that I watch Naruto every week, and then that’s all they wanted to talk about.

Oops.