Tuesday, October 14--There's Ten Weeks of This?

Today I began a ten-week Japanese language course. It is a free class, offered by Fleet and Family Services, which meets for 90 minutes once a week. I didn’t walk into class expecting to be fluent in Japanese by the time it ends in December, but I figured it was a good starting point. After the first lesson…I am not so sure.

The class seemed like total chaos to me. There was an American there helping to run the class—she teaches the Getting Started Teaching English class and runs the English Teachers’ Networking Group—and she did not let the Japanese instructor do much. There were two or three kids at the back table being chatty (was today some sort of school holiday that I missed?). Many of the other students have already had one or more Japanese classes, and they were intent on showing how much they knew. So while I was desperately straining to hear the Japanese instructor pronounce common greetings, all these other people were talking over her. It was extremely frustrating.

Adding to my confusion and frustration were the photocopied pages from the textbook we were supposed to get for the class. The local bookstore did not carry the book, so I had to order a copy from Amazon last week—it is on its way, but did not arrive in time for today’s class. Luckily the instructors knew we were having difficulties obtaining books, and made copies of the pages we’d need for today. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the pages and they are all in hiragana (one of the three Japanese writing systems)! I was expecting to see the Japanese word for house spelled out in English letters, like in a Japanese-English dictionary or phrase book. Looking at those pages, it finally clicked with me why learning Japanese is such a huge undertaking. It’s not just using flashcards to memorize some new words. It’s learning a whole new language from the alphabet up. I’m starting to feel like that old dog trying to learn a new trick.