The Adoption of Accents and The Never Ending Struggle to Teach

Beginning at the beginning would be a fantastic place to begin, but as Dane Cook would say, "I'm Tarantino-ing it" (for no apparent reason other than my own entertainment). And so it begins at the end where my elation was ransacked by surprise and anger at my own stupidity. As such, my day at work today ended with two little words, (please excuse the upcoming vulgarity but i feel it is necessary to express my momentary lapse of restraint, if you are under seventeen years old and you are reading my blog then please close your eyes and ears for the next twelve seconds and pick up the story in the next paragraph) "Fucking shit."

So the day (really) began quite normally, yet slowly rose to exceed my usual expectations of a day sitting at my desk reading, listening to books on tape, playing Sudoku, failing at cross word puzzles, and grading papers. I attended a writing class and the teacher asked me to prepare some hints and tips for writing well in English. Judging from the many, many, many essays i have graded over the last 7 months, I came up with this list of five do's and don'ts:

1. Do not start every sentence with the same word. Use transitions like; for example, however, but, yet, first, secondly, etc.
2. Have every paragraph have a contained and cohesive topic. If you are writing about dogs, don't start writing about piano lessons all of a sudden.
3. Alternate sentence length. Have short and long sentences. This helps with the flow of the essay.
4. Stay in the same tense for the whole essay. This is a very difficult concept for foreign students but changing from past to present to future is a very common problem.
5. Lastly, for the love of all that is holy, stop using the phrase "And so on." It doesn't mean anything. "I like baseball, basketball, books, movies and so on," This is a horrible sentence.

As the class continued, I had to opportunity to stop and edit many of the students essays. One student, who I had never met, asked me to stop and help her. Her accent was quite unusual for a Japanese student speaking English. I immediately took the foreign accent and unexpected fluency of her speech to be the result of a study abroad program in New Zealand. (If you have never heard a New Zealand accent you can either listen to the music of The Flight of the Conchords or imagine an Australian accent sweetened with natural Kiwi fructose) I quickly learned that my analysis was correct and that this girl spent a year in New Zealand studying English. This has to be one of the most fascinating aspects of linguistic study that i have ever encountered. I suppose by mere osmosis the subtle intonations, accents and stresses are learned while studying abroad. I can only assume that this is happening to my own Japanese. My use of the local dialect and my pronunciation of certain words in Japanese label me as a Kyoto resident. I really wish my accent, pronunciation and skill level are as good as this girl's English after one year.

It was at this moment in class where my day began to sour. I had a striking memory of a small, white and pink self-study Japanese language book rotting in my message bag on my desk. A date flashed before my eyes: "January 20th. Tomorrow. Book test due." These memories and concerns, brought forth by the sudden self-investigative wishing for Japanese fluency, crushed my teaching high.

The rest of the day was spent in frantic study and review of 80 pages of Japanese language study, approximately 4 weeks of projected study in one afternoon. As the day rolled on and more classes interrupted my hectic cramming, I was drained and beat to near unconsciousness with the lofty understanding of, but not the reasoning behind, the usefulness of teaching the polite form, the not-as-polite form, and the not-polite-at-all forms of speech. And thus I ended my day with the two words with which I began this entry, "Fucking shit." And then my brain exploded "and so on."