Nihongo 101: Japanese Classes at the Local Community Center

How many times can my Japanese teacher look at me sadly and say, "Wakarunai" (you don't understand)? She doesn't even say it with a questioning voice, only with a disappointed downward glance as she stares at the book and tries to think of another way to explain some obscure word to me without letting me resort to my newly-downloaded Kotoba! iPhone bilingual dictionary. Instead, she just speaks without gestures as if I understood, while I watch her mouth and catch maybe one of every ten words, usually words that don’t help me with meaning, words that mean “but” and “so” and “therefore.” The Vietnamese girl on my right continues to work diligently at her book, and I continue to stare dismally at the open book in front of me, half-understanding the tale of Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox and some mishap with Mr. Bear’s letter.

Today was my first day of Japanese class at the local community center, a 10-minute bike ride from my house. I was the first to arrive, a full 15 minutes early for the 7:00 class. In my best Japanese, I asked the receptionist, an older gentlemen with a yellow polo shirt and khakis, if this was where the Japanese class was, and he nodded "Hai, hai" several times. Taking a key from the desk, he stood up and joined me in the hall, leading me to the locked classroom a few doors down. After fiddling with the lock for a second, he opened the door, and my surprised eyes saw a completely empty classroom: no desks, no chairs, nothing. I turned to ask him where the desks were, but he was already opening another door and extracting the furniture we needed. Together, we took out five collapsible plastic tables and twice as many grey stackable chairs, placing them on opposite sides of the room: two against one wall, and one each against each of the other walls.

Just a few minutes later, two instructors walked in: a tall older man with an unlined, kindly face, and his wife, shorter than him, with curly hair and beige capris. The woman began talking to me in medium-speed Japanese, short sentences that I mostly understood, and I answered her questions the best I could: Yes, I'm from America. Yes, I'm an English teacher. This is my first time in Japan. I arrived on August 1. "Seito, doko?" (Students, where?) I asked her in broken Japanese, since I can’t ask the complete sentence yet. “Amerika, Australia...?"

“Mmmm,” she thought aloud. “Vietnam. Thai. Pakistan. Chugaku (China)”.

“Ahhh, soo desu,” I replied, my hopes of meeting some Brazilian or Peruvian dimming slightly.

The students started to walk in. A middle-aged Chinese man with a huge grin, followed by his younger friend/brother (I never did figure out which) greeted us with a resounding, “Konbanwa!” (Good evening!) They were followed by a pretty Vietnamese girl with long hair, who ended up sitting beside me for the two-hour class. While the other students were coming in and tables were being set up, the lead teacher motioned for me to sit at a desk and register for the class.

The registration form was bilingual, but I attempted to respond in Japanese to all the questions: name, address, date of birth, home country, date of arrival in Japan, date of departure, languages spoken, etc. It was the smiling Chinese man’s first day in class also, so he sat beside me and filled out his own form in impeccable kanji (Lucky duck, I thought, he’s been writing with Chinese characters his whole life.) He looked up at me. “Kanji wa muzukashii ne?” (Kanji is hard, huh?) he asked. I smiled, thinking, “Yes, yes it is.”

After we finished filling out the forms and paying our 500 yen (~$5.00) with the round gold coin that would be used for the cost of copies, all the students and teachers formed a circle in the empty space in the middle of the room. There were about eight students and five teachers. The lead teacher bowed to everyone with a “Konbanwa,” and we bowed back. He said a few words that I didn’t understand, then introduced himself. Afterwards, he motioned to the man on his left to continue.

It was the same man who had sat beside me at the registration desk. His Japanese, albeit with a slight Chinese accent, was almost perfect, from what I could tell. He spoke for one or two minutes, saying his name and some other things that went over my head completely. When he finished, everyone applauded.

Then it was my turn. Stumbling a little, and suddenly nervous that everyone was staring at me, I slowly said that my name was Jaimie Foster, that I was from America, that I taught English at a middle school here, that it was my first time in Japan, and that my Japanese was really bad and I was sorry for it. I finished with a bow and a “doozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu” (literally, please be nice to me, an expression used with introductions) and everyone applauded again. I felt a little better.

The rest of the introductions went quicker. The man on my left was from Thailand, and seemed comfortable with Japanese. The teachers also introduced themselves, although as soon as they said their names I promptly forgot them. The Vietnamese girl, whose name is Sakura, talked for a while in heavily accented Japanese that still made sense to me. Maybe it’s easier to understand foreigners speaking a foreign language. . .

After we finished our introductions, the lead teacher looked at me, said something, and waited for my answer. I stood still, a little bewildered, waiting for some non-verbal cue to tell me what to do. Another teacher, a short Japanese woman with glasses, motioned for me to cross the room and join her. I walked over and stood beside her, only then realizing that they were pairing up teachers and students for the evening. We all dispersed to various corners of the classroom, one or two students per teacher. I sat on one side of the small table with Sakura; our teacher sat across from us.

“What books have you brought?” she asked me in Japanese. I reached into my backpack and pulled out Japanese for JETs, Genki Book 1, Essential Japanese for ALTs, and a kanji workbook. “OK,” she nodded, and asked Sakura the same question. “Very good,” she told us, and immediately handed us each a thin paperback textbook that had been sitting on the desk. I returned my books to my backpack.

I looked at it. “Kokugo: ichinensei.” A first-graders’ Japanese book, the green cover bright with a white anime bear holding an apple, surrounded by heart-shaped leaves. Well, I thought, You’ve gotta start somewhere, I guess.

“Read, please,” our teacher instructed us. “I'm going to go make copies.”

I opened the cover. The first page repeated the title and had a picture of a rainbow-striped spider sitting on his web, with raindrops falling around him. This was followed by a table of contents (mokuji), and then the first story.

“Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox,” I read. “Oh.”

“Mr. Bear went out to mail a letter. ‘It’s a beautiful day. I feel nice.’ Something something something Mr. Fox walking. Su-ta-ta-su-ta-ta” (pitter patter, maybe?) “Mr. Bear looked at Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox looked at Mr. Bear. The two something something something friends.”

“Wakarimasuka? (Do you understand?)” asked my teacher kindly when she returned with a stack of printed copies.

I picked up a pen and wrote “70%” on a sheet of paper. She laughed.

“What don’t you know?”

I pointed at a few words. “Are they friends or not?” I asked, not quite as eloquently as I would have liked to: Friends? Yes? No?

“Jyanai (They are not friends).”

“Ahhhh, okay, thanks.”

A few sentences later, I asked her again for help with another word, which she tried to explain. This time, there was less success. I stared at her blankly. “Wakarunai,” she whispered. She sat for a while. Then she said what I believe was an explanation of what happens when two verbs connect in Japanese. This was what I wanted to learn, and I tried to ask a question. “Why?” I wanted to know. Why do you sometimes put “ni” between two verbs, but sometimes “te”? I immediately regretted asking the question, though, because she launched into a heavily-worded explanation that I couldn’t even attempt to follow. “Dajoubu desu,” I said, going back to the book and trying not to sigh heavily. “It’s okay.”

I kept reading. As I sat there, though, struggling to make sense of the hiragana and the unpronounceable kanji, I kept thinking about everything I have learned about adult second language acquisition over the past ten years. Aim for 80% success. Too little success and the student gets frustrated. Too much success and the student is bored. Students don’t need to understand every word in a passage, as long as they understand the main idea. Make the classes relevant. Don’t use children’s books. Use materials appropriate for adults and their daily life in another country. Thinking all of this and wishing desperately for an interpreter, I pointed at a word that my sensei had been unable to explain to me.

“Taisetsu desuka?” (Is it important?) I asked her. Now it was her turn to look bewildered. She seemed confused by the question. “Meishi desuka? (Is it a noun?)" I tried again. She nodded.

“I Japan here,” I tried. “I want to learn. Important.” I stopped. I could feel tears of frustration prickle my eyes. How could I explain to her what I wanted to say? That reading about Mr. Bear and Mr. Fox was not going to help me go to the post office and ask for stamps. That it wasn’t going to help me get on the right bus, or withdraw money from my bank account, or ask where the vinegar is in the grocery store. Yes, reading is important, it helps with fluency and certainly with recognizing kanji, but even a first grade book is above my level, and it doesn’t teach me what I need to learn. In that moment, I suddenly understood every ESL student I’ve ever had, those hard-working refugees and immigrants who come to the U.S. eager to learn English and fit in, but who are hindered by their well-meaning but ignorant volunteer teachers who insist on teaching as if they were all children instead of adults with real life experiences and intelligence. I am guilty of being that ignorant volunteer teacher as well, not knowing where to start or how to communicate with beginning students, not knowing what to do or how to react. And now, since I lacked the vocabulary, I couldn’t tell this nice Japanese woman who gives her Monday nights to émigrés from other countries, that I needed her help and expertise on another level. I needed her to explain grammar, verb conjugations, particles, and kanji to me. I needed her to let me use a real textbook. I needed her to teach me casual conversation. I needed an explanation in English, dammit! But I couldn’t. I couldn’t explain.

The teacher noticed I was getting internally worked up, and she put a soft hand on my book. “Yonde, kudasai” (Just read, please), she told me, and turned to help Sakura. So I read, running my pinky fingers under my eyes, keeping my head down. I didn’t even try to make sense of the hiragana anymore. I just read, letter by letter, without comprehending more than a word or two, hating Mr. Bear and hating Mr. Fox, their pictures blurry on the page. But I swallowed hard, set my jaw in a hard line, and took a deep breath. I am not going to cry here, I told myself. I will cry at home if I have to. But I will not cry here.

Just a few minutes later, Sensei interrupted us again and instructed us to close our textbooks. Sighing gratefully, I set them aside to make room for an enlarged 11 x 17 copy of two textbook pages, containing 50 typed questions.

“Wakaru?” she asked me politely. Do you understand?
I nodded, not knowing if I understood or not.

“Daijoubu desu,” she said. OK.

The first set of questions had to do with particles. Watashi WA Maiku Miraa desu. Sore wa watashi NO hon desu.

I got to work, reading each sentence painstakingly and thanking the editors for putting furigana over the kanji. After three sentences, though, I realized that I was completely unprepared for these types of questions. Having only had half of a semester of formal Japanese study two years ago, the only particles I had ever really studied were wa, no, ga, ni, and o, and even those I got mixed up. I quit on sentence four and moved to the next section.

This one was on Miraa-san’s daily schedule. I was supposed to look at the pictures and the clock underneath them and write a sentence about each one. Miraa-san wakes up at 6:00 a.m. Miraa-san studies from 9:00-11:00. Miraa-san eats lunch at 12:00. I did a little better with this one, but had to keep referring to another textbook to remember how to write time expressions.

The third and final section that I worked on was a review of question words. BLANK is this? It is a television. WHAT. BLANK is that person? That person is Mr. Sato. WHO. And so on.

Although I didn’t finish this part of the worksheet, I felt like I learned a lot from it. My only experience with question words had been when I asked another teacher at my middle school to write them down for me, and I only had about three of them memorized. Sensei was very helpful when I had a question and I grabbed at that glimmer of understanding with gusto. Here, here at last, was my 80% success.

By the time class ended at 9:00, I was feeling better but still overwhelmed. I had communicated in only Japanese for two hours, using and reusing the 10 verbs and 30 nouns in my possession, and I felt lonely for authentic communication.

Sakura and I left together on our bicycles. Before we left the community center, she reached into the basket on her bike and pulled out an orange. “Suki desuka?” (You like?) she asked. “Hai, suki desu!” (Yes, I do!) She handed it to me, then rooted around in her bag for some more vegetables, an oversized (for Japan) potato and two small eggplants. “From the teacher,” she told me in Japanese. “OK, thank you, teacher!” I replied, placing them carefully in my own basket, and she laughed.

Sakura doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Vietnamese, so our conversations were brief. Her Japanese is also twenty times better than mine, but she is patient and uses hand gestures to explain herself to me. We rode quickly down Highway 25, the air finally a bit cooler than it is during the day, the wind blowing our hair back. The sidewalk was bumpy and narrow in some places, and the lights from our bicycles barely illuminated the way in front of us. I almost ran off the curb twice, laughing and screaming that I couldn’t see—miranai! The switch to the bicycle light was rubbing against the front tire, too, making pedaling difficult, but we rode the kilometer or two back to my street in just a few minutes.

Near my house, traffic was light, and the iridescent neon glow from the hot pink Pachinko building tinted everything with color. We stopped to talk a little more and to exchange phone numbers. I found out that she is 32, that she is married to a Japanese man but has no children, that she has been in Japan for three years but that she wants to move to America, and that her sister lives in California. It was nice to be able to talk a little, and being with her half-reminded me of being with Latin Americans: the touch on the arm, the lack of personal space, the constant questions about boyfriends. She put her hand on my arm every time she asked a question, and when I said something particularly witty, she threw her head back and laughed heartily from her stomach. I discovered that I had missed this kind of human interaction: in Japan, personal space abounds and we are always quiet. As Sakura and I were talking, an older Japanese couple walked by, opening gawking at the sight of at these two foreigners trying to communicate in a difficult language. I wanted to wave, but I restrained myself. Instead, Sakura and I said goodbye with a friendly pat on the shoulder, and the promise of dinner someday next week.

I pedaled towards home, thinking, like I always do, of Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese (“I am pedaling, pedaling. . . . ") and of the past few hours in my first Japanese class. I felt the stress of the past few hours catching up with me, but I feel proud, too. “Be happy, Jaimie,” I told myself as I passed the garage, closed now, and biked slowly uphill towards the street I live off of, "You just had a long conversation completely in Japanese. You can do this. You can.”

And I think, maybe, a little, it’s true.