Fortressing against Bad Education

I was informed that a companion to this post caused distress to someone whose opinion I valued. Initially, I removed this post to re-evaluate it, but I decided to put the post back up here.

I will likely revisit this subject, because the converse arguments also have value.

Things That Weren't Shiny

I was informed that the post I originally had here caused someone whose opinion I valued distress. I am not sure what distressed her about it, so I initially removed it to rethink how to express the contents in a better way.

I have come to no useful conclusion, so I have put the post back up, here, with the beginnings of a translation to Japanese.

The converse arguments have value, as well, so I will be revisiting the subject.

惣菜 (sōzai): Side Dish vs. Main Dish vs. Japanese Dishes

When translating Japanese into English, sometimes you run into some real puzzles, concepts that just don't map.

One of those is 惣菜、 or sōzai. (Also called おかず, or okazu, especially when you cook them at home.)

Conceptually, it's not hard. In traditional Japanese cuisine, the staple mainstay (主食のご飯 -- shushoku no gohan) of a meal is the grain -- usually rice, but possibly noodles or even bread in present Japan. Sōzai are the dishes that support the mainstay staple, so they should be called "side dishes", right?

That is generally what you'll see sōzai translated as.

Meat is the mainstay of western cuisine, so the parallels are there. It's one of those cultural differences. Problem solved, back to work.

Except, what should we call the shops, and the sections of the local supermarkets, where they specialize in sōzai?

And what if there are nothing but side dishes on the table for a meal?

Way too much is lost in translation.

Western style main course (courtesy of Wikimedia):

Would you call this the main dish? Or is the main dish the meat, and are the potatoes, carrots, broccoli, and spring peas or whatever the collective side dishes? Perhaps I'd call it the main meat item with sides of potatoes and vegetables.

You could buy every item in there at a sōzai specialty shop.

(Ahem. Okay. That steak is about twice the size, minimum, of what you'd find in a sōzaiyasan, and it would likely be minced, breaded, and contain soy filler. Soy filler is not evil, by the way, if you aren't allergic to soy. Soy is good protein, and both the meat and the soy improve in nutrition value because of the mix.)

Gohan Shushoku (courtesy of Wikimedia):

If you heard someone say "main dish", would you expect this?

(If you look closely, you will see there is barley cooked into the rice. It's not uncommon in modern households. My wife does it too, and I appreciate it. It doesn't really change anything I'm talking about.)

Western style side dish (courtesy of Wikimedia):

That looks like some good side items, side servings of side dishes collected in a single dish. Not much disagreement whether you are doing Japanese or western cuisine.

Okazu no Sōzai (courtesy of Wikimedia):

Would you call that a box full of side dishes? How about delicacies? What if, as is not unusual, there were a hamburg steak in that box? How about if there were a side of rice in there, as well?

What if you selected (separately, not collected in a box as above) items like these including croquettes, spaghetti and meatballs, squid, steak, chicken, or pork cutlets, etc., at the supermarket, or at a sōzai specialty shop, to take home and serve for dinner? Does the size of the serving matter? And why does a sōzai shop usually sell servings of rice, as well?

Lately, many supermarkets will label the section where they sell sōzai "delicatessen" or 「デリカテッセン」。 That sort-of almost fits in with current western supermarket practices, really. It seems quite a long time ago that delicatessens specialized in foreign delicacies, if they ever did.

And not a few American or European family meal organizers will sometimes collect the elements of a meal, pre-cooked, at a delicatessen to take it home and serve pretty much as-is.

But it doesn't answer the question of what a Japanese shop should call the items themselves as a group if they want to translate their ads to English and attract English-speaking customers.

I think, although for business reasons I haven't actually done this in my translation work, that, for myself, I would call them meal items or pre-cooked dishes.

Or, hey -- This is Japan. Latinize/Romanize it and call them "sōzai (pre-cooked meal items)" at the top of the page and just "sōzai" everywhere else.

Then the person who sets the table can decide whether they are side attractions or main.

Fortress against English

Recently, one of my private weekday students left this behind:

I forgot to clean it up, so the morning teachers had to take care of it the next day. (Sorry, guys. But thanks for the pic.)

This particular student regularly builds forts which he hides in while I try to engage him in English-related activities. Two weeks ago, I managed to interest him in a book of funny sentences and pictures (Cheese and Tomato Spider, if you're curious.) before he got started on his fort, and then got him to sit through a set of Halloween flashcards.

I thought maybe the monsters had his interest, and they did. Last week he brought a library book of monsters to read. Japanese, not English.

He sat down, opened the book, and dug in while I prepared for the lesson. Pretty soon he looked up and said, in Japanese, "See! Frankenstein! And Dracula! and Arachne! And Mummy! And Zombie! Werewolf!"

I argued with him (playfully, in English) about whether the ghost flashcard I had was a zombie or a ghost, so he had to look up ghosts. The book had a ghost ship.

I'm not sure wheher his thesis was that all those monsters were Japanese or that he didn't need English to learn about them. Both, I think.

Eventually, I just pulled out the jobs flashcards, and he had the patience to listen and even try to repeat about half, then play a game with me where I set about six of them out, then said one and waited for him to pick it out, replacing as we went.

Was I surprised that he had patience?

Not really. He's a smart guy. He doesn't want to be made to do anything, and he doesn't want to be drawn into anything that is not obviously going to benefit him. But if it's new and makes him think, maybe he's okay with it.

Letting him say his piece about English and monsters, even if I disagreed with him, gave him enough satisfaction to be a little patient with me and with English. And the jobs flashcard were new enough to overcome enough of his resistance to put up with it.

Why should he have such a strong resistance to English?

Well, ...

1. It's different.
   
   • He's only in the 2nd grade in elementary. He's finally getting the hang of hiragana, katakana, and numbers.
   • He wants to understand the world, and he is absorbing Japanese vocabulary. (He's actually quite a bit ahead of the median in 2nd grade in his mother tongue.)
   • All of that takes energy and work. He's working hard, and English rules, vocabulary and pronunciation are different and distracting.
   • And they confilct with the rules he is working so hard to learn.
2. He had a bad experience with a previous teacher who lost patience with his approach to learning. He has been hurt by English, as he perceives it.
3. I'm probably the first teacher who knows enough Japanese for him to be able (he hopes) to successfully negotiate the rules system with. So he wants to negotiate.

He is not a bad kid. He's smart. He wants to learn. But he wants to learn in a meaningful way, and that has been denied him so far relative to English.

So he's going to make an English teacher (me) work really, really hard, before letting English (back) into his life.

Or something like that. I don't know everything about the guy, but this is what I've pieced together from our lessons and from what his mother and other teachers have told me.

Why doesn't it worry me? I've seen it before, many times. I've seen young students who fought English when I started with them change their minds. And I've seen a few students I couldn't reach.

It's not my decision. Ultimately it's the student's decision. My job is just to give him the best opportunity I can to make a decision that's good for him.

Shiny Things (and Teaching English)

Several weeks ago, some of my Saturday students got busy during break. When I went to call them back to the crafts project I had prepared, here's what I found:
数週間前に、サタデースクールの子供たちが休憩の間に、遊びに夢中になってた。受業に呼び戻そうとしたところ以下の様子を目にしました。

If you have watched certain daytime children's TV shows in Japan, you'll probably recognize what they were trying to do.
ある子供向けの日本のテレビ番組を見ているなら、その子供たちがなにを企んでいたかがお解りだと思います。

Even if you haven't, you can probably guess that the ball on the left is intended to be rolled into the track formed by the chairs, and maybe caught in the baby rocker on the right, or to bounce over it, depending on how fast it is rolled.
その番組を見ていなくても、左側にあるボールを置いている目的は、イスの間にできている迷路もどきに入って右へと転ばしたら、転ばされた速度によって揺れかごの上を飛び渡るかすっかりとその中に入り込むかと、多分推測できるでしょう。

Sometimes, the students build forts out of carboard boxes, tables, chairs, and other pieces of equipment in the school.
時には、子供たちが学校に置いているダンボール箱やテーブル、イスなどを使って基地を作ったりします。

I generally let them do so. Children are more engaged in learning activities when they are having fun.
楽しくやっていると教育活動に子供たちがもっと集中してくれるのですので、大概は作っているのを止めません。

As a strategy, I can usually play the monster attacking their fort, and then bring the flash cards when I attack and show them flash cards while playing the monster, drawing them back into English and into games which give them more direct exposure to English.
戦略として、鬼になって基地を攻撃して、またフラッシュカードを持って見せながら攻撃して英語に呼び戻すやり方があります。だいたいその戦略によって、もっと直接的に英語に触れるゲームに戻ってもらえるのです。

When I use these kinds of techniques, things will usually click in the lessons, and (perhaps as their monster) I can speak English and get them to respond in English in their games of imagination. Role playing is a wonderful tool in teaching a foreign language.
こういう技術をレッスンの中に取り入れると、大概ですけど、レッスン中子供に閃きつき、たとえ鬼の英語としてでも、英語を耳にすることを我慢してもらって、その想像の遊びの中でも英語で反応してもらうことができます。模擬というものは外国言語を教えることに素晴らしい道具です。

Cardboard boxes.
ダンボル箱やな。

If you are a parent, you probably know the frustration of buying some shiny new present for your child and watching her happily pull it out of the box, play with it for maybe ten minutes, then spend the rest of the day playing with the box instead.
親として理解していただけると思います。何かの新しいものをプレゼントを買ってあげて、子供が嬉しく箱から取り出すのを、およそ１０分ぐらい遊んだら、その一日ののこりをプレゼントではなく箱で遊ぶのを見守ることがよくあります。

Why is that?
どうしてでしょう？

Easy. A carboard box is an invitation to dream.
かんちん。ダンボル箱は夢見る誘いです。

Dreams are shinier than plastic, metal, and glass.
夢なんてプラスッチックやら金属やらガラスなどよりもずっと輝くですから。

(There is a converse argument to this way of thinking, and the argument is not without value. I'll have to post that argument sometime.
こういう考え方に反論があって、その反論には価値がないとは言えないのがあります。というのでその反論を説明する投稿もしないと行けないでしょう。)

---

[1 December 2018:]

When I originally posted this, back in October, I was still struggling to get this approach to work at that school. Other teachers (not native English speakers) did not seem to know how to deal with it. And they would say things to the kids that, well, just didn't help.
１０月、これを元々投稿した時、その学校でこういう技術を適用としても効き目がさほどなかったのです。他の先生（英語を母国語とする先生ではなかったけど）私のやり方について納得してもらうことができなかったようです。子供にレッスンの（言っちゃて悪いかな？）応援にはならないことを言ってしまう傾向が多かったのです。

Posting this seems to have precipitated my being released from my contract at that school. これの投稿がその学校の契約から降ろされるきっかけになったようです。

Funny thing, during my last month at that school, the students settled down and the lessons started working better.
皮肉に思うかな。その学校の最後の一ヶ月の間、生徒たちの落ち着きが良くなって、レッスンがもっと巧く行くようにもなりました。

How I Learned Japanese, What I Recommend

I am sometimes asked how I learned Japanese.

The short summary:

I picked up the basics as a missionary in the Kanto area. Then I tried to continue studying it in America while trying to focus on becoming an engineer. Not having much access to real, modern Japanese, my modes of expression never became natural. (This was in the days before the Internet.)

In fact, after we were married, my wife told me my Japanese was pretty strange when we met. (I was a little disappointed, but not really surprised.)

I did study Japanese when I was a student at Brigham Young University, taking as much as was available at the time.

I don't recommend choosing a spouse just to learn a language. Marriage should be guided by higher things, really. But my companion has been one of my primary teachers. Unfortunately, I have not returned the favor.

After she brought me back to Japan, I was immersed in Japanese all day long, both at work and at home. And Sundays, at Church.

She listens to the radio several hours a day. Her favorite talk show host, Dōjō Yōzō, has essentially become one of my primary sources of patterns. Another is the collection of teachers for the NHK foreign language programs. I picked up a lot of Japanese grammar terms there.

We needed to listen to more English radio programs, for the kids and for her.

We occasionally watch videos. I try to get her and the kids to watch in English, and I find myself watching in Japanese. Newspapers, too. We sometimes take English language newspapers, but mostly it's Japanese. And I sometimes check Japanese novels out at the library.

There's a certain amount of sink-or-swim motivation, but, more than that, there is exposure.
Exposure is important.

You can't develop natural usage patterns without lots of exposure. You need good models, and you need many different models and you need lots of words and expressions from them to model your own language against.

One very useful thing is to read the scriptures in parallel. I have the scriptures in both English and Japanese. One verse in English, same in Japanese. Next verse in Japanese, and then English.

If you don't like scriptures, you can do similar things with Rowling's Harry Potter books, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

There are even some books you can buy with the English and Japanese in parallel, the English on one page and the Japanese on the facing page. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is one that has been available in that format, I'm not sure if it is still in print. 

(One of these days, when I start publishing my novels, I plan on doing that with some of them. Some of my Random Eikaiwa scraps, I've either annotated or translated, and I've translated some of my posts here, as well. I don't guarantee my Japanese in those, however. Japanese to English, I'm good at. English to Japanese, I'm not quite as good at.)

Another thing that is helpful for students of Japanese, but not available for students of English, is books with furigana (振り仮名). This is the kana pronunciation of many of the Kanji in the book printed (as ruby) above the characters or to the right. It's very common in books printed for junior high and upper-elementary grade students, and it's very useful for foreign students of Japanese, as well.

For students of English, I don't know of any books that have such ruby throughout as it is available for Japanese. But it's not as necessary. Looking up Kanji words whose pronunciation you don't know requires dictionaries with stroke-radical indexing, and a modicum of familiarity with the radicals. 

(The Internet can help with that.)

With English, it's all in the spelling. Your ordinary pocket dictionary can carry you quite a distance. But that can be counter-productive, if you look up too many words. Be careful not to do that. That much, books oriented towards a younger audience can still help you in English, as well.

Grammar? Dictionary definitions? How do you know what it all means, so you can remember and use it?

Believe it or not, adults can pick up a lot of meaning from context and non-verbal cues, just like children. Mistakes, too, but dictionaries can also invite mistakes just fine.

Yeah, the bare-bones grammar I got from the Church's Missionary Training Center was important. So were the basics of vocabulary, pronunciation, and the hiragana and katakana. That was easily done in two months. Studying more at college was helpful, when I got there.

Buying a couple of semi-advanced texts to study before I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Exam was also helpful. But reading a couple of Japanese novels while I was studying the texts was what made sure the grammar stuck with me.

How much writing things down did I do?

There were some things that were important, but I found myself progressing a lot faster when I was not writing everything down. You have to pick things that are important, otherwise writing things down just gives you more ways to forget things.

If you're tempted to worry about losing all the words you spent all that effort learning, believe it or not, being willing to let a lot of it go is important. Being able to do throw-away reading, listening, and watching is important.

Why? It's a bit technical to really get into here, but, first, the things you let go do stick around in your less conscious memories. Second, what you are doing when you let things go, when you throw things away, is selection. Selection means you are dealing with meaning. Meaning is what helps you remember things.

You don't remember things that don't mean that much to you, and you (usually) shouldn't try very hard to remember them. You will, in fact, remember them better for thinking about them just enough to choose to throw them away.


So what about tests?

Well, tests can be useful as tools to motivate yourself to study.

Preparing for tests can be an excellent way to raise your game, as long as you are not studying the test itself.

Fluency building? Skill building? Evaluation? No, not so much.

This is another place where I could get lost in the technical details, but just think about it.

Say there are 1000 vocabulary words on a test. True fluency requires at least 10,000.

Say there are 100 grammar principles on a test. True fluency requires at least 1000.

Fluency requires being able to think about and discuss concepts in the target language. Say a test includes long readings and summary paragraph answers on ten topics. Real fluency requires being able to work with hundreds.

Getting the picture? Even the most torrid of tests can barely cover a narrow, thin, ridiculously one-dimensional piece of the target language.

Tests are a necessary evil. Use them, but do not let them rule you.

If you've taken a test recently, say in the last several years, it's likely to be more beneficial to use your time reading more novels and watching more movies in the target language. 

And don't forget to keep building your fluency with your mother tongue. Learning a foreign language does help your skill with your mother tongue, but only if you let it.