Would you like to read some Japanese?

This is the second half of a 2-part post about my experience with year 7 students in Selby. I worked in collaboration with nybep to deliver workshops on the following themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). I have yet to come up with a decent title for either workshop. If you have any suggestions please do leave a comment.

The idea for the language workshop came about after some reflection on my status as a linguistic mongrel. Growing up in India, which has around 26 official languages, it is next to impossible to remain a monoglot. As a child I lived in cities across the length and breadth of the country. Therefore, I was taught – Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit alongside English. Having spent eight years in Delhi I was exposed to Urdu and Punjabi. I picked up a bit of Japanese as I travelled there for work, and recently I have been tinkering with Dutch. I would like to emphasize that I am fluent only in English and Hindi, for the rest my skill-level varies from beginner/intermediate to just a few words.

There is a lot more that goes into speaking a new language than the ability to memorize words, swot grammar and regurgitate stock phrases. I think intuition, confidence and self-awareness play a very important role. The workshop was designed around these soft values. The students had been studying German and French (of which I know next to nothing) for a few months and I hoped that by the end of the session they would be sufficiently enthused to teach me a bit of both.

The workshop was divided into four sections – Making New Sounds; Looking for Similarities; Gestures and Emotions and Reading Japanese. We began with the easy, accessible stuff and then moved on to unfamiliar territory. Although a number of different languages were used, progress was pegged to speaking/reading Japanese in order to have some structure. The Reading Japanese section was a challenge – I introduced some logical rules about Kanji and asked students to read a sentence written in some fairly difficult characters.

To be honest I was quite nervous as the kids could focus on my lack of fluency and not take the session seriously. So I did a fair bit of practice beforehand with some native speakers. I also had another wee trick up my sleeve. This is something I used as an ice-breaker during my breath workshops in Japan. I wrote my name down in three scripts – Abhay, アバィ and अभय to illustrate how different my name sounds in different parts of the world. For the workshop we tried pronouncing names from various countries, tried a few tongue twisters and there was a sing-along to the 46 phonetic sounds of the Japanese language (あいうえお… etc.).

I am happy to report that the students were thoroughly excited and participated enthusiastically. After the Looking for Similarities bit, they started translating some of the things I was saying into German, which is what I had hoped for. In a way the workshop was already a success.

Then we came to the Reading Japanese challenge. I began by introducing the following characters: 日 (sun),　木 (tree),　本 (root/origin),　女 (woman),　子 (child),　言 (speak),　五 (five) and 口 (mouth). After explaining their meaning and how they have been derived, we looked at some combinations. For example, Japan is written as 日本. When correlated with the meaning of the individual characters it makes sense why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.

The atmosphere in the classroom was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese.

We then moved onto making more kanji by combining the above. Starting with a simple example, 女 (woman) +子 (child) =好 (like) I asked students to guess what happens when many mouths say the same things, 五+口+言=?? You get the character for language 語 which is combination of all of the above (Obviously a wee bit of artistic license has been used to arrive at the above). And so piece by piece we assembled the sentence = 私は日本語が好きです。The kids had no trouble guessing what it meant. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese, so we talked about stroke order and so on.

Given how successful the workshop was, I have been asked to consider delivering a few more. One of the teachers commented that there are very few male language teachers. There are a number of additional benefits, these range from employability to increasing tolerance of others. I won’t go into too much detail as this post has become fairly lengthy. I would like to end by saying that as usual, I cannot wait to work with another batch of students, hopefully in the very near future.