Japanese experiences

As of last Thursday we have had a Japanese student stay with us. He leaves Wednesday, and we get another student the next day for another week. I'm required to drive him to school and pick him up on the weekdays. And also to show him some Aussie sights and just generally immerse him in Aussie culture.

Through the school he is attending here he is doing an English intensive course and learning Aussie things like singing "G'day, G'day G'day", making boomerangs and visiting a wildlife sanctuary.

I have friends and a relative housing other students, so we got together for a party yesterday. The older kids and the Japanese students had fun playing chasy, until they wore themselves out and sprawled out sedately on the front lawn. While checking on my little kidlets I went out the front and my older 3 kids told me "we're talking to them about whaling".

So proud I was of my older kids at that moment. The Japanese students were clearly listening and hanging on to every word (truly a captive audience). To help with the language difficulty, I drew a crude picture and labeled it "whale". Then I wrote out the sentence, "Australians don't like Japanese people killing whales." It is a huge issue here, as the whaling often happens in our waters, is claimed to be "for scientific research", and Australians monitoring these whaling vessels have been injured by the whalers.

It might be difficult to change the mind of a nation (I have no doubt whales are probably delicious and one blue whale could feed the entire Japanese Military for a year) but change begins with one person. We were potentially educating 3 Japanese youth to be anti-whaling, with a ripple effect ensuing, and perhaps a domino effect followed by a tidal wave of Japanese anti-whalers.

Our student added us as Facebook friends. Perhaps my older kids can communicate with him over the internet in Japanese. I live in hope.
A friend I went to university with now resides in Japan and speaks the language well, so he will be able to translate anything I want to say and find some information on the web in Japanese for me.

This experience has been great for our student's English practice, but it has highlighted my children's lack of Japanese knowledge despite years of studying the subject at their private school. As they told me, "we just learn what we have to for our next test, then after the test we forget it straight away."

How pointless. Perhaps I need to have a year-long japanese student for my children to really get some exposure and practice. Yet another reason fo homeschooling my younger ones. So we can actually practice a language, reinforce the learning, and practice some more. So they will actually become proficient in the language, so they can actually converse with Japanese speakers. Seriously, counting to 10 and saying Konnichi wa is just not good enough for years of studying that language.

I am considering the idea of raising my littlies to be Jack of many languages as opposed to being Master of one foreign language. Then they can easily build on one of those languages if they should go to that particular country. But I hope to maintain their proficiency and not let it drop off like my older kids.

Yesterday we took our student out bushwalking to a lake, with some four-wheel driving thrown in. It was an experience, especially wheeling a jogger pram with toddler seat along a rugged track with steep inclines and mud. Signs saying "Beware of Snakes" worried me a lot, but thankfully all we saw was some sort of spotty lizard.

Will be good to do nature hikes when the little ones are older, so we can photograph the flora and fauna, and do identification tasks at home. I have good flora identification charts and books. I did this myself in Second year University Botany and found it totally dullsville, but am hoping it will be fun for our homeschooling years. I have 3 flower presses to use. I also intend to collect all dead insects we find, categorise and mount them the way we did in my Second Year Uni zoology entymology course. The difference being then that we had to kill many insects ourselves on field trips, a killing spree I did not appreciate partaking in.

Today we may go down the coast to the beach spots and waterfalls. Little bub, Rori for the sake of this blog, isn't well so I may not go. Though fresh air and sunshine is great for health, and there will be that in abundance until the thunderstorms arrive later on.

I have been wanting to show my student Little Pim Japanese and Bilingual baby Japanese so he understands that the littlies are learning Japanese, but have not been able to as my 14-year-old has been saying "No mum, no! Don't be embarrassing." And has been criticising my attempts at communicating non-verbally using crude sign language. It's embarrassing. I look like an idiot, apparently. Well, perhaps if she spoke some Japanese,or even wrote some hiragana or katakana down on paper, I wouldn't need to make an idiot of myself with crazy gesticulations.

My Zari is learning Japanese at kindergarten, and at home also, so I hope this experience helps her pick up Japanese and familiarise her with the sound of the language. And as for Rori, it should help her to speak Japanese with no accent but an authentic Japanese one, as she is still young enough to absorb the sounds of a language and be able to reproduce them later. We lose that ability if we arent exposed to a particular language.

I will be showing my Japanese visitors some flashcard programs and materials that would teach an english person Japanese and a Japanese person English. I hope they leave my place with lots of tools to aid their English learning. More about that later...