Another Good Day

Today I went to the last elementary school in my rotation of schools, so tomorrow it is back to the first school. Today was a pretty good time. I had to do self-introduction a few times, but I think I'm getting pretty good at it by this point. The key, despite what people tell you, is not being incredibly energetic, but catering the introduction to the age group. Younger kids are very easy to deal with because they are very excited just by the presence of anyone different from the people they usually see, and want nothing more than to look at pictures and yell out questions ranging from, "what kind of food do you like," to "what kind of animal do you like?"

Generally it is harder to get older kids (I'm talking maybe 5th or 6th graders) interested in what is going on, but the ones today were pretty good. If anything, they were better than the fourth graders I had class with. The sixth graders thought it was funny when I kept telling them they were smart for knowing the American flag and the like, and when I said that sixth graders know everything. I also got a chance to use Izumo-ben, and it worked out. Izumo is a city that is near here, though not a particularly large one. It does have a very famous shrine. ben means dialect, so you can figure it out from there. Izumo-ben is not one of the more pronounced dialects, but it does have some unique features. There are some verb ending changes, supposedly, but I've never heard anyone actually use them. All I did was say "dan dan" which is just the local way of saying thank you, but the kids thought it was great, it seemed.

Other areas of Japan have famous (at least in Japan) dialects. Osaka and the surrounding region of Kansai, for example, features a strange dialect called, oddly enough, Kansai-ben, and a slight variation of that is prevalent in Kyoto, or so I hear. I've only run into a little Kansai-ben while here, from an old man who used to live there. He was basically incomprehensible, anyway, so it didn't matter that much. The thing about that dialect is that there are a bunch of verb-ending and other -ending changes, which makes it hard to follow because the ending of a sentence is basically always a verb in Japanese, with some sentence-final particles that you can basically ignore, or which amount to a question mark. When somebody ends the verb differently, it doesn't sound like a verb anymore, which really messes up my perception of what they are trying to say. Also, they say okini for "thank you", but I doubt anyone would get it here if I tried to use that.

There are a bunch of dialects in Eastern Japan, including a couple very famous ones, but I don't really know anything about them that you can't find with a quick google search, so I won't bother.

But I digress. After school was over, I stayed around and watched the kids practice field hockey, as that is the big sport here and one of the kids wanted me to watch. Also, I didn't have anything else to do, and I usually stay past when I'm allowed to leave to demonstrate Japanese team spirit. I also listened to the band playing for a little while. They were pretty good for an elementary school band, and of course all the kids smiled and waved when they saw me outside their classroom. After they got done playing, some of the kids were still hanging around banging on drums and stuff, so I showed a couple of them how to drum a rock beat on snare and high-hat with arms crossed like everyone but Ringo does. Then I played a little bit on their piano, as the music teacher/something-else-I-think-but-don't-know had invited me to do earlier in the day. The kids were very impressed with my poor sightreading of their songs, and the music teacher even came in after the students had given me more songs to try, so I played Imagine, which she recognized.

Just to stick it to a semi-intelligible writing structure, earlier in the day, I had a third grade class where I taught them "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" and how to play Simon Says in the span of a few minutes. So, that was good, too. I'm glad to play those, because it is way less fun to continue playing amerika no janken, or Rock, Paper, Scissors than to do something that is at least sort of different. Not that janken is bad or anything.