Holy Squeaking Children, Batman!

Work has finally started to pick up, which means that I'm grading papers and making exciting plans instead of sitting at my desk and drawing pictures of alligators for the AET board. My students are mostly middle-school aged and just beginning their English education in earnest. As I have been reading through their summer homework essays I am struck by a few patterns:

1. They're really good artists. A number of students had drawn, in painstaking detail, the various theme parks and old castles they visited during summer vacation.
2. Most of them have electronic dictionaries, and they use them. In their essays, my first year students will be writing along using simple grammar and vocabulary when suddenly...bam! A long word that I barely know will appear, “accommodate” and “rendezvous” would be good examples.
3. “R”s and “L”s are difficult. It annoys me a little that westerners seem to find this so funny- I was four before I could make “r” sounds correctly, and I had been speaking English full-time for a couple years. Also, I'd like to see a native English speaker pronounce the Japanese “ra/ri/ru/re/ro” syllable category. We write them out with “r”s, but in reality they sound closer to a mix between “ra” “la” and “da”. Anyway, this difficulty with the English “r” appears in writing as well as speaking for my students...and sometimes this errors are pretty amusing. Not because they're dumb mistakes (they aren't), but because of the earnestness with which they write. For example, “gland” instead of “grand” (this exact mistake hasn't been made, but it illustrates my point). “I had a gland time grading papers!”
4. Finally, our students are effing brilliant. I have studied Japanese for six and a half years (on and off) and am just barely beyond the ability of my middle-school students who have been studying English for three or fewer years.

In other news I explored the local mall over the weekend and found the local foreign-import foods store. I hadn't thought that I'd been missing western food, but as I started seeing familiar food items such as spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, and even spam, I found tears welling in my eyes. I'm finding that I like most Japanese food, but there's something to be said for a jar of foodstuffs that can make a person cry.

While I was at the mall I also discovered that my backside has been upgraded from a western small/medium to a Japanese large. That's right, I went underwear shopping! (*saucy music here*) As I was perusing the selection I noticed a sign that indicated underwear was two-pair for 900 yen. Now, in America this would mean that you could buy one pair for 450 yen, so I made the error of selecting an odd number of underpants and trying to buy them. The following dialogue unfolded in Japanese:

Clerk: Oh! It is two for 900 yen, did you know? See! Two for 900 yen, you only have three.

Me: Oh, it's okay, I only want three.

Clerk: Did you know it is two for 900 yen? You could go get another pair, and it would be four for 1800 yen.

This went on for a while, when it finally dawned on me that it was actually -impossible- to buy an odd number of underpants at this particular store. Oh Japan...

Because I visited the mall on the weekend there were many small children and their families present. As I ate my McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese (kuo-ta- pounda- chi-zu) I bent my mind to the task of figuring out what makes Japanese children so much cuter than American children. I came up with the following theories:

1. I am a foreigner, and thus I am as fascinating to the small Japanese children as they are to me. At least two run-away toddlers stood and gazed up at me in awe as I sat on my ass and ate a cheeseburger. Equally adorable are the small children who find my pale visage frightening. A pair of rough-housing siblings tussled their way in my direction, only to stop and give me their best deer-in-the-headlights impression before beating a hasty retreat.
2. I am a foreigner, and cannot speak colloquial Japanese. Small children are probably cuter when you can't understand their complaints. I haven't a clue if that toddler was expressing his love for his mother or whining about needing ice cream.
3. Japanese children squeak as they walk. Okay, only some of them do. In a brilliant move to help parents track their energetic offspring a company in Japan began manufacturing foam sandals with squeakers in the soles. In turn, this created small, dimple-faced children who squeak like a dog toy with ever step. The serious look of concentration on their faces as they master the art of walking is perhaps offset by the jubilant exclamations of their footwear.

That's all for today. It's 7pm and I'm ready to sleep ^^;

-Andrew