Small Interactions

So this week I have been visiting schools which means I introduce myself to the students and attend their classes and activities. In general once you give your name and sit near kids, they will start to come up to you. If you can speak Japanese, it’s not uncommon to get swarmed by kids who want to talk to you. However, I barely speak any Japanese so during these visits I spend a lot of time asking the person next to me what is going on.

I often have a difficult time understanding Japanese when it is spoken to me. My knowledge of what is being asked usually only clicks when a sentence form I know is used and I don’t know that much. In general I’m very confused when people try to talk to me and they usually resort to pointing at stuff or saying something in English. When I was taking Japanese lessons in school we didn’t speak a lot and most of my practice was written or typed. Only since getting here have I been focusing on listening to and speaking Japanese. Today I actually got to see my progress.

We were at an elementary school in the morning and I brought my poi so I could show the kids some tricks. One of the teachers at the school started talking to me and even though I understood maybe 25% of what he was saying he got some of the little kids to come over. Some of them came up and asked “それは何ですか？” which means “what is that?” and I could actually understand them and tell them, in simple sentence form, that this is poi. I would let them play with them and try to show tricks a little bit.

Once we got home from the school, we had some time to hang out before moving on to other activities. I went grocery shopping and on my way back ran into some girls from the middle school I had visited the previous day so I said hi to them and continued back to the house. I decided to sit outside and watch the kids walk home from school and after some of the usual saying hi and waving at kids a group of kids from the class I visited came walking down the road. I waved hi to them and then one of the “we’re bros” kids started saying “couple! Couple!” to me (I visited their class with a boy so now they are convinced we are a couple) which I responded to with a very scandalized no.  He then asked his friends what the name of the kid was and someone had remembered so they said his name a couple times and continued to tease me until they had passed. Sure, I was teased by a group of middle school kids but I actually understood them. Well, it was English part of the time but I’m happy to now have an ongoing joke with some kids.