speech contest

For the past 3 weeks I've been correcting speeches and coaching a couple kids in English pronunciation to help them prepare for an English speech contest. The students wrote the speeches in Japanese, the teachers translated it, and I took it from there. On Tuesday, they competed in the Naruto competition. One of my students came in third place, but only the top two get to go on to the prefectural level.

I just have to explain the difficulty in English coaching to you. I've never thought about what my tongue is doing during certain sounds that we make when speaking, until I did this coaching. In Japanese, r=l and l=r, so their entire tongue is trained to stick to the roof of their mouth while they talk instead of just the back up for an r sound or just the tip up for the l sound. Also, f= the h sound, w= the oo sound, and v= the b sound in Japanese, so you can imagine how a sentence like "I would like to eat my favorite food" would sound like "I ood like to eat my haborit hood." On top of that, Japanese has a vowel after nearly every consonant, so when Japanese people speak English, they add a lot of extra vowels (that's why that shirt I posted a picture of before says Okulahoma). So in the end, that sentence would come out as "I oo-do liku to eato myu haborit hoodo." And when they say my name, it sounds like Jie Lozyaazu to me. But anways, the kids listened to my instructions and watched my lips move a lot more than they were use to, so it was a good experience, but all the exaggerating of my tongue and mouth movements gave me a headache everyday that I coached. I was really impressed with their improvement in the end though. I'm really proud of them. It was worth it! I also learned a lot about how to move my tongue a little differently so that I sound more authentic when I speak Japanese. Here are the kids that I coached after the contest. They are all about 15 years old.


At all three of my junior high schools, I'm conducting the oral exam part of class all week. The oral exam was always my least favorite part of foreign language classes, so it was odd to be on the other side of the desk. But it was really interesting too. I always wondered how I sounded to native speakers and how other people in the class did. Turns out that some kids just sit there until you motion that they can leave no matter how clear you make the directions (non-verbally, verbally, and written down). The girls were all average or above average, and the boys were either silent the entire time or answered with incomplete answers. There were a few boys in each class that knew what was going on, but I couldn't help but notice the general trend. I have run into the same pronunciation problems that I mentioned before with all of the kids, but I wasn't sure if I should downgrade them for that since their teacher pronounces it the same, unclear way.

This is a really funny article:

Third-Grader Awaits Lesson For Cursive G

GRAND RAPIDS, MI-Area third-grader Abigail Werner simply cannot wait to learn how to write the letter G in cursive.

Mom, no that foot bath was free, but you had to have your own towel, just like you need your own towel nearly everywhere else (bathroom, restaurant, etc) because paper towel and napkins are rarely provided. I'm pretty sure it's to reduce the amount of trash. I now carry a washcloth type handkerchief everywhere I go.