hey all,
Does anyone remember the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is dating a deaf woman? At one point he's trying to suggest a meeting time, and he says "You up for six? Six is good." She instantly slaps him, mistakenly reading his lips as sex, not six.
The point of the story is that teaching in a Japanese school is like living this moment an infinite number of times. You say six, and your students all start giggling. I've started counting from 1 all the way to six, each time I say it, so they get what I'm talking about, but they still giggle. Everybody knows the stupid jokes about Japanese people not being able to hear R vs. L, which are all true of course. But they also can't hear B vs. V, or G vs. Z. And of course Japanese has about 8 vowels, if you include diphthongs like [ai], [εi], etc. English has about 12 vowels. Because of that, especially young Japanese can't hear the difference between [I] and [ε].
Anyway, I have one more day of work this week, and then I get Sunday and Monday off before heading back to the frontlines.
Cheers,
