Week Six

What should I say…?

Last week was a week of self-introductions. I think I’ve now introduced myself to at least 700 students. “Hello, my name is Joey. I am from Canada. My city’s name is Winnipeg…” Part of my self-introduction involves talking about animals, and I had mentioned that I have a cat back home. To go along with this, I made a cat sound, “Meow” I got a lot of blank stares after making the sound. Wondering if they had understood or not, I looked to the Japanese-English teacher for translation. She quickly sputtered off a bunch of Japanese ending with the sound “Niao”. I looked at her again with a confused look on my face. “In Japanese, the sound for cat is Niao” she told me. I was fairly surprised at this fact as I had always thought that this animal sound was universal. After class, I began to ask her and my other Japanese-English teacher other Onomatopoeias. For those of you unfamiliar with this unnecessarily long word, Onomatopoeias are words which sounds are imitative of the sound of the noise or action designated (This definition was totally plagiarized by the way). Some of these sounds are very similar to the English sounds, yet some are just bizarre. For example the sound for cat, as mentioned, is Niao. Ok, pretty similar. The sound for dog: won won. Sound for horse: hinhin-hinhin. The sound for pig: boo-boo. Duck: gaga. Crying baby: en-en. Gurging water: gara-gara. Mouse: chu-chu. Train sound: shushu-poopoo. Dropping large rock in water: Bo-cha! (You can almost hear this one).Dropping a small rock in water: po-cha. Ripping paper: biri-biri (I don’t get this one…) Unlocking a door: cacha-cacha. Touching something hot: achi (In North America, I believe the sound is a sharp Tsss). Stomach rumbling: gogo. And finally a buzzing bee: buuuuuuuuu.
I hope to teach a class on these in the near future. Part of my role here is not only to assist the Japanese English teachers with teaching English, but also to be a cultural ambassador for the students. Onomatopoeias are just one example of the many interesting cultural differences that exist. I hadn’t realized that saying ‘bless you’ after you sneeze is pretty North American. I was walking with a New Zealander, where at one point he let out a large sneeze. I dropped the ‘bless you’ remark and he began to laugh explaining that in New Zealand, they don’t say anything, and that he usually tries to stand beside someone from North America when he needs to sneeze so he can hear our absurd remark to a natural phenomenon. The Japanese don’t have a remark for it either which I find interesting since Japan usually has a polite phrase or action that goes along with almost everything. I got scolded the other day by one of my Japanese English teachers for not putting the word san after one of the secretary’s names when talking about them. The word san will always follow a person’s family name (last name) to show respect, but for me, because I’m considered a teacher in Japan, I get the honorary title of sensei. I don’t think I deserve this title given the role of what a teacher in Japan has to do (I’ll have to talk more about this in a later journal). I was also scolded for asking, “How are you?” to the principle. There is very much a hierarchy system in Japan, and a principle, as you might expect, is above the teachers. Asking “How are you” is just too casual, and is perhaps rude for a teacher to ask this question. He just looks so friendly though!!!