Entries this day: a.i. lately

a.i.

10:45pm JST Sunday 13 June 2004

A.I. is on TV now downstairs. I stopped by to watch for a bit on my way to bring the laundry upstairs.

Hitomi is helping by hanging it. (!--)

lately

10:03pm JST Sunday 13 June 2004

Hanging out with Hitomi a lot does two major things: helps me have time to speak Japanese; helps me forget about writing in my journal.

Today at work I had a great cool new student named Rumi (I think) who was awesome because she did something really novel. She took notes! yeah duh that's a no brainer but by far far far most of the students do not take notes; man teaching these man to man kiddos reallllly drives home the necessity of studying at home. You fuckin' gotta study. I'm becoming more obnoxious about telling them; no slack from booth 17; you have got to study or you won't pass this book. No coddling.

I also had Hiroyuki today. He's got an awesome grandfather voice; soothing like Morpheus when he first met Neo. He's great because he only defines things in English; he occassionally brings in Beatles' lyrics to study natural English. Today he asked me if I preferred to say "incidentally," or "by the way," when changing the topic of conversation.

I was like, "I just say 'oh,' and then change the subject," but when I thought about it more, I realized I don't change subjects very often, so I don't really have opportunity to use any topic changing devices.

He goes, "I agree with how you are feeling," (or actually something more obtuse than that) and I changed it to, "I know what you mean."

What he meant, more precisely, was that he didn't talk much in Japanese. He explained, "I am a native speaker of Japanese; I don't need to practice speaking. But when I have an opportunity to speak English, I speak as much as I can."

Wow. I know it intellectually, but he.. I don't know- he's just like as much of a father figure as a student can be. Today on the way home, I talked with Junko as much as I could manage in Japanese. It was more than I would have previously.

The feeling was like, it's more important to practice than to be correct combined with people will be more impressed with my effort than unimpressed with my errors.

In the past, it's really been a challenge for me to get over the fear of what other people will think about me for things I do.