Japan Exchange, outgoing, Post #5

June 13, 2016--Tuesday

     Today is our second day at school.

     I have sent photos and a few comments to Mrs. Muehleisen during the last couple of days.  She has shared them with the other parents and posted them on the closed parent group Facebook page.

    Yesterday, Monday, our students, Mason, Ryan, and Lee attended Harata Sensei's English class, where the Noshiro Shoyo students started by taking a vocabulary test.  Students graded each other tests, and then I taught a grammar/poetry lesson at the request of Harata Sensei: a cinquaine with lines arranged as lines of nouns, then adjectives, then adverbs, and verbs.

     Later on Mr. Mertz and I and Kiara sent to the Korean language class, which included a lot of culture.  Kiara looked beautiful wearing the Korean national costume, the hanbok.  Mr. Mertz took a colorful photo of the two of us, she in dazzling pink, and I in my own bright turquoise jacket.  We also learned a few phrases appropriate for introducing ourselves in Korean.  Kiara showed real talent for the pronunciation, which has some similarities and some differences from Japanese.

      After school we were supposed to help clean up the Media Hall, where we are to meet every day, but the lack of cleaning materials made that impossible.  According to Okura Sensei, who is in charge of the exchange, we will help with cleaning our homerooms from now on.

      First of all, we all stayed in Media Hall together, learning items of Akita dialect.  It differs from the standard Tokyo dialect, for example:
       yes             nda                standard is hai
       cute           menkoi         standard is kawaii
       tired          koe                standard is tsukare
       to rest       nagamaru   standard is yasumu       
     
      Noshiro Shoyo H.S. is unusual in offering Korean, Russian, and Chinese, in addition to English.  This morning Jordan, Liam K., Annie, and I tried hard to learn Russian letters for writing our names and simple expressions.  It must be so hard for Japanese students to pronounce Russian.  The teacher, Anna Mikhaylova awed us by teaching simultaneously in Japanese, Russian, and English. 

       Today I noticed that lights in the stairwells and halls go on when people are using those areas, triggered by movement sensors.  Then the lights go off after the areas clear, saving power.  There are 10 minute intervals between classes, too, signaled by chimes ringing intervals like Big Ben in London.

       Our group will visit an elementary school about a kilometer away this afternoon, walking from one school to the other.  OPRF students will teach games like Red-Light-Green-Light to the 6th graders.