English Club

(English = Eigo, raw fish = sashimi)

Just about every weekday around 3:00pm I get on my bike and ride to Tonosho junior high school to help out with English club. The bike ride takes about 30 minutes and most of it is through rice paddies (surprise, surprise!). I listen to my iPod while I ride and listen to NPR podcasts (“Wait, wait…don’t tell me” and This American Life); it makes the ride go by faster.

I decided to help out with English club after Gordon told me I should come and that I could actually be put to some use. English club is basically this: the kids (grades 1-3 or, in the U.S., 6^th-8^th graders) prepare speeches in English (Eigo), memorize them and then go to an English speech contest to compete against other junior high schools. The speeches have to be under 5 minutes, but need to come close to the 5 minute mark.

These kids are crazy. Most of their speeches are a page long, single spaced. When I started helping out, they already had their speeches memorized perfectly. So the job Gordon and I have is to help with pronunciation. The kids don’t know English and don’t know how to pronounce most of the words. The Japanese language doesn’t have the “r” sound and doesn’t have the “th” sound. Therefore the kids end up pronouncing the r’s like l’s and th’s like s’s. For example, “thank you” sounds like “sank you” and “raw fish” sounds like “low fish” (Gordon and I have gotten asked several times, “Do you eat/like ‘low fish’?” It took us a while to figure out “low fish” was not a particular species of fish, but “raw fish” (sashimi) hahaha).

This Wednesday was the Sawara English speech contest. Gordon and I did our best to help the kids prepare. They were nervous. Even though Gordon and I don’t speak Japanese, we can still read emotions and several of the kids were wringing their hands and talking excitedly to the English club teacher, Hirano-sensei. When we got to the building where the speech contest was there were several groups of students from the different junior high schools waiting outside (about 11 junior high schools competed). I started eyeing the competition and was tempted to go around and threaten the other competitors, but then I remembered I need to represent the U.S. in a positive light, so I just gave the other students dirty looks.

The competition was intense. The judges had a tough job because all the students did an awesome job on their speeches. Most of the speeches were short stories and anecdotes like The Little Mermaid, The Fox and the Crow and The Frog Prince. Here’s a list of the students from Tonosho junior high and the title of their speeches:

1^st grade: The Sun and the Wind (Gordon and I nicknamed these two students “Sun” and “Wind”)

2^nd grade: The Little Mermaid (Yu)

3^rd grade: Alice in Wonderland (Ayana)

3^rd grade: The Children of the World and Me (Tomoka)

All the students from Tonosho junior high did an amazing job! Yu got 5^th place, Ayana got 3^rd place, Tomoka got 1^st place and Tonosho junior high got 2^nd place overall! Gordon was so excited when Tomoka got first place that when they announced it he shouted, “Yes!” Needless-to-say several people turned around in their seats to see where the American was. Tomoka will go on to compete in Chiba at the next speech competition. Here are some pictures and video of the Sawara speech contest…

Yu giving her speech about The Little Mermaid. My favorite part of her speech was when the little mermaid says, "I just can't kill him. I love him too much!"

Yu's Little Mermaid speech.

"Wind" and "Sun" giving their speech. The Sun and the Wind are trying to prove who is stronger by getting a traveler to take off his clothes :). Sun "Shines brighter!" while Wind "blows very hard!"

Sun wins by not using her strength, but by shining. "It's alright. We're still friends."

Ayana's Alice in Wonderland. She did the character's voices very well. "Off with their heads!"

Tomoka's The Children of the World and Me. She wrote her own speech. Her topic was about street children. She talked about how she learned about street children, being thankful for her family and gave advice on how students can help those less fortunate.