Not Just Ninjas

On my first day of school, way back when, I was interviewed for the local paper. In this interview, I mentioned that my great love is African drumming and dance, specifically, the music from Ghana. Shortly thereafter, a Noshiro internationalization organization read this interview, and asked my boss if I would prepare an hour-long lecture on Ghana to present in November.

Allow me to shed light on the murky process of creating a JSL (Japanese as a second language) speech. Now there is no way I can write an hour long speech in Japanese, or even competently read Japanese aloud for five minutes. So I wrote my speech in English, and planned to flesh out the presentation with pictures, video, props, you know, the works. I then waited for a month for the community center to contact me to figure out the nitty-gritty logistics. A week before the presentation we met, and they took my speech to a translator. The result of which was a speech in kanji and kana, which I pretty much can’t read with any facility. I mean, sure, a quick sign or menu item, yeah, fine, but not a whole speech with 3 days notice. So this Japanese is then translated again into roomaji, so that I can read it at something approaching a speaking pace.

However, some of the Japanese is really complicated, and speaking in Japanese for an hour would pretty much fry my brain and frustrate my audience. Enter life-saver Yumeko, my eikaiwa partner-in-crime. This wonderful woman came over to my house and she listened to me go on and on about Ghana. She translated extra tidbits into Japanese, and she basically ended up reciting over half my speech for the presentation last weekend. To boot, she is an exceedingly good sport, and even though the weather is getting wintery, she let me dress her up in my Ghanaian up and down for the speech.

Amazingly enough, the speech went off without a hitch. Chris came along to give instrumental and AV aid. The room was full mostly of old ladies, with a few English teachers sprinkled in for moral support. I got to make up catchy Japanese teaching aids (Migi! Hidari! Migi, hidari, owari!) And that’s when my lifelong dream came true: an entire room full of Japanese people trying earnestly to do Ghanaian dance. I can now say that my purpose in life has been fulfilled. I even got my very serious boss to come up and dance.

Shazam!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Festivals and Events, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.