Look out the window of my Color T.V.

With the end of training, and work beginning, we've finished chapter 1! At this rate, I might not get bored and stop writing before this is all over!

Well, don't hold your breath.

My devout reader and good friend Richard made an inquiry in my last post: "How big are your classes?" Well, so far they are mostly 1 on 1. Standard classes can be as big as 4 students, and soon I will be teaching special 80 minute classes to 7-10 students. Today was a day very heavy with "man to man" classes, and a slew of different types of students: Everything from the "nervous newbie" to the more rare and very fun "pro at English dude."

Nervous newbie was a young guy who said he DJed for a club. I thought this was really cool, however his English was not very up to par. He definitely wanted to learn, but kept getting very flustered and almost panicky, even though I tried to calm him down. I made a mistake or two myself and got him to laugh about it, so I think that helped. He also offered to get me on the guestlist of a nightclub he DJs at on Saturdays - supposedly to a thousand people every night! o_0

Pro at English dude was, well, a pleasure and a relief to talk to. I didn't have to grade his level at all, I could just talk as I normally did, even a little faster and more difficult. We had no real lesson plan and 80 minutes to kill, so we talked about anything and everything, including the philosopher Kant and his having to read his works in original German in college. Crazy. The best part for me though was at the end, when I invited him to say whatever was on his mind, and he asked me how to get better at English. I thought about my Japanese classes, and one of the first things that my wise and benevolent Sensei had taught me: it is easy to "plateau" after a few years of learning a language.

Plateauing is the concept that learning a language is a lot like building an upside-down pyramid. When you first start off, you learn very simple basics, which are widely applicable. Also you learn common words which you can use quite a bit. However, the farther up you go, the more freedom you have to choose which direction to go in, and where to learn more. This freedom is can not only be wonderful, but terribly stifling. The more academic or "obscure" you get in the far reaches of the linguistic universe, the more it can seem like you have plateaued at your current level, and can't get any better. I have sort of experienced this with Japanese, but nothing close to what a 20+ year student of a language must feel. That being said, it made me really happy that I could explain to him why he was getting frustrated with his English, and I told him a possible solution: focus on one specific area, and hone your language there. So next week we are either going to discuss a wordy article related to literature, or something very political with a lot of thick, governmental language.

Today was very mentally exhausting, but I do love my job. Again I met more friendly co-workers, both teachers from all over the world and Japanese staff members who were more than happy to practice their English in brief intervals with us. I tried to retain as many names as possible, but I'm not very good at that.

And finally, I leave you all with an advertisement that was plastered in copious amounts all over the subways until last week:

"For that job, isn't rainbow BOSS coffee delicious?" - Tommy Lee Jones

And I have to answer, like so many canned coffees, it is addicting and sweet, if only served in ridiculously small amounts. To save cash, I travel with my thermos full of black coffee, always.

"I wanna live in a city
with no friends or family
I'm gonna look out the window
of my color T.V." - Modest Mouse