Another reason I hate Katakana

Today, I discovered another reason to hate katakana.

Katakana (カタカナ) is the Japanese alphabet for loan words, words that come from other languages. banana becomes ba-na-na (バナナ), pineapple becomes pine (パイン). Sometimes this makes learning Japanese really easy, because it's just a very broken up way of pronouncing English. On the other hand, it makes my students believe that we will understand them when they speak Katakana English to us (not true).

But, other times katakana words come from other languages. Stapler, for example becomes ホチキス Ho-chi-ki-su, from the name of the guy who invented it. Part time job becomes アルバイト, a-ru-ba-i-to, from the German word for it.

Even other times, Japanese is put into katakana, because it looks cool. I think these are the most difficult words, because I sit there sounding them out trying to figure out what English they could be and they're not (I'm as bad as all of my kids, I expect katakana to always be English words). The Japanese words are the hardest, because they're not usually in the dictionary like that.

So today, my students are supposed to be practicing "Do you . . ." sentences. I look over one's shoulder and he's written "Do you play fagot?" I ask him what he means (assuming it's a mis-translation) and he says it's a katakana word and does the motion to show me it's an instrument. We can't figure it out and even the teacher is thinking I might be crazy for not knowing this word, but I know that this word cannot be what he means. I'm not completely sure of it's meaning in English, but I know it's a pretty bad insult.

After class, my teacher pulls out her dictionary and looks up what he means, bassoon, it comes from the word in German. She also looks up fagot and is surprised to find that it's such a terrible word in English.

Yet another reason why I dislike katakana.

English Class today

Today I got to visit what is probably my favorite school, mostly because when I go, I get to spend the entire day at the school and really get to know the kids (which is incredible). The students are one sixth-grade boy, two third graders (girl and boy), three third graders (2 boys and one girl), two second grade girls, and two first-grade girls. They are an insanely fun group.

I was informed about the English lesson moments before going into the classroom. The teacher wanted me to pronounce the cards with the animals on them and then read the story. That got my brain going. If I was going to read this story, which the students weren’t likely to understand all the words to, how was I going to keep them engaged? (Keeping students engaged is always a big question for me, because it cuts down on management problems).

We got into the classroom and I asked, “How are you?”, “How’s the weather?”, “What’s the date today?” (the regular set of questions). As usual, most of the students do not know the month to be able to say the date. I have one third grader who seems to be particularly gifted in English who can almost always answer the question (maybe he studies at home?).

Then we pronounced the words, kids repeated (pretty standard way to start). After some questioning of students on the words, we moved on and played karuta. Karuta is a game I was introduced to in my high school Japanese class. The teacher calls a word and the first kid to slap the flash card wins it. The kid with the most cards at the end wins. We played a few rounds, with me being silly at the end and calling random non-animals (like carrot) when there was only one card left, to see if they were really listening.

After Karuta, came the story. It was about animal noises. To solve my earlier problem, I decided to pass out the cards with the animals. Each student was responsible to hold up her/his card when she/he heard the animal’s noise.

Please remember that as they were being asked to do this, most of the animal noises that we use in English are different than the ones that Japanese people use for animal noises. So as we went through the story, a few of the students held their animal up for every noise, until they got it right, and a few actually tried hard. They stayed engaged the whole time though. That was the best part; I didn’t lose any students while reading a story which most students didn’t understand.


My view a couple of mornings ago.