It was my second year in college and my curriculum required a foreign language. I wanted to try French just to sound cool. But rumor has it that graduates of my first course (don’t ask what) find their destiny in the Land of The Rising Sun. My eyes were seeing yen (ka-ching!) so I enrolled in a Japanese class.
My teacher was very friendly (because he is Filipino), in fact he was one of the coolest prof I had met in my college life. I had classmates from different colleges but the atmosphere in that class was light and very casual.
Later, I will find out that Japanese was doubly hard because we have to read and write Japanese. We had to memorize this crazy Japanese alphabet that I only see on those Japan-imported buses (the ones with English translations for “Pull button to stop” in various combinations of wrong grammar).
And I really, really hate memorizations. To me, memorization does not constitute learning or understanding. What am I, a robot?!
Back to my story...every session, we had verbal recitations on reading Japanese. Since I was seated at the back, I had a bright-bulb moment. Before my turn came, I already pencilled the pronunciation below the Japanese characters.
I waited coolly for my turn, even resisting the urge to whistle while my classmates recited one by one and stumbled on some of the difficult characters.
When it was my turn to recite, I breezed through the first two sentences. I summoned by best actor mode. So that my “cheating” will not be obvious, I used the tone of a nursery student who just learned to read. I even paused for effect, pretending to have some difficulty in reading.
And then I noticed that my classmates were laughing. So was my teacher.
Turned out I was reading too robotically that I forgot the silent syllables. In Japanese, syllables like desu ka are pronounced des-ka. Silent "u". So I was saying suka and suka in every sentence, complete with the accent that made it sound like vomit.
I wanted to commit hara-kiri right then and there.
No comments:
Post a Comment