F or a while there, maybe a period of two months or so, I didn't get a single inquiry about Japanese lessons. That was a bit discouraging. I have to admit, Montreal is not a real hotspot with loads of people who want to learn Japanese, but what surprises me is how many of my students are francophone. (Is that capitalized? I never know).
Out of the perhaps thirty or so students I've had since I started, I maybe had three who were anglophone -- one was Mainland Chinese and two were even Japanese themselves! These last three were utter disasters, for completely different reasons. The Chinese fellow, in his thirties, spoke English pretty well but it never seemed to register with him when I told him that for him, half the battle was already in the bag, because he could read and write any Japanese kanji on the planet.
But he didn't seem to view this as an advantage at all. He kept repeating "Waa, Japanese is so difficult!" so many times that I was genuinely glad when he stopped showing up. The second was a young Japanese-Canadian, at McGill, who purportedly wanted to "brush up on various parts of Japanese that I'm still not that great at." Needless to say, his spoken Japanese was native-speaker level -- he certainly didn't need
my help. But the clincher came when he showed up three hours late for a meticulously planned (by me) sushi and saké feast which I had spent considerable amounts of money on.
He had absolutely no excuse other than "I didn't realize it was so late." <sound_of_boot_in_rear>*Whap*</sound_of_boot_in_rear>.
The third guy was the oddest Japanese man I'd ever met. Also in this thirties, he was married to a Russian woman and had two kids -- he wanted to learn English. For the first two lessons he brought along a tape recorder. That's the spirit! thought I. But his accent in English was atrocious so I thought we'd start with that. When I pointed out that his pronunciation of the word "further" could not be distinguished from his pronunciation of the word "father," and how that could lead to, umm, some difficulties later on, he agreed to go through the kana syllabary (alphabet), correcting his pronunciation along the way. I thought we were doing very well -- I managed to get him to wrap his tongue around the word "World" so that it didn't sound like he was saying "Waldo," but he obviously did not like my inference that his pronunciation was atrocious and needed to be tackled before we learned a single word of English. Let's chalk it up to "Too many people falsely praising his English ability" because he certainly didn't feel that he had any problems with his pronunciation.
As they say, "denial" is not a large river in Egypt.
Never saw him again.
But the others -- as I said, almost all francophone -- were the most willing to learn and the hardest workers to try to get ahead. They all dropped out for various reasons -- most of them probably because they had underestimated the vast undertaking that was learning a completely alien language from scratch.
But lately, I've been getting students that stick. All francophone, and all so good-humored (as are most French Montrealers) that they're a joy to teach, and frankly, a couple of whom I would pay THEM to come learn Japanese, teaching and talking to them was so much fun. (That was a horribly mangled sentence, grammar-wise, and I apologize for it in retrospect.)
And I have a new young man coming this week who is already looking like a delightful bundle of joy to come. He cheerfully admitted that he'd just broken up with someone and consequently had "a lot of time to kill."
That is one of my most favorite-ever reasons told to me by someone wanting to learn a vast, complicated language from scratch. Believe it or not, these "laissez-faire" guys almost always turn out to be my best students, because a) they have fantastic senses of humor and b) don't have any pedantic notions of how to learn a language.
So far, the balance has mainly been students who hardly knew a single word of Japanese to some who were better at it than me (hate to say it, but that's rare around here) but strangely, hardly anyone in between.
So to new signer-on Ben, whose screen name is "Montreal Geek Dude" I just cannot fucking WAIT to meet you.
By now the folder on my computer desktop called "Japanese Lessons" is groaning under its own weight -- over a year of accumulated tutorials, vocabulary lists, kanji theories and a whole lot else, all written by me and not copied from a book.
Who knows -- maybe one day I'll actually make a book out of it. Meanwhile, all you lurkers out there, come on down and join the fun! I will be glad to teach you the meaning of "Nani menchi kiton jaa, kono gaki yarrrōō!!!!" Just please, PLEASE don't try it on your Japanese waitress before consulting me.
