More than just translation

About 10 days later, my jetlag is starting to wear off. I no longer awake up in the middle of the night fully awake, but now wake up about half awake where I can just shut my eyes again and fall back asleep. The only problem about doing that is that I wake up in the mornings tired. This is supposedly bad since I lose alertness during the day. According to the Times magazine we have sitting around here, sleeping in extra is a bad thing when it comes to alertness. But anyways, on to other things...

Last week, I was dubbed the Japanese to English translator for the international hour event held yesterday at an internal exchange center. The event was run by the @home volunteer group, a group of university students that are interested with helping out and interacting with exchange students. Over here, the University term for Japanese students started last week making this the first event for the @home group of the year... meaning that a lot of first year students wanting to learn more about clubs that came out.

My Japanese is far from perfect so acting as translator on the fly was rather funny. I couldn't care too much about being in front of 100 students and making a fool out of myself however because a) most of them don't know me, b) most of them didn't know English and c) I'm used to making a fool out of myself in front of large crowds :). Anyways, there were some interesting moments when I was caught off guard with some weird words coming out of the Japanese announcer's mouth where I could only give him a weird stare and a shrug. Everyone laughed so it was all good.

The students that came out to the event were very friendly and very eager to practice their English too, despite being shy about having not so good English. Most of them didn't like learning English during high school and didn't learn it well during that time, yet they were eager to come out to try conversing in English with exchange students (as I probably noted before, through we had an international crowd of exchange students, most could speak English). It was also not very useful learning a language when I was in school, both with French and Japanese; everything you would learn was considered over polite, formal and very clunky to use... but in defense for the school, how else are they supposed to teach you from their position? I found that the international students from places like Poland, Nicaragua, Columbia... etc probably learned English because there were English influences around them rather than from only a classroom environment; it shows when they speak.

I was again amazed at the amount of work the @home students put into the event. They spent about 1.5 hours before the event making Japanese desserts called dango from scratch to give as food during the reception after the presentation was over. Again there were about 8~10 people helping out which is amazing in terms of turn out (more came out later on to help out) and most of them stayed to about 7:30 to 8:00 helping clean up after the event was over. They are exceptionally meticulous when it comes to cleaning too. They were down to the point of scraping off name tags that fell to the floor and pulled out a vacuum to clean out the room before putting the tables back into the room.

In the mean time, I gave a couple of first year economics students an explanation of why I liked differential equations... I was amazed to find out they LEARNED some elementary differential equations for their *entrance exam* into university. When I wrote something like y' = cy + a (where c and a are constants), they nodded at me and told me they remember studying something like that... though they didn't really understand it at the time (I didn't understand differential equations until I saw it a few times in different courses!).

Actually, that isn't the whole of the story. I was just glossing over some of the more juicier tid-bits... Anyways, lets back track a little shall we? After translating the introductory speeches I walked off to the side where a Korean girl (with eye catching blue contact lenses) energetically catches my arm for a sec to compliment me on my humorous translation (I figured that I'd give the exchange students a good time by twisting what the speaker was saying a little)... something to the effect of:

Her: Wow your Japanese must be really fluent, that was amazing!
Me: Thanks, but I'm not really that fluent; I've still got a lot to learn...
Her: Oh come on, you're just being humble... (more flattery ensues :P)
Me: Not really... (and I digress into other conversation)

Actually, I was more amazed that a person from Korea had such fluent English. But anyways... There was another set of presentations left to do, I was going to be introducing the Aikido martial arts performance to everyone and translating what the students were going to be doing. During the presentation the 2 girls (the economics students) were staring at me while the Korean girl stood beside them. I overhear the Korean girl in Japanese saying "do you want to meet him? Do you want to meet him?" Was I already getting prepped up for a setup already?

So after the presentation, I get rushed by the 2 Japanese girls, flanked by their Korean friend who goads me on "hey, since your Japanese is so good, why don't you practice your Japanese and perhaps some English with them?" (my 6th sense tingles...). I start speaking in English to see how good these students are in English to try and lay off the Japanese at first. The Economics girls can't speak much so I switch over to my (basic) Japanese to speak with them... right after I do that, the Korean gal goes "seee, his Japanese is really good, why are you hiding it" with glee. It gets more interesting...

The Japanese students introduce themselves to me... they're both wearing name tags right off to the sides of their busts. So they point to their name tag and stick out their chest for me to get a better view... of which? I really do not know (sweat drop!) I end up telling them I studied Engineering Physics in Canada... the girls chime in that I must be brilliant or something... they tell me that they're bad at math. Ah ha! I thought, perhaps I could talk about some math to cool them off or something?? So off I go saying that I thought understanding math was "beautiful" and that it would be something really applicable for them in their economics field... hence my little tutorial on differential equations... which they've seen (as mentioned before). Despite my broken Japanese trying to use mathematical terms they understood what I was getting at and enthusiastically (hyperactively?) thought that I'd make a great teacher. I get the sinking feeling that I'm fresh meat? Really, there's only so much flirting I can handle at once. It will be interesting to see what happens if I run into meet them again...

Anyways, after all that, I helped out with the cleaning arrangements and then I left at about 7:30 ish and the cleaning up operations were starting to wind down. These students from the @home club are amazingly hard workers... but they seem to have a lot of fun with this club however. More power to them!