Everywhere you look in Japan, there are some immaculate and spectacular gardens. Future installments of our Destination series will give some recommendations, including the one above (Ritsurin, Takamatsu: Shikoku).
Peaceful, colourful, full of fish.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Everywhere you look in Japan, there are some immaculate and spectacular gardens. Future installments of our Destination series will give some recommendations, including the one above (Ritsurin, Takamatsu: Shikoku).
Peaceful, colourful, full of fish.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Interior Differences
First off, when you sit on the other side of the car, it means dials and buttons for controlling the car will be situated in different places. In a Japanese car, the windshield wiper controls are on the left of the steering wheel, and the turn signal controls are on the right. You turn your head to the left to check the rearview mirror or look out the back window. When parking, you need to compensate for extra space on the left to avoid scratching your (and someone else's) bumper. And if you drive manual, you're now going to hold the steering wheel with your right hand and shift with your left.
Signaling to Other Drivers
Like in the U.S., a quick headlight flash is a common signal between motorists that a patrol car is somewhere nearby. In Japan, flashing with headlights is also commonly used as a signal to "go ahead" to another motorist, such as when you are giving up your rightaway to allow someone else to make a turn. In addition to this, many Japanese will turn on their hazards for a blink or two as a way to say "Thank you" to the driver behind them, and some Japanese even use a very brief honk (it ends up sounding like a chirp) to say "Thanks" to another motorist.
Turning into a Lane
In the U.S., I was generally taught to turn into the same lane as the one I'm coming from--that is to say, if I make a right-hand turn at home, I always turn into the right-most lane of the new street. If I make a left-hand turn, I always turn into the left-most lane of the new street. In Japan, this rule does not apply. If there is no oncoming traffic and you can confirm that the move will be safe, it is legal to, for example, make a right-hand turn into the far-left lane of a large motorway.
Stopping at Intersections
In Japan, a white line painted across the road does not necessarily mean you are supposed to stop. If there isn't an obstruction in the road (such as another car or pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk), a traffic signal, a stop sign, or the word 止まれ (tomare) painted in front of the white line, you are not required to stop. This differs from America, where drivers are generally taught to come to a complete stop at any intersection in which their rightaway is not specifically indicated.
Turning Guides
When turning at an intersection, often a diamond or a triangle is painted on the road. This is a turning indicator for drivers, and you are supposed to turn the car tightly enough that it doesn't cross over this symbol.
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| No Parking. |
In Japan, parking along a road is illegal almost everywhere. This makes sense, because Japanese roads tend to be skinnier than American counterparts. But despite this, Japanese people "temporarily" park along roads all the time, and if you aren't prepared for it, it can be very obnoxious. Drivers will suddenly, without warning, pull over to the side of the road and flip on their hazards to "park" while they run inside a convenience store. But, if the road is too tight, there may not be enough room for you to maneuver around the jerk without bashing into oncoming traffic. On big roads in big cities, I generally avoid the left-most lane unless I'm about to turn in that direction; if you always keep to the left, there is no telling when you'll run up on a vehicle with its hazards flashing and be unable to merge right because of heavy city traffic.
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| No Parking or Stopping. |
So, keep these points in mind and drive safe in Japan. If you have any other good tips, please share it with a comment below.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Here are some easy-to-use tools and hints for incorporating a Boggle puzzle into your classroom:
The Word Solver is a U.K. based website that provides a simple script for generating random Boggle-style puzzles of many sizes (from 3x3 to 10x10) and solving the puzzles for every possible word in an American or British dictionary. This is great for you as a teacher, because you'll have a record of every possible answer in the puzzle you use.
For advanced students, you can provide a large puzzle to students and ask them to find words based on their own vocabulary. You can allow students to use their textbook or a dictionary, or you can have them try to create words strictly from memory. This works well individually or in groups of three or four. Provide incentive by imposing a time limit or declaring whoever (or whichever group) finds the most words as the class champion.
Slight edits to a randomly generated puzzle (replacing some letters on the grid with vowels or common consonants like "s" or "t") will greatly increase the number of words that can be found in the puzzle, including many words the students will already know from their English course.
For low level students, you can also provide a list of all the words in the puzzle and let them solve it wordsearch style. For beginning English learners, I like to copy the puzzle in capital letters and write the answers to the puzzle in lowercase letters, making students practice their big and small letter matchup skills.
Thursday, 6 January 2011
As mentioned last time,
"An ALT is supposed to act as support to a Japanese English Teacher (usually abbreviated to JET or JTE, but not to be confused with JET programme participants), while an ELT usually plans and executes classes alone by instruction from their employer."You are not on the same level as Japanese teachers. You don't have the same status or responsibility. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your current and future goals.
Japanese Teachers of English will teach each of their designated classes about 3 times a week.
Because you are spread across every class of students in the school, usually you will be in one or more of those three English sessions each week; although in larger schools it will be less often, and the inverse for the tiny schools in the countryside.
The lessons in which you are involved will resemble one of the following, listed in order of frequency (based on the experiences of my friends and I).
The positions of 1 and 2 often change depending on the time of year:
- Textbook lesson.
The class is made to study the textbook, which means no preparation on your part, and usually reading vocab lists and a page of text several times for "Repeat after the ELT" segments. Not the most exciting lesson ever, but not the worst either. Often combined with number 4. - Your class.
The JTE is still there, but you have been asked to make something which will last all lesson. It may be a game, activity or worksheet revolving around some grammar point. Check our Worksheet Sunday entries for examples of these. - The worst variety of this is the "Anything OK", where the JTE gives you no input whatsoever for the class. At first it's fun, but you'll grow to dread those words, especially with the short notice usually accompanying them.
- 1/2 your class, 1/2 textbook or worksheet.
- Worksheet.
The JTE has either forgotten you are there or refused to use you, so your job has become walking around watching the students complete a worksheet the JTE put together/downloaded. Small amount of room for interaction. Pretty boring. - Normal class.
Meaning there's no need for you to be there. You kick off the lesson with "Hello, how are you?" etc, then stand and watch while the JTE explains grammar in Japanese. For about 40 minutes. Then it's over. Some nice teachers will simply cancel these lessons.
You are not usually required to do anything outside of school-hours other than attend semi-compulsory work parties (enkai) - click here for a blog on that.
Being an ALT series:
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Although I think there are other, better resources available for job searching, the well-trodden sites of the Internet are still worth a look; they are often well designed and because of their popularity, new jobs appear on them almost every day.
Today we're going to take a look at Gaijinpot Jobs.
(But, this advice is just as effective at other big job-listing sites, too.)
Most readers have already heard of Gaijinpot Jobs, so I'll keep the site description short: You create a profile on the site, write and save resumes, browse jobs, and send resumes with cover letters. Most of the jobs listed on the site are ESL teaching gigs, from small local schools to corporate giants like Interac. And Gaijinpot's ability to store your resumes means you can apply for a load of jobs with very little effort.
And that right there is what I want to focus on.
Think about it: If you can save one resume and one cover letter and send those off to a dozen companies in five minutes, so can everyone else. So, if you want to get in for an interview, the name of the game at Gaijinpot is quality and speed. Read on...
There are a lot of jobs with similar requirements here (visa, native speaker, TEFL certificate, driver's license, pulse). And there's a glut of people on the site who all fit those same credentials. Within 24 hours of a new job listing at Gaijinpot, it's not uncommon for dozens or even hundreds of people to one-click submit their resume to that company.
Unfortunately, many of the employers aren't so picky. They need to get onto the interviewing phase ASAP and there isn't a lot of time to dredge through two hundred resumes. Instead of waiting around for every resume that comes in before the ad expires, usually they just look at the first resumes to arrive. Once five, or ten, or twenty people who meet the initial requirements are identified, the company proceeds to interviews with this group and ignores all further resume submissions.
(Unless, of course, all five or ten or twenty people interviewed turn out to be duds.)
The point is, there's a very short window of time for you to get your application in. It's much shorter than the actual run time of the ad. You are more likely to get a callback from a company if you can get your resume in fast.
In order to do this, it's best to skim the site itself every day, as you'll see new jobs the instant they've been listed. Next best is to sign up for the daily job e-mail that Gaijinpot offers. I say next best because actually everything in the daily e-mail is going to be about 24 hours old; it's a compilation of yesterday's newest listings. Anyway, check it in your inbox every morning, and immediately apply for any jobs that look interesting. If you wait until the weekend, consider your chance already gone.
But, speed isn't everything. Recruiters know that on sites like these, any doofus with an "Enter" key can instantly submit a resume and a generic cover letter he wrote six months ago.
This means you need to keep your resume up to date, and you need to target it. Gaijinpot's even built a system for you to save multiple versions of your resume, for Pete's sake. Use it! Don't send the same thing to every company. Pick and choose the skills you'll highlight according to the type of job you're applying for! If it's a teaching job, your introductory lines should be about your degree in education and your past experience. If it's for an IT job, talk about your programming language proficiencies and certifications.
Most importantly, for non-teaching jobs, get rid of the teaching related talk! Unless you've worded it to show how your teaching experience has prepared you for the job you're applying for, your statements about "great lesson plans" and "getting along with students" will leave recruiters rolling their eyes as they reach for the delete key.
And finally, in the same vein, you need to write a cover letter for every job you apply for. Generic cover letters are really obvious: "I'm a 27 year old graduate from America. I'm really interested in everything about Japan and I've lived here for three years. In school, I studied..."
This is a bad cover letter because it talks about you. But the company doesn't want to hear about you! You're already attaching a resume full of that information! Your cover letter should talk about the company and position you're applying for. Mention what you know about the field and the company. Use the company's name in the letter. Talk about an experience you've had in the past and why you think it prepared you for this job.
Armed with this mentality, your likelihood of a callback will skyrocket. So get out there, and start customizing your next application. :)
Monday, 3 January 2011
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| Pregnant fish |
We've written quite a bit about school lunch in Japan in the last few months. Steve wrote a very interesting article about why we have some very bizarre combinations of foods sometimes, and I wrote about what it's like eating with your students.
For a more in-depth look, I also put together a typical 5-day sample of what you can expect to be eating.
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Anyway, here's the list of countries who do or don't have to take a driving test in Japan:
You don't have to take the driving test if you're converting a license from... (in fantastic alphabetical order!)
Australia, Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
Finland, France
Germany, Greece
Iceland, Ireland, Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway
Portugal
Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland
United Kingdom
You do have to take a driving test if you are converting a license from...
Anywhere. Else.
But notably for our primarily English-speaking readers, this includes the USA, Jamaica, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Africa, as well as everywhere else in Africa, everywhere in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the majority of nations in Asia and Oceania.
Saturday, 1 January 2011
This is a great format which can be adapted to a lot of different scenarios. It's essentially a listening test, where students have to pick the correct choice on a descending pyramid of words, letters or numbers.
Takes about 10 minutes.
Full description:
First grade/limited ability versions - I have one with words, and one with letters (click to download, but as always beware of Google Docs' preview - it will look fine when you download and open in Word), and you could also make one with difficult/similar numbers (e.g. 13 and 30):
- Use the template and edit as you like
- In this example, students have a copy of the pyramid each,
- You read out one of the two options on each row, and the students must decide which,
- When you complete the pyramid, ask the students what letter they think the pyramid finishes on.
You can also edit this to use harder words, and use that with second graders. Here's an example, but for best results tailor to your own classes.
Some of the words may seen too difficult, but that's fine. It's the sounds you are testing here.
And that's it! You can edit this for use with an elementary class, slow learners, "special" class, etc. Great stuff.
Friday, 31 December 2010
Happy New Year!
This is our first new year together, treasured reader. Thank you for your visit, we hope you found what you were looking for. If not, why not email us what you need and we'll see what we can do.
Anyway, thanks go to the almost 20,000 hits we've had in the last few months; we've been much more successful than we expected.
But chances are you've missed some of our wonderful posts, so here's a list of some of the greats that may have slipped beneath your otherwise highly efficient radar.
- About the cold winter we're in:
How to insulate your Japanese house for the winter
- Daily life
The cost of living/utilities in Japan
Finding an ESL job in Japan
Our "Job Spotlight" employment series
- School stuff
The 5 most annoying pages in the New Crown textbooks
"Wot dis? Dis pen!" Appaling Japanese English set to change?
Elementary school - The Hello Song vs "Anything OK"
- Popular posts:
Our "Budget Accommodation" series
Using an Amazon Kindle to study Japanese
Soaplands - the Japanese brothel
Robots in my toilet
Driving schools in Japan
- Fun things:
The top 10 dirty Japanese phrases
And don't forget to check out our guides page for all the important information about living and working in Japan we've posted this year.
December also saw the unveiling of our new "Photo Tuesday" series, where we post interesting or nice pictures relevant to recent posts. If you have any images you think we should up, let us know through our Facebook page.
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Unfortunately, when I next picked up New Crown 2 it flopped open to Pot of Poison and I realised my work was far from done. "You're bad," I thought, "I must punish you."
Without further ado, here are some terrible editorial decisions from the NC team.
3. Zorba's Three Promises
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| Sepúlveda, unimpressed |
Based on a reportedly beautiful book by award-winning author (not to mention humanitarian superstar) Luis Sepúlveda, NC2 manages to capture absolutely none of the skillful writing and scene-setting which earned the original book sales of 2 million copies.
Simple stories are fine for learning English, so why not pick one? Why chose a novel famed for it's emotional content and reduce it down into 4 half-pages of vacuous rubbish? Why would you do that?
Perhaps my next project will be re-writing Philadelphia in 4 words:
Guy gets AIDS. Dies.How's that? Or how about Inception:
Guy dreams. Wakes up?
In this story, an oil-covered Gull splats into the ground next to a cat (Zorba). The cat doesn't like the taste of oil, and is just lazy enough to listen to the gull's life story. Turns out she's dying, but has an egg up her arse which must continue her family legacy of stealing food from infants and picking at the carcasses of pigeons. After making the cat promise not to eat the egg, she dies and farts it out. The cat looks after it, defends it from rats etc and it's all very lovely and darling.
My biggest beef with NC's terrible retelling is it's daringly touching acceptance of individuality. "Cats do cat things. Gulls do gull things." replies Zorba to Lucky (the baby bird)'s complaint that she can't spend all day sleeping, crapping in my flowerbed and pissing on my sofa. Oh how sweet, how educational. We're bringing our children up right! No more war! Free Tibet! Eating endangered species of whale is barbari...Then the bird flies off leaving out feline hero to murmur "I love you" to the empty sky. What a heart-warming story... "Lucky" didn't even stick around to hear Zorba's last words! Lucky? More like Bastard, am I right?
It only affirms my view that seagulls are the rude-boy gangsters of the bird world. But what else can you expect from a foetus which fell out of the lifeless corpse of it's mother. Summary: It's like that manga Berserk, except with no massive sword and everyone's a dick except the black guy.
2. The Whale Rider
The award-winning film becomes a four-page epic in NC3. And boy, is it a good one.Not content with just dumbing-down the story, NC decided to change the main character's name. Joseph Gordon-Levitt lookalike Paikea inexplicably becomes Kahu, and things relentlessly cartwheel downhill from there; eventually reaching the lofty heights of trying to teach 3rd year students grammar such as
"Come, Father. Come." (see pics).How on Earth do you explain that?
The story itself isn't so bad, apart from giving women ideas above their station (right fellas??), and probably strikes a chord somewhere within Japanese society. But come on. Something a little more fun?Whatever, I don't even care anymore. This crappy story full of crusty old goats and predictable Ocean Odyssesy morals can go to hell.
1. A Pot of Poison
A Pot of Poison is awful. Our three anti-heroes are trusted with not touching their master's pot of poison whilst he's out of town. Down's-Syndrome inflicted An manages to knock it over during cleaning time and spill the poisonous contents, which total prick and ever-ready ADD opportunist Kan immediately shoves in his mouth because it resembles honey. It turns out it actually is honey, which is good news because Huey, Duey and Luey have eaten it all. Sly fox Kan then smashes the pot and smears blood on An's face to make it look like an accident (without the blood), while desperate drama-queen cave-painting Chin relentlessly freaks out like he's auditioning for Will and Grace.Inevitably the master returns, and is understandably pissed off by the fact that he can't trust his disciples not to knowingly kill themselves if given 72 hours alone. All's well that ends well, however, when Kan deftly reports how they've punished themselves for breaking the pot by eating the poison! Kan, you joker! Of course, it turns out the only person dying today is Master when he realises what a terrible trainer he is and commits seppuku to an aging portrait of his grandfather.
The only good thing to come out of these three pages is the alteration my student made to page 42; which shows the three douches vomiting red and black gunk all over Master's wincing face.
That's all I can bring myself to write today.
Tuesday, 28 December 2010
So you want to teach English in Japan?
Well, here's the start of a new series of posts giving you a sample of what to expect as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher). Hopefully this information will help you decide if teaching here is for you, and answer any questions you may have.
You may also want to consult our "How much will I get paid teaching English" blog, and our "Living expenses guide".
Anyway: first off, here's an explanation of what an ALT actually is.
An ALT is different from an ELT (which will be covered at a later date). An ALT works in schools - elementary, juniour high or high school; while an ELT typically works at a private language school/cram school. They are both usually native English speakers.
The usual route into an ALT job is the JET programme, or a dispatch company such as Interac (more info on jobs and companies).
An ALT is supposed to act as support to a Japanese English Teacher (usually abbreviated to JET or JTE, but not to be confused with JET programme participants), while an ELT usually plans and executes classes alone by instruction from their employer.Your job will range from full control of an entire lesson, without any help translating, to just standing around watching the JTE teach the class with no input of your own. In the next couple of weeks we'll look at exactly what you can expect in the classroom.
Each week we'll be looking at a difference aspect of ALT life. Next: a detailed look at your role in school.
More
If you're interested, the guy from My Darling is a Foreigner (Japanese movie featuring the titular dilemma) is in a recent "comedy" series about an ELT language school - check it out here (but don't expect the next Mork and Mindy).
Being an ALT series:
Monday, 27 December 2010
These two disturbing old ladies sit by the side of the road in Komagane, Nagano-prefecture.
They appear to be enacting an onsen scene, but without the hot water. Which reminds me: an onsen outside in the rain or snow is really, really nice. I recommend you try it if you can. The iconic Snow Monkeys (the Japanese Macaques who live next to and bathe in a natural hot spring) share the area with many outdoor onsen.
Check out our onsen blog for some more information about the experience.
