Sora-mimi

"Sora-mimi" is a funny way of saying "mishearing" in Japanese. I came up with this little exercise for teaching English. Nothing fancy. I would find a short YouTube clip, usually a funny commercial like the one shown (the Budlight series are my favorite), and tell my students to transcribe what is being said word for word. Then on the day of the lesson, I'd get them to write what they heard on the board. Let me tell ya, some of the stuff they hear are h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s! It's always a blast.

Two things can be expected from this exercice. First, to transcribe, the students will have to listen to the clip over and over and over and over and over.... Of course, this gets their ears accustomed to English words in bite size portions, which is much more effective than listenting to English in long portions, such as in a TV series or movie. Second, often the funniness of the students' answers and the "aha moments" (a.k.a. "eureka effect") created by my corrections really make the answers stick.

But this exercice, as simple as it is, is tough. Just a few minutes of clip can take hours and hours to really transcribe correctly. Even the one shown above, which is the very first one that I used, took my students a long time to transcribe. The dialog consists of only 3-4 lines!

This can be done of course with your favorite videos and DVDs also. It's easier if you have someone to control the clip for you. Play-stop-rewind-play-stop-rewind...(ad infinitum)

Tetsu’s Road to Multilingualism (Part VI: 29-present)

Why Japan?

Two reasons. First, being half Taiwanese and half Japanese, I wanted to revisit my roots. But really, that’s not half as important as the second reason. I’ve always felt a disconnect between what I learned at university, i.e., biology, and my strongest assets, i.e., languages. The language of science is English and it was not about to change anytime soon. So I figured I could probably find some clues as to how to use my languages, well, at least Japanese, if I came to Japan, the scientific hub of Asia, and started my career here. The plan was to do a post-doc for about 2-3 years in Japan, and then do another one for 2-3 years in California, where a lot of biotechs are found, before going back to Canada to open my own lab. As usual, things don’t go quite as planned.

Tetsu’s Road to Multilingualism (Part V: 23-29 years-old)

As I mentioned in the previous post, after doing a few university courses in German and Italian, I decided that I should stop increasing the number of languages in my repertoire, but rather improve the level of the 5 that I already knew much better (English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish).

Tetsu’s Road to Multilingualism (Part II: 6-13 years-old)

My parents planned out two grandiose language assimilation schemes for me in this second part of my linguistic history.

Natural Japanese learning in Japan

The first began around the age of 6, when they started sending me to grandma’s place in Japan to spend all my summer vacations there. I had been there a few times before, but this time would be the beginning of annual summer visits. In some years, I also had the privilege of going there for Christmas. Although these visits lasted from a few weeks to a few months, this full-time immersion allowed me to naturally “be” a typical Japanese kid.