Talk Like That

Last Friday was the English speech contest for both of my schools. Six schools in total competed (two of those being my schools) and I think the outcome was quite good! Leading up to this day there had been many after school rehearsals and I was staying back every day to help these students. I didn't really WANT to stay back after school but it seemed like the right thing to do - plus I think I was expected to... being the only native English speaker at hand. At both schools the students were chosen and they wrote up their speech in Japanese, which was then translated into 'English' by the Japanese English teachers and then in turn was turned into English by me. I'm sure that by the end of this process it had lost a lot of its intended meaning but that wasn't my job - I just had to make sure they could say things properly.

I'll break it down into steps so you don't begin to go cross-eyed from the sheer amount of text in this blog.

Step 1; Choose the Students
Not many students were particularly willing to do this contest and I mean, who could blame them? Teachers therefore had to choose students and then convince them to do it. I didn't really play a part in this step I was just told who was going to do it. Two first year students, a boy and a girl, were chosen at one school and after listening to them a bit we had to choose who would be better. The girl was better although her speech was a little boring but we went with her anyway. Also, One boy wanted to do the speech contest so we had to choose him even though he wasn't particularly good at speaking. He wants to be a paramedic (which was also the topic of his speech) so he thought doing things like the speech contest would give him some mental strength. To be honest I'm not really 100% on his motivation but to his credit he tried really hard and he was fun to teach so I didn't care.


Step 2; Choose the speech topics
The decided topics ranged from talking about a local form of pottery, to the dreams of the students, to the use of the steep hill before the entrance of the school as a metaphor of life. That latter speech won. I almost had a student who was going to do the whole speech from the perspective of a cat but he lost out to the pottery girl in the selection to see who would represent the first year. My goal was to avoid speeches about learning English as it would have been su-per boron and unoriginal and I succeeded for the most part... one of my girls did a speech entitled 'Words From the Heart' which doesn't so much talk about speaking English, as it does speaking in general. To quote;

" Even if we live in different places, greet each other in different ways

and speak different languages, we all greet each other from the Heart "

As you can probably pick up even from that one sentence, these speeches are pretty cheesy. Many students had lines like "a smile can help anyone", or "I want everyone to have dreams to make them happy like me". I think it's just the nature of the competition to be campy so I was making them smile all the time and so on.

Step 3; Pronounciation

Had to begin by ironing out some pesky accent issues (Shince instead of Since) but that wasn't nearly as hard as trying to get them to reproduce the 'R' sound and the 'Th' sound. You all probably know the difficulty some Japanese people have distinguishing between the two. They can actually make the 'l' sound fairly easily as it involves the tongue hitting the front teeth they just need to remember to do it...but the 'r' sound is quite hard! the tongue doesn't hit anything it just sits at the back and the tip raises up so saying words like 'remember' and 'reminds' took some practice. The 'Th' worked out to be ok in the end but it went through the stage of sounding like an 's' (sanks) to the 'f' stage (fanks) and then finally to the 'th' stage (thanks).

" Team sports are played with the cooperation of all of the teams members "

Step 4; Intonation
When Japanese people speak it all sounds like a flat, monotonous blargle (just made that word up then). They do have some kind of intonation which allows them to differentiate between two words that are identical (hana vs. ha˹na; nose vs. flower... or maybe it's the other way around) but it's no where near the level we talk. So I spent a little while drawing intonation maps for the students showing when we go up and down all that stuff. The students had to learn their entire speech in another language and on top of that learn where to put their voice. I could tell how hard it was when sometimes they would forget the intonation and it would just sound super weird and they couldn't hear it. Most students picked up on it fairly quickly though but that was only the beginning!

____/\____/`\_____/\_ ____/`\__________/`\________________/`\________/\_

"Since I was a little girl, I was always with my Grandparents because my parents were very
/\__
busy "

Step 5; Gestures
On top of remaining fairly low key when they talk, Japanese people don't really use facial expressions or body gestures to emphasise their point. At one point I suggest a student raise her eyebrows when she talk and after a brief struggle she could move them but it just looked odd. One girl managed to use her eyebrows in a natural fashion (that is to say, subtly) but she wasn't that good at speaking so it didn't really count for much I'm afraid. I had the students use some hand gestures but not too many, I didn't want it to look like a drama monologue (as awesome as that would have been). Some other students in the actual competition were going a bit over the top with their hands to the point of hilarity.

______/\_________/ \_______/\_____/ \___________/ \_________

"But I don't mind at all, because I have a dream to become a voice actress"

------(shake head)-------(look at someone new)---- (SMILE)----------

Step 6; Polish
This was after we had all been practicing too much and I thought the speeches were fine but were still sitting there listening to them over and over again. By the end of rehearsals I could recite all 6 speeches from plain rote memorisation from having the students repeat after me. I was teaching things like when 'an' is used in front of a word they sort of mould together, for example, an interesting = a ninteresting. Small things that don't really matter much but that I may as well help with anyway.

Finally they had to perform and they all performed well with no one forgetting their speech or anything which was a relief. I had 6 students participating (3 from each school, one for each year level) and out of those 6, two students came first - 'steep hill = life' girl, and 'voice actress' girl. The rest went really well with two seconds places and two fourth places (6 contestants in each category). Which means my region won two of the three trophies which is pretty good I think.

The only problem? Now those students have to compete in the prefectural level which MEANS I now have to keep up the rehearsals. Not as late as before mind, but the speeches are boring to me now so I don't really want to keep listening to them over and over again. This was originally going to be a small blog but I thought i'd flesh it out and now it's quite lengthy! my next blog will be after the 3rd of November and I'll be writing about the cultural festivals at both of my schools.

__/\____

Excitement!

Again. no pictures. Next blog. Plenty of pictures. Promise. Even a video or two! WOOO

kris.

P.S. Formatting on Blogger is shit. It's one of the biggest things I need to deal with when writing these blogs and it alone makes me not want to write them. I've been trying to get the intonation to match up with where they should be for AGES and it is just. not. working. You know the intonation. Imagine it's right.