From: Charles Eicher <ceicher@inav.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan
Subject: A brief account of a nihonjin studying English
Date: 12 Mar 2001 02:09:46 -0800

I occasionally work with students coming from Japan to my university on a blitz 3 week English intensive. Many of those students are architecture students, since they come from a tech school in Tokyo. I often invite them to take a tour with me around my hometown, which has many interesting Victorian houses, as well as some prize-winning postmodernist architecture, like this.

But anyway, this is just the setting for a surprising experience I had. I invited several students to come on a drive around town, and when I picked two of them up at their dorm, they asked if it was ok to bring along their friend Yuki. Plenty of room in the car, so we headed off on a tour.

A little while into the tour, as I'm sitting in the front seat driving around and pointing out interesting sites, I notice Yuki has been rather silent, and the person in the front seat has been turning around, facing Yuki, and restating my Japanese speech to her in almost my exact words in a slow, over-pronounced manner. And in reply, I heard something surprising, Japanese with a thick-tongued speech impediment that alerted me to something I couldn't have possibly known; Yuki was deaf.

Hmm... this was certainly unexpected, and having worked with many completely deaf people before, I was perhaps a bit more prepared to deal with the situation than most.

During the tour, she barely spoke but a few words to her friends, but those words were still fairly intelligible to me. I guess she used lip reading (and that must be REALLY hard in Japanese!) She never once spoke directly to me, but later, I told her that I could understand her Japanese speech fairly well. And then she turned red with embarrassment. Ooops.

At the end of the tour, we stopped for dinner and Yuki pulled out a little pad of paper and we rapidly conversed in writing. Her English writing was pretty darn good, although it was a bit tedious and slow to converse in this format. It seemed like she could not express herself quickly enough in writing in a foreign language, and it was obviously a bit frustrating for her. But I did everything I could to make her comfortable with the situation.

I had noticed that Yuki did not appear at our previous weekly conversation hour, where I had originally offered the tour to the other students. I know that it could have been intimidating for a deaf person to attend a meeting where the goal is spoken conversation, but I insisted that she come to the next meeting, I'd talk to her if nobody else would, but I assured her that she'd meet lots of people who would make her feel at home. And that is pretty much what happened. With a couple of surprises.

Yuki came to the next week's meeting with her little pad of paper. We conversed a bit, I typed on my laptop computer, and she wrote on her little pad. And then a couple of other people started conversing with her too. And as I looked up from my laptop to observe the scene that was unfolding, I was completely astonished at what was happening. Yuki was conducting 5 or 6 simultaneous conversations in writing! She would pass a sheet of paper with her words to someone, and as they wrote their response, she would be writing another response to another person. It seemed like she had found her element. It was sort of like watching a real-world version of an online text-chat room. It was bizarre; I'd never seen anything like it.

Well anyway.. I asked her about her goals and how she was doing with her studies. She said it was hard studying English, but she enjoyed it and wanted to study German too, as well as English and German sign languages. She said she had a hard time at first in her childhood studies of Japanese too, but I suspect that this was largely due to unenlightened attitudes about handicaps amongst her teachers. She seemed to have a skill for languages, her written English was better than any exchange student's that I had ever met. Perhaps this was partly because she couldn't study spoken English, and could devote more time to reading and writing.

So.. this brief and very interesting encounter was over all too soon, leaving me with a more questions than answers. I wondered many things, like how deaf students were treated in the Japanese educational system, how hard it would be to learn to lipread in a foreign tongue, what is the difference between the sign languages of different languages, etc.

As the students packed up to leave conversation hour, they thanked everyone for their hospitality, and to my horror, they said they were leaving the next day for a 3-day recreational trip to... SEATTLE. This was just a few hours after the Seattle earthquake. None of them had heard the news, and when I told them about it, they were positively freaked. But I reassured them it wasn't dangerous, and everything would be OK, and besides, I thought to myself, what could they do about it anyway? They'd probably have lots of fun when they arrived back home with lots of pictures of destroyed buildings. From the students' description of their studies in architectural engineering, I had visions of career-changing experiences in Seattle, perhaps some great seismic engineer would be formed from the group of a dozen students touring the city's damaged buildings.

So anyway, I'm not quite sure why I'm writing this up, except that perhaps it typifies what many of us seek from our language studies, to encounter and converse with interesting people with very different backgrounds than our own. And this was certainly the most unique exchange student I'd ever met, so I figured others might have a passing interest in this tale.