Entertaining a foreigner

There are a significant number of high level students who have no problem expressing what they think or reading through a difficult piece of news material, but choke at it when asked to explain Okonomiyaki to a first-time foreign visitor in Osaka. This lesson is designed for such students.

My 6pm was a yellow level student who had exactly the same problem as mentioned earlier. So after we exchanged greetings and reviewed her previous one-point, I pulled out the thick chunk of Japanese word cards and explained to her what we were going to do. She recognized her own weakness as well, so when she saw the cards, she smiled and took a deep breath to get ready. Instead of asking her to match the English translations with the Japanese cards, from experience I knew it worked better if the student had to actually think of an appropriate translation for himself, and that was exactly what I asked my 6pm student to do. She went through the first few words without much trouble, and then came "takoyaki", "nabe", "yakitori", "anago" and "okonomiyaki". She laughed and joked that she wished she were not Japanese now. Anyway, instead of giving her the answer right away, I inspired her to come up with her translation by giving her hints and guiding her through the thinking process. This worked extremely well, by the end of the activity, she had no problem translating all the food cards into appropriate English, some were even better than the original ones, e.g. she described Okonomiyaki as a kind of Japanese pizza made from a mixture of finely cut cabbage, eggs, pork and flour, served on a hot plate with special sauce as well as seaweed and bonito fish flakes!

While it was the aim of this lesson to help her tackle with her weakness, I thought it would be too much if I spent the whole 45 minutes on it. After I complimented her on her great job of translating, I asked her what her favorite food was and any good restaurants that she'd recommend. Our conversation flew from there naturally and thanks to her, I now have a lot of good Nabe places to try out for the winter!