Home Page Advertising About Us Articles Subscribe Survey Links

Cover Story
Spotlight On Schools
Featured Columnists
Letters
Books
Business of Education
Careers
Children's Corner
Colleges & Grad Schools
Commentary
Continuing Education
Editorials
Languages
Law & Education
MEDICAL UPDATE
MetroBEAT
Movies & Theater
Museums
Music, Art & Dance
Politics In Education
Special Education
Sports & Camps
Technology in Education
Travel
June 2001
May 2001
April 2001
1997-2000
 
New York City
September 2001

Exchange Student Experiences: Japan
By Christopher Lapinig

It was the language of Japan that brought me thousands of miles away from my home; the prospect of speaking to native speakers and nurturing my language skills.

Standing on a raised, open-air platform in the heart of Tokyo, my friend and I gazed at the crowd of people bustling below us. He noted, “Not a single American. I looked around, and all I saw was a sea of Japanese.”

The utter homogeneity of the Land of the Rising Sun was striking, to say the least. Schoolgirls broke out into giggles and adults stopped to stare when my fellow exchange students and I took walks around Tokyo. In terms of diversity, what a sharp contrast this land makes to America.

It was extremely helpful that, for two years, I had taken advantage of the Japanese classes at my high school. Even though the particular home-stay program I chose offered three-hour Japanese courses every weekday, much of it was a review for me, and the actual learning came more from my conversations and interactions with my host family and people on the street. However, the same could not be said of most of the other American students in my group. Because few high schools across the nation offer Japanese as a language option, the majority of my peers had no formal training in the language.

Communicating in Japanese was most certainly a challenge even for me and the handful of others who also had experience with the language. As with all foreign conversations, the native speakers would talk so fast that it seemed impossible to comprehend the jumble of strange-sounding words and phrases. Luckily, my host family had a tremendous amount of experience in English, since they had hosted several other English-speaking guests in their home. In addition, my host father had been an English teacher years earlier, and my host sister had recently taken the SAT and the TOEFL to gain entrance to a university in California.

For most of the month-long home-stay, our conversations consisted of my speaking in Japanese and my host family responding in English, or vice versa. Communication, with the occasional exception where we had to whip out the dictionary, was far easier than I had expected. I felt blessed to have had a host family so fluent in English and sorry for my fellow students who not only had little knowledge of Japanese but who had host families who, conversely, had little knowledge of English. As a result, some students ended up relying heavily on sign and body language, while others, unfortunately, ended up not communicating with their family at all.

Even though my main goal was simply to practice my Japanese, my entire experience was definitely enlightening and enjoyable in several aspects: Through my visit to another culture I was able to immerse myself in Japanese lifestyle and language and discover things about myself, about the United States, and about the rest of the world. Going to Japan not only shifted my sleeping pattern, but it shifted my perspective as well.

Christopher Lapinig is a junior at Stuyvesant High School in NYC.

 

Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001. Tel: (212) 481-5519. Fax: (212) 481-3919. Email: ednews1@aol.com.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2001.




LANGUAGES

DIRECTORIES