Namjatown, etymology, and other adventures
I accidentally left my cellphone on silent mode after coming home last night, which means I completely missed ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
katharos trying to call me this morning several times; it wasn't until about 12:30pm when I was on the train to work that I got out my cellphone to play with it and realized, oh shit, I had several missed calls, and of course it'd be 10 mins before I could return the call, being on the train at all. Fortunately, Katherine called back about 20 seconds before I was getting off the train in Akabane, so I talked to her then, and we made plans to meet up at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro once I'd signed in at work and all, since I didn't have any classes until 5pm. She was already there wandering around with Rebecca.
Short shameful confession: I'd never actually been in the Sunshine mall before today, DESPITE the fact that Sunshine 60 Road and East Ikebukuro used to be my absolute favorite hangout spots in Tokyo. Sunshine Road has like 3 awesome arcades (used to be 4 before Moai closed), a lot of great shops, restaurants, etc, and things are open semi-late.
I found them in a place called "Namjatown", which is, for lack of a better term, a mini-theme park inside Sunshine City. It doesn't really have rides -- aside from a merry-go-round -- but it's got all of these weird theme areas. Like there's a Gyoza Town, which is completely decorated like a festival from Edo-period Tokyo, with little gyoza stands all over the place and some izakayas and a few variety shops. There are lots of weird seating areas, including a 1960's-style tatami room and such. We ordered various gyoza there for lunch, which was pretty good. Another part of Namjatown was a "Relaxation Forest" which basically had tons of places to get massages and such. Then there was this "Ghost Town" thing going on, where people had to do a ghost hunt with weird devices. Katherine apparently used the bathrooms in the Ghost Town and the toilets were even "haunted".
We went up to the top floor, which was full of little dessert shops and felt like something out of the Ghibli museum, aside from Ice Cream Town, a brightly-colored little area with various ice cream places with a big variety of flavors. While sitting outside the merry-go-round with Kat, watching people dressed in funny costumes as proprietors of the shops, I suddenly realized it was just like Final Fantasy 6 come to life. I felt like I should walk up to the costumed proprietor of the shop nearby and press A, and we'd both turn towards each other, he'd say something like "Welcome to our shop! Would you like to buy something? > Yes > No" and I'd press "No" and we'd turn away and I'd walk along, until running into a moogle or something.
Which, oddly, is exactly what happened next. A big funny-looking white cat mascot came down the hallway just as I was saying all this. Kat took a picture of me with it which looks horrible, but I took a decent picture of her with it. I think we levelled up after that, but I'm not sure since I had to find a save point and quit the game to go back to work.
Work was ok. I made a deck of phonics cards and played Go Fish with my 11-year-old student and it actually worked out really well, by the end of it she even had down the "Do you have any 'bus'?" "No. Go fish." and so on really well in English. She said she likes card games a lot, so I'm going to try to come up with more - I wonder if I can do Phonics Uno or something. If only I thought my 8-year-olds wouldn't destroy the cards I'd make them a set too...
My 7pm class asked me my blood type and embarrassingly enough, I couldn't actually remember it. I think I am Type A, but I don't really know. They told me I should go to the hospital and find out because it is very important in Japan to know this sort of thing. For homework I ordered them to write blood type personality charts, in English. That'll show them!
Only one of my 9pm students came again. The other two wrote me emails on my cellphone though, which was nice of them. (One of them loves baseball so he wrote me a message also of "Did you see the playoffs?") However, the one who showed up is the one who has never missed class since I came here; probably my most fluent student now that the army interpreter transferred to another school. I had said we'd discuss phobias today, so they should look them up as homework. So he looked up many and so did I, and we spent a while going through them, picking out some pretty funny ones. He asked me some question about the "-phobia" and "-phile" and "-mania" suffixes, so I went up to the board and wrote the word "etymology" and said, "Do you know what this is?"
He said, "Etymology? Of course I do, it's the study of the origin of words."
My jaw drops. "WOW. I am really impressed."
"I have a book on it, I have been studying English word roots recently."
"You WHAT?"
So, seriously, this guy had an English book on English etymology with him, different word roots from Latin and Greek... I told him that 95% of the people in America would have no idea what the hell we were talking about, as we were debating whether roots like "biblio-", "hydro-", "somni-", "phobos", "philos", etc, were from Latin or Greek, and going through the books. I'm not sure he believed me; it's like, in Japanese, you always combine kanji to make different words, and can guess the meanings of them, so the idea that people just don't know the roots of the words seemed impossible to him, like "but... you know the words, why don't people know the parts?" "Because Americans are stupid." "Oh?"
After work I stopped by the ekimae arcade in Warabi and played one game of PNM, but I seem to have broken a blood vessel in one of my fingers on my left hand, so it was painful to play any difficult songs. On the other hand, that meant I discovered that Linn1999 and Mr.CC and other such oldskool Bemani songs had been imported into PNM, and even better, their Hyper difficulties are around 25ish. Awesome.
I got a katsudon bento from the place near me for dinner, brought it home, and caught up some more on the Hanakimi dorama, which I completely slacked off on watching when I moved here, but since many of my younger students like it, I should finish watching it so I can discuss it with them. After all, "I think Shun is cuter than Toma" is a valid example for an upcoming lesson in comparatives...
katharos trying to call me this morning several times; it wasn't until about 12:30pm when I was on the train to work that I got out my cellphone to play with it and realized, oh shit, I had several missed calls, and of course it'd be 10 mins before I could return the call, being on the train at all. Fortunately, Katherine called back about 20 seconds before I was getting off the train in Akabane, so I talked to her then, and we made plans to meet up at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro once I'd signed in at work and all, since I didn't have any classes until 5pm. She was already there wandering around with Rebecca.Short shameful confession: I'd never actually been in the Sunshine mall before today, DESPITE the fact that Sunshine 60 Road and East Ikebukuro used to be my absolute favorite hangout spots in Tokyo. Sunshine Road has like 3 awesome arcades (used to be 4 before Moai closed), a lot of great shops, restaurants, etc, and things are open semi-late.
I found them in a place called "Namjatown", which is, for lack of a better term, a mini-theme park inside Sunshine City. It doesn't really have rides -- aside from a merry-go-round -- but it's got all of these weird theme areas. Like there's a Gyoza Town, which is completely decorated like a festival from Edo-period Tokyo, with little gyoza stands all over the place and some izakayas and a few variety shops. There are lots of weird seating areas, including a 1960's-style tatami room and such. We ordered various gyoza there for lunch, which was pretty good. Another part of Namjatown was a "Relaxation Forest" which basically had tons of places to get massages and such. Then there was this "Ghost Town" thing going on, where people had to do a ghost hunt with weird devices. Katherine apparently used the bathrooms in the Ghost Town and the toilets were even "haunted".
We went up to the top floor, which was full of little dessert shops and felt like something out of the Ghibli museum, aside from Ice Cream Town, a brightly-colored little area with various ice cream places with a big variety of flavors. While sitting outside the merry-go-round with Kat, watching people dressed in funny costumes as proprietors of the shops, I suddenly realized it was just like Final Fantasy 6 come to life. I felt like I should walk up to the costumed proprietor of the shop nearby and press A, and we'd both turn towards each other, he'd say something like "Welcome to our shop! Would you like to buy something? > Yes > No" and I'd press "No" and we'd turn away and I'd walk along, until running into a moogle or something.
Which, oddly, is exactly what happened next. A big funny-looking white cat mascot came down the hallway just as I was saying all this. Kat took a picture of me with it which looks horrible, but I took a decent picture of her with it. I think we levelled up after that, but I'm not sure since I had to find a save point and quit the game to go back to work.
Work was ok. I made a deck of phonics cards and played Go Fish with my 11-year-old student and it actually worked out really well, by the end of it she even had down the "Do you have any 'bus'?" "No. Go fish." and so on really well in English. She said she likes card games a lot, so I'm going to try to come up with more - I wonder if I can do Phonics Uno or something. If only I thought my 8-year-olds wouldn't destroy the cards I'd make them a set too...
My 7pm class asked me my blood type and embarrassingly enough, I couldn't actually remember it. I think I am Type A, but I don't really know. They told me I should go to the hospital and find out because it is very important in Japan to know this sort of thing. For homework I ordered them to write blood type personality charts, in English. That'll show them!
Only one of my 9pm students came again. The other two wrote me emails on my cellphone though, which was nice of them. (One of them loves baseball so he wrote me a message also of "Did you see the playoffs?") However, the one who showed up is the one who has never missed class since I came here; probably my most fluent student now that the army interpreter transferred to another school. I had said we'd discuss phobias today, so they should look them up as homework. So he looked up many and so did I, and we spent a while going through them, picking out some pretty funny ones. He asked me some question about the "-phobia" and "-phile" and "-mania" suffixes, so I went up to the board and wrote the word "etymology" and said, "Do you know what this is?"
He said, "Etymology? Of course I do, it's the study of the origin of words."
My jaw drops. "WOW. I am really impressed."
"I have a book on it, I have been studying English word roots recently."
"You WHAT?"
So, seriously, this guy had an English book on English etymology with him, different word roots from Latin and Greek... I told him that 95% of the people in America would have no idea what the hell we were talking about, as we were debating whether roots like "biblio-", "hydro-", "somni-", "phobos", "philos", etc, were from Latin or Greek, and going through the books. I'm not sure he believed me; it's like, in Japanese, you always combine kanji to make different words, and can guess the meanings of them, so the idea that people just don't know the roots of the words seemed impossible to him, like "but... you know the words, why don't people know the parts?" "Because Americans are stupid." "Oh?"
After work I stopped by the ekimae arcade in Warabi and played one game of PNM, but I seem to have broken a blood vessel in one of my fingers on my left hand, so it was painful to play any difficult songs. On the other hand, that meant I discovered that Linn1999 and Mr.CC and other such oldskool Bemani songs had been imported into PNM, and even better, their Hyper difficulties are around 25ish. Awesome.
I got a katsudon bento from the place near me for dinner, brought it home, and caught up some more on the Hanakimi dorama, which I completely slacked off on watching when I moved here, but since many of my younger students like it, I should finish watching it so I can discuss it with them. After all, "I think Shun is cuter than Toma" is a valid example for an upcoming lesson in comparatives...
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Randomly, I have another friend who recently visited Namjatown.
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I wouldn't know nearly as much about English if I hadn't taken Spanish.
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In school, the only place where we saw any etymology was in science class, where it was largely skipped over: if on your own time you read the side bar, you'd figure out whence the term 'hydrophilic' but most teachers skipped it and most kids therefore wondered why learning science terms was so hard.
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