Chinese exchange students

Today during my sixth grade class I was joined by two Chinese university students, Grace and Silvia. They're both doing studies in Sapporo and came up to Wassamu for four days for... some reason. Everyone only talked in Japanese, so I didn't catch all of the details.

Anyway, they both speak Japanese and a little English, so they came to an elementary school class. They were both pretty shy, and I did most of the talking. They still had a lot of fun playing games with the students and lowkey giggling at some truly bad voice acting from the textbook DVD materials. Outside of the class, Grace is more talkative and her Japanese is definitely better than mine.

After school was over, I was invited to a welcome party that was held for them. Some BoE staff were there, too. Seven people total. Drinking was involved.

It was a lot of fun!

Since they speak Chinese, Japanese, and English, we all had a interesting discussion about language. (Sorry, Lauren!) They talked about how Chinese and Japanese use some of the same characters, and how writings and meanings have changed. For example, the restructuring of Chinese writing from traditional to simplified never happened with Japanese, so a lot of Japanese characters that used to be the same are now more complicated than the Chinese characters in common use now.

We also talked about aspects of Japanese and English that are difficult for people to learn as a foreign language. In Japanese, since the subject of a sentence is often not directly stated, "to give" and "to receive" can cause difficulties. And apparently Japanese people have trouble with the difference between "take" and "bring" in English.

Since their four day stay here overlaps with the tamaire competition this Sunday, they were roped into forming a team and participating. They pulled me into it, too, to make up the numbers. Well, they've never played the game before, so at least we can all be bad at sports together. My tall isn't as helpful as one might think.