Posts Tagged ‘eikaiwa’

G.Com Nova celebrates its second birthday

Two years have passed since English conversation school chain Nova imploded. G.communication, the company that purchased the remnants of Nova, is now running commercials that celebrate the 2nd birthday of the G.com Nova brand:

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The Nova usagi is back

English language school chain Nova has a new commercial for its kids’ classes:

The infamous Nova usagi is back, joined by a blonde foreigner speaking with a heavy gaijin-san accent.

The end of the commercial adds a “G Com before the familiar Nova jingle, perhaps as a reminder to viewers that this is Nova is different from the Nova that ripped off so many former students.

Related Story: Former Nova president Nozomu Sahashi was sentenced to three years, six months in prison yesterday for embezzling some 320 million yen in company funds.

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
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Japanese TV news reports on poor working conditions of foreign English teachers

NTV’s “Real Time News” sometimes airs some pretty dumb special reports, but it also devotes considerable time to serious issues. Here’s a very good report on how using dispatch companies to employ foreign English teachers is killing the quality of English education in Japanese public schools and making foreigners endure poor working conditions (subtitled in English):
Part 1

Part 2

These videos were originally uploaded by the General Union, which seems to be doing some good work fighting for better working conditions and posting the latest news on this issue.

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• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
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Sensei-tional: Confessions of English Teachers in Japan

I recently received a copy of the book Sensei-tional! Confessions of English Teachers in Japan, which has the following description on its back cover:

“The vast majority of English teachers in Japan are horny and hedonistic travellers, desperate to delay their adulthood by drinking as much as is humanly possible and shagging anything with a pulse.”

Outrageous, grotesque, and frequently hilarious, “Sensei-tional” is a collection of true tales about the misadventures of language teachers in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Rex Chesney has been teaching in Tokyo for several years and here he compiles the most jaw-dropping anecdotes he has heard from his colleagues or experienced himself. Stories of drunkenness, debauchery and ineptitude, with a cast of gangsters, stalkers, transsexuals and hyperactive five-year-olds.

When you are an English teacher in Japan, anything can happen.

As the title of his book suggests, Rex Chesney’s book is a collection of wacky and sensational stories from the eikaiwa world, with special emphasis on Nova. The English teachers in his book regularly show up to work drunk, seduce their students, pass out drunk on the subway, and commit petty crimes. Chesney also tells tales of the terrible students, employees, and cops as well.

After reading the back cover the the book and the wild generalization it made about foreign English teachers in Japan, I really wanted to hate this book. However, it’s pretty clear that the focus of this book is ridiculous comedy, and few people who buy this book would be seeking a fair or accurate picture of what life is like in Japan for most English teachers. Several of the stories are actually amusing, especially when they’ve got illustrations such as the one below:

Near the end of the book, Chesney concedes that there are some decent individuals among the English teachers in Japan, which he calls “a few good apples floating in the barrel of scum.” It seems he doesn’t consider himself one of those apples.

Sensei-tional can be found at Amazon.com and Lulu.

Nova Expanding Into University Education?

News from LetsJapan.org:

Strange but true, g.education announced plans to open a Nova school on the campus of Aichi Gakuin University in April.

According to the Mainichi Shimbun, the opening of a private business on a university campus is almost unheard of. The article notes that the president of g.communication, Masaki Inayoshi, is a graduate of Aichi Gakuin and apparently this connection was used to help set up a Nova school with the university in order to boost the English ability on campus. The new Nova school will use the current 9-level curriculum and offer lessons at a discount to university staff and students.

English Teaching in Japan

Update (May 2008) : Mark Ledbetter has responded to this post and your comments!

ORIGINAL POST:

Mark Ledbetter is an American who has lived in Japan for 28 years and teaches English as a profession. Last night he appeared on Japanese TV to quiz celebrities on their English and inform the correct some misconceptions the viewing public may have held about converting certain katakana words to English.

For one of his questions, he asked the celebrities to tell him the English word for クーポン (coupon). One of the celebrities answered with the Japanese reading of the katakana word, which sounds like “koo-pon.” I think that most English speakers would be able to understand her answer as “coupon.” However, Ledbetter said she was wrong, as this video clip shows:

According to Ledbetter, the only correct way to pronounce coupon is “kyoo-pon.” He even claimed that native English speakers wouldn’t understand the word if it was pronounced as “koo-pon,” and they might even mistake it for “cool pond.”

As an American, I have heard coupon pronounced both as “koo-pon” and “kyoo-pon,” favoring the “koo-” version in my speech. Baffled by Ledbetter’s claim, I checked Dictionary.com:

Every entry in their database favored either dual use of “kyoo”/”koo” or exclusive use of the “koo” pronunciation. Random house describes the version Ledbetter promotes as an American variant with “an unhistorical y-sound not justified by the spelling. This pronunciation is used by educated speakers and is well-established as perfectly standard, although it is sometimes criticized.” Maybe Ledbetter has been away from America so long that he has forgotten how those who are not “educated” pronounce their English.

Ledbetter also taught viewers that they should not use convert the katakana term “body check” into English when talking about being searched by security at the airport. Instead they should use the term “body search.”

According to Ledbetter, if you said you were given a “body check” at the airport, native English speakers would assume that you had been playing hockey and received a nasty body check. It might not be the correct word in English to describe being searched by security, but given the context it would be presented in, wouldn’t it be pretty hard for such a ridiculous misunderstanding to take place?

Oh Japanese TV’s English teaching programs, how I hate thee.