Posts Tagged ‘eikaiwa’

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.

English in Japanese Dramas

I don’t watch many Japanese dramas, but I did manage to catch part of an episode of one called Asakusa Fukumaru Ryokan last week. It is a drama about a Japanese style inn in Tokyo’s Asakusa district and its employees.

It just so happened that the episode I found myself watching was one focusing on a new member of their staff who helps them learn basic English to communicate with their foreign customers. Here’s a clip of some the the English scenes:

The new worker impresses her co-workers when she is able to talk to foreign customers, after which she teaches a few basic phrases to them. I guess a lot of it was meant to be cute comic relief, especially with the one woman who can’t answer the foreigners’ follow-up question. However, if it was kind of painful for me to watch because the actress playing the English-speaking staff member delivered her English lines so badly (would it have been so hard to get one of those foreigners on the set to coach her to speak her lines without the feel of strained reciting of katakana English?).

Later on in the episode she starts getting close to one of the foreign guests, a white guy who can speak Japanese. It looked like some sort of romance was developing between them, and the other Japanese characters seemed to have nothing but positive things to say about it. Having my fill of drama for the day, I ended up changing the channel before the episode was over.

Yuri Morishita Lost 2 Million Yen in Nova Collapse

An article in Mainichi’s Japanese edition today mentions that gravure Idol Yuri Morishita [pictured above] admitted that she lost a huge sum of money when English conversation school chain Nova went bankrupt. She told reporters that she had bought 2 million yen [$17,800 US dollars] lesson package, but only had to the time to take 3 lessons before Nova collapsed. Much like thousands of other Nova students, she will get no refund for pre-paid lessons. Morishita said losing all that money has been the biggest shock of her life.