I had to attend a training session for my job yesterday. This usually serves as a pretext for giving me the coming month`s schedule and could thus be sent to me via email saving me the cost and hassle of travelling nearly all the way across the city traversing four different train lines. I was the only one out of the four people who started with me last April to require a repeat session it seemed as the others weren`t summoned or (hopefully for my pride) didn`t show up. Though I`ll be the first to admit I`m not the best teacher in the world.

It went well but I am working at elementary schools (11 and 12 year olds) where the most difficult sentence is “What food do you like?” The training session was done by an outside company I believe (only my amateurish comapny would be suckered in to paying for this session privately) and thus instead of being barked at for three hours by a Hungarian Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike, we had a Canadian 18 years in the country who gave us useful tips for teaching at Junior High Schools. “When you`re teaching the present continuous tense…” was a particularly unapplicable sample sentence of the session.

When I introduce myself to anyone the first thing I say is that I have a degree in French and German. I didn`t say it this time as it`s pretentious for one thing and secondly I have barely spoken those languages for over a year and am rapidly forgetting them. However I can understand complicated grammatical terms like present continuous tense, auxiliary verb, modal verb and indirect object. Yesterday I didn`t mention I spoke those languages only hinting at my average gaijin Japanese ability and was patronised for three hours by the bloke with fluent Japanese ability and similar level to my Japanese ability I`d wager in Chinese and Korean. I really hate being patronised.

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