The Language

July 14, 2008

First of all, I made it safely to the training facility and been enjoying the training program so far! I’ve met tons of interesting fellow trainees and I think we got quite a good crowd over here. There are 171 of us in total and 12 of us are going to Tanzania.
After arriving here and taking number of orientations, I’m now starting to grasp a much better picture of what’s this training’s all about.

So, here’s what the language classes are like.

The training center offers wide variety of language courses such as English, Swahili, French, Arabic, Thai, Lao, Spanish (in Nagano) etc. If you’re taking English, you’ll be assigned to two different classes depending on your language proficiency; home class (H) in the morning where you learn general English language and technical class (T) in the afternoon where you learn to improve your technical skills (teaching in my case) in English.
If you’re assigned to take a language that is not English, you will only have H classes of your assigned language all day.

Prior to the training, I was assigned to take the English classes, but upon taking a placement test and going through an interview with my T class teacher, I was able to switch into Swahili class in the morning! So, my schedule is looking something like this at this: take 3 hours of Swahili in the morning and 2 hours of teacher’s training in the afternoon for 6 days a week.

I’m pretty happy with their decision to have me switch into the Swahili class because I’m absolutely going to need it to be able to get by in Tanzanian daily lives. My teacher is from Tanzania, been teaching at this training center for more than 10 years and speaks really good Japanese and English. The class is lots of fun!
As for my T class, I’m currently preparing for a 20 minute long mini lessons on Wednesday. I’m going to do the characteristics of living things just to make it simple and fundamental. I’ll be doing more complicated topics later on though. A good news is that I’ve found out that the Tanzanian syllabus (Our library has the text books and syllabi from most of the host countries JOCVs are going to!) spends quite a good amount on parasites probably because parasitic infections are more prevalent there. Since I did parasitology in my undergrad, I’m planning on making a practice lesson out of it sometime during this training.

Anyways that’s about it for now.
Tutaonana tena! (We’ll see each other again!)

PS
My flight date out of Japan has been scheduled to be Sept. 22!