Furu Anime Panikku

Due to my trip to Japan, I missed 4 lessons and had to attend 4 other makeup sessions. The first session began yesterday. It was my first time entering the new class with a new teacher and strangers as classmates.

The new teacher was the total opposite from my teacher in the normal class. She’s hyper and really talkative. Even before the lesson began, the first thing she began ranting on was about how she must shift houses because hordes of cockroaches emerged from the garbage chute and infested her kitchen and washroom earlier in the day. The way she interacts with her students is really dramatic, often resulting in the whole class bursting out in hearty laughter.

She focuses quite a lot on nudging the students to form their own sentences that are totally far from the boring ones in the textbook, even at the expense of allowing herself to be the subject of the students teasing. Also, one thing I found refreshing was that she taught her students some of the words you never would never learn in class, such as the well-known てめえ, which shouldn’t be a stranger to you if you’ve experienced a fair deal of popular Japanese culture and media.

There was one example with an image depicting a guy who overslept and is calling his girlfriend who was already waiting at the date venue. After a student formed the sentence for it, she proceeded on to asking what we thought she would say if she was the girlfriend. Instantly, I heard phrases such as 「てめえ、殺す！」. She then looked at me and jokingly told me not to inform my other teacher what extra vocabulary I was actually learning in her class.

Attending this new class felt a little like attending a gameshow. You get all kinds of unexpected questions asked by the teacher, and even more unexpected replies by the students. Learning Japanese never was so hilarious. I wonder what will happen in the following 3 lessons to come.