You Can't Have Spelling Bees in Japanese

This morning in Japanese class, sensei was asking us about different school-related things in America. We had to write a sentence on the board using some kanji from the current lesson, and someone wrote:

"Tesuto to kuizu wa kubetsu ga nai." (I cannot distinguish [the difference between] tests and quizzes.)

Sensei looked a bit confused at the writer (who is quite a funny cookie if you ask me), and asked the class at large what the difference was between tests and quizzes. We came to the conclusion that the amount of content and point value were the distinguishing characteristics of tests and quizzes. Quizzes cover smaller amounts of material and are worth fewer points; tests cover a lot of material and are usually worth a good chunk of a student's grade. She also asked us what the word "quiz" came from, like if it was short for something, and I don't think we gave her a real answer to that.

Then we got to discussing the readings of the kanji in this lesson. It's all map-related words, like the different words for prefecture, town, city, etc. Most kanji have at least two ways of being read (yomikata), the Chinese reading and the Japanese reading, which makes kanji that much more frustrating to learn. You have to know 1) how to write it, 2) how to read it both ways, 3) the translation to English. But if you can recognize a word in kanji and know at least the meaning in English, you can make some fairly educated guesses as to what it is. At the same time, if you know a word but can't write the kanji, you can always spell it out in hiragana.

Not quite the same in English. There aren't always clues to a word's meaning in the word itself. If I were learning English as a second language, I can't imagine I would ever assume the word "lavatory" means the same thing as "toilet" or "bathroom" if you didn't tell me. I suppose you can study Latin for prefixes, suffixes, and things like that to get clues. Yet I didn't start really learning that stuff until middle school and I don't know if that would be helpful to someone learning basic English. And even if you know a word, there's always a chance you'll misspell it, so there's no hiragana-type safety net in English.

At that point we came to the concept of spelling bees. You can't have spelling bees in Japanese the same way you have them in English. In Japanese you can spell anything you can sound out, but English has all kinds of stupid rules and silent letters all over the place. You can tell a Japanese first-grader to spell some complicated Japanese word and they can do it in hiragana, but you can't tell an English-speaking child to spell "juxtaposition" at the same age and expect them to do it. In fact, I'm sure you can't ask some college students to spell "juxtaposition." Sad.

I can't think of a good segue... So, tomorrow -- dinner with John in Asakusa. I will be having a delicious dinner of fatty tuna sushi mmmmmmmm it will be great.