From Japan to America teaching comes easy for Kono

In her second year at Georgia College & State University, Yumiko Kono continues to educate students about the Japanese language and culture.

Learning a new language can be difficult. New characters, symbols, grammar, and accents take time and hard work to memorize properly.
The accent can often be one of the major stumbling blocks. In high school, some of us were subjected to well-meaning teachers who butchered the accent. I learned two different means of pronunciation in my high school German class, neither of them were ever quite correct.

Kono is from Fujisawa-city Japan, and has no trouble communicating the nuances of the Japanese language. She is very well traveled having visited the United States before, as well as Italy, France, Germany, Singapore, and Thailand.

Kono was working for an IT company in Japan when she decided that she wanted to become a Japanese language teacher.

“It’s hard to get a job as a language teacher in Japan,” Kono said. “I also wanted to study and improve my English, so I came to America to experience teaching Japanese. I applied for an exchange program, and the program sent me to GC&SU”

Since part of her job is to teach the culture, as well as the language, it’s important to her that we learn about the differences between the two societies. As with most industrialized countries outside of the United States, Japan has a very efficient mass transportation system.

“In Milledgeville, there is no transportation, you need a car to get around. I don’t have a car now, so I have to ask people to take me to the grocery store, or anywhere else I might have to go. When I was living in Tokyo, I lived in an apartment close to the station; it only took five minutes to get to the station,” said Kono.

Here in America, one of the most popular and commonly seen pieces of Japanese culture is Anime, Japanese animation.

“Japan has a lot of western culture. Japan is very good at revising things
from other countries. We took the computer and made it smaller and
smaller.animation movies are just from Japan and that makes it original,” said Kono.

Approximately 10 years ago, anime was relatively new, and geared toward children. As it grew more popular, cartoons directed toward older audiences were developed. Kono spoke of Anime directors as some of us would speak of live action movie producers.

Kono enjoys American pop music because she doesn’t always understand the lyrics, she likes to be able to concentrate on the music.
She also mentioned the fact that a lot of modern Japanese music is starting to sound a lot like American music. Older Japanese people like some different types of music, country, traditional Japanese music, and “Inca” are a few of the favorites.

Kono’s grandfather was a Buddhist monk, and this has caused her to have some interesting religious beliefs.

“Not all Japanese people believe in one specific religion.we respect nature, or a God. Some of the beliefs come from Shinto beliefs, but I don’t believe in Shinto,” said Kono. “We feel that nature is a very important thing for us, and that we should respect our parents, and relatives. Even if people don’t have a specific religion, we have a certain discipline, or belief. I personally believe that that kind of belief has had an effect on education. We believe we have to make an effort to be a good person.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 6 2002. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry