etoileplaneteblog

[etoileplaneteblog]

Debate and depressed

I just joined in a debate club. I felt like there is no space for me. They did not need me. People will leave me. I was disturbing people because I cannot speak English fluently and I had a feeling that I will drag the other person down if I join a competition as a team. I felt so depressed and feel lonely in the mid of the members.

I know it is true that my bad command of English is disadvantageous for me and may work against the effort that the other teammate strive to make. However, I also feel these things I mentioned above were my stupid assumptions. In addition, if you keep thinking about it, I guess these bad situations that I imagined will come true eventually. I feel I am just stay in my shell and I shut down from the outer world. And also, no matter what I do, I feel no one would really care about me. I think the reason why people will be nervous in front of many people is that they scare of getting attentions from them. I think having a mindset that no one will really seriously care about you might push yourself to break and go forward from your shell. (If literally no one would care about you, it would be very sad tho)

I think these struggles are like an endless game. If you want to improve English debating skills, it is preferable for you to have a good English oral and listening command. However, if you want to improve your debate skills, you should keep debating and brush up your skills. When I was in my home university back in Japan, I could not brush up my debating skills for some reasons. I am not the person who can deal with things very efficiently. I always thought I want to be good at debating and I always struggle with it. I am not good at English either. I was often pointed out the mistakes of English pronunciations by some senpai who keeps forgetting my name and my grade. (Is it sarcastic?) I also felt like I do not have a place in this community. This is because I did not have friends there, I did not get along with the members there and I started to take a distance with the community. Also, strong people always remain in this community and weak people will leave it. That is how this world works as well.

I mistakenly believe that if I study abroad and participate in some debating club, maybe I can improve both English and debating skills. But in the first place, I cannot catch up with other people unless you already have a good English commanding skill.

I also think I lose the gut that "I HATE LOSING". Why? I don't know. Maybe I know the fact that there are bunch of people who are very competitive and smart? I feel I lost the power that I have. I feel like nothing.

And then, one of my memories was flashed back. When I was in a high school, I was rejected to involve in an English competition just because I am not good at English. I was told by one of the group members that if you cannot speak English "KAERE" (which means get out of here in Japanese) I felt extremely sad and angry at that time. Some teachers from my high school said my goal is too high that is why I feel depressed. That is true. I also set my goal too high to reach out and achieve.

I will watch debate videos now. Keep going. If I will feel the same on Monday, I can just quit and escape. Good night.

[etoileplaneteblog]

Week4 in the US

It has been 1 month since I came here. Wow time flies very quickly.

Brief summary of my week

Fri/Sat/Sun I went to Park Forest for Unite UW program.

Mon-Fri Classes and midterm (I have only one midterm from French history class)

Got used to the life much more than last week here. Yen got so weak that I decided to convert most of yen I have to pay for the rent and food account of the coming quarter and the spring quarter. Also, I tried to find a part time job here. I talk to myself this is life but at the same time I feel a bit sad because I worked quite a lot to gain money for studying abroad and I was not planning to work here to focus on my study. However, considering I didn't get much amount of scholarship, I need to work to lessen my financial burden. Also. I think it is part of the valuable experience to work here using English. It was my dream to use English in a job. I think it might be a good opportunity to learn working culture here. I feel the way of thinking toward time is completely different from the U.S. and in Japan. I feel like in the State, managing time is one of the individual's responsibilities and it is not something that is controlled or supervised by someone or something. (schools, companies, other adults) I got surprised that in one of the classes, many students started to prepare to leave the class 3-4 minutes before the class will end even though the professor is still talking, and then when the buzzer goes off, almost all the students in the class stand and walk to the door together and make a traffic jam inside a classroom. I feel it is silly because if everyone starts to prepare at their own pace after the class end, they don't have to wait in front of the door to get out of the classroom. In Japan, at least in my opinion personally, listening to a prof or a lecturer to the end of his/her lecture is commonly practiced and it also means showing the respect of them. I do not say students here are rude, but I personally think here in the US, listening to the prof until they stop talking in their lecture is not considered as showing a respect of them. They are doing what they think it is natural that is why they start to prepare to go home so early.

-English

Still have difficulties to understand everything but I think my listening skills slowly but surely get improved. When I just arrive here, I could not understand fast English at all. It was like a chunk of magic spells. However, right now, I can detect the flow of fast English as a chain of the words. However, the thing is even though I can get the sentence as a combination of words, I often struggle with understanding what the chain of the words means as a whole. I think I cannot catch up the speed of fast English and I take too much time to process the words. However, words run on and on and on one after another so as a whole, I cannot completely get the meaning of the whole sentence. Therefore, listening to fast English put a heavy burden on my brain and my brain get short very easily. And then I got sleepy in the middle of the lecture, and I often lose my consciousness for 5-10 min. After I fully wake up, I always regret why I sleep during the lecture.

-Foods

The best food I ate this week is hot pot!! I got a huge discount and had all-you-can-eat kind of hot pot with Wednesday Unite UW members. I ate meat and vegies to the heart content. (Stomach content??lol) as I cannot eat them a lot in a daily basis, and I also ate fruits and cakes! They were super super delicious. Hot pot is similar to nabe in Japan, but I feel shabushabu is much more similar than nabe. Hot pot here is Chinese style and there are two separate areas in one hot pot. You can choose two kinds of soups and fill them into these areas. You can order meats, fish, vegetables and whichever sauce you like. Then, you will eat them together.

The worst food is mashed potato. I bought three packs of powdered mashed potato just because it looks delicious and cheap (only around 3 dollar/each pack) The way to make it is very simple. You pour hot water in it and stir it with spoon. The taste was not very bad but kinda artificial. Even though the package says garlic, it doesn't taste like garlic. I mixed it with some creamy dressing and ate it with baby spinach.

-What I am thinking

I really want to do whatever I cannot do outside of the state. When I am fighting with a large amount of homework (most of the time, reading) and looking up for the words that I don't know, I often get a bit irritated and get bored of it because I can do these things in Japan as well :( I think working, chatting with friends, discussing with classmates, visiting many places here and experiencing what I have not experienced yet are very valuable and I am happy to do these things to enrich my life. It would be better to concentrate on doing homework in a short amount of time and try to make time to spare for valuable activities listed above. I should measure how long it takes for me to complete homework haha. I want to use time wisely and efficiently!

-P.S.

My grandparents sent me a package from Japan. :-: There are lots of foods that I like. Thank you, grandparents. This package is my savoir!

#usa #english #grandparents #hotpot

[etoileplaneteblog]

About English

I love English. I simply like to talk in the language. It is my language to communicate with my significant other as well as friends and people here. When I was young, I wanted to speak other languages than Japanese. I believed that I would be able to speak English very fluently once I study abroad. I know it's not true. It is definitely not true.

When I arrived here, I found many international students (not limited to from Japan but also from some other countries) speak English far better than me. I knew it before I arrived here tho.

I try not to compare me with other students. Different people have different personal experience, different struggles and different way of thinking. However, whenever I feel impressed with how well and naturally, they speak it, I often feel jealous, a little bit sad but something fueling in my mind. That is like a detonator for me to keep studying it even though I feel tired, and my brain is about to boil after a long school day. I sometimes feel I wish I could go to the US when I was a child. I wish I could start speaking English earlier. However, I think it's meaningless to talk about a figment of imagination. We cannot get our time back. We cannot go back to the past. Only we can do is to proceed and live in this moment, now.

I often experience the language barrier here. I want to express my feelings in the way I express in my native language. (but I cannot) The words coming from my mouth are always simplified and monotonous, unnatural and so on. I am struggling to listen to someone speaks fast and pronouncing words correctly.

You can live in a country even though you cannot speak its language very fluently. Also, I know it is so difficult or almost impossible for someone started learning the language after becoming an adult to master the language and command it as native speakers do. However, I think it is better to improve it to the extent that I can do it. Better than I do nothing right? You know, you can learn any languages you want at any time you like. There is no age limitation to learn some languages. I try to brush up my French as well and next time I will write about French in this blog

Struggles of English

-classes

Ex. A prof said something funny. Everyone laughs at it but I don't because I cannot understand what the prof said or get a funny point of it.

Ex. I often have many difficulties with catching what other classmates are trying to say. One of the profs often rephrases what they said in a class and then I can understand what the student said. Listening and speaking are the most difficult things for me.

-stores

When I finished slashing a card to pay for goods

Shop clerk: You are good.

me: (cannot get what it means and keep slashing a card)

shop clerk: You are good!

I sometimes cannot catch "that is all?" as well.

-chatting with other students

That's super challenging moment for me. They often speak super-fast and use slangs. If there are lots of people talking and chatting around us, I simply cannot get any of what the other person talks to me. (cuz I easily get distracted)

Things that I try to do

-try not to use Japanese (media, novel, news, video, everything) as much as I can. I access to Instagram time by time (because I want to know what my friends enjoy doing so on and so forth hahah I am a nosy person) but I try not to look at news in Japanese (even though it is easily catch my sight and pop into my brain quickly)

-try to listen to English and watch English movie as much as I can

I try to make my mind getting used to English and expose myself in English-spoken environment.

#US #english

[etoileplaneteblog]

Week 3 in the US

It has been 3 weeks and more since I arrived here on 21 of September. When I came here, I was a bit nervous, but I was pretty sure I'm ok. Got surprised at the view of houses, trees, many cars and how different and picturesque the landscape was. I didn't know anyone in this country at that time. I didn't have any family members, any friends, and any relatives here. Right now, I have some people that I know ranging from quite well to not so well, classmates, roommates, and other Japanese international students.... Even now, I sometimes feel lonely not having close and intimate friends to go out and chat with. I tell myself that I will be fine, but the introvert nature of myself always prevents me from starting a conversation myself so that I always wait for someone to talk to me. The language barrier sometimes terrifies me to talk to someone with fear of not being able to understand each other. I feel like even though I have studied English for a long time (since I was 10 yrs old), my English is slow, sometimes broken and often tedious. I can foresee my long long long language journey from here.

#Week 3 in the US

English

I get used to English little by little but I cannot understand what people are talking about if they speak too fast. I am still struggling with the difficulty of communications.

Food

The cost of living is too high. If you want to save money and stay healthy, you have to think carefully what you choose to eat. On the first week and the second week, I had a lot of opportunities to get a free food because many clubs had lunch meetings and dinner meetings to hunt more freshmen to join in their teams. However, even in these occasions, most of the time we got pizza pizza brito pizza....something fat and greasy. Snacks and juice are easily accessible as the price is chaper. (but still more expensive than Japan) I genuinely feel Korean food and Chinese foods here are very tasty for me and compatible with my mouth. However, sushi is suck. (How come do they put cheese in it! It is not terrible but tastes weird.) I noticed that when I buy some American foods, I often image the taste of the products in Japan. Therefore, I often feel I am betrayed by the food when I actually taste them.

Places I visited

I haven't been to many places so far. U district is fun but all we can find are supermarkets and restaurants. I went to Capitol hill and international district. It was so much fun to visit various kinds of markets and colorful towns. Been overwhelmed by the gum wall & had to put my gum onto the wall after chewing it.

Places that I want to visit

I already went Target so I want to go to Costco next time.

Someone's recommendation:

QFC, I forgot the name of a coffee shop :-:

#English #usa

[etoileplaneteblog]

My introduction

Hello. This is etoile planete. I'm an exchange student coming from japan and studying French in the US. This sounds a bit weird but it's ok. I will write about what I feel and think about anything regarding the life in the US, my studies, my concerns & I would love to share something good and bad, fun and sad, and so on!

#usa #japan #france