We have an interesting phenomenon happening at our house. We have a Japanese student staying in our home for a week. It is a great program really. There is a junior high in Japan that sends its students to the United States for a week when they are in 9th grade. There are 235 Japanese students scattered across households in our valley. They are getting a taste of life in America by touring various sights, attending school for a day and spending time with an American family and seeing how they live.
Our kids are so excited to have our student here that when he heads out for tours, etc, during the day, the kids constantly want to know when he will be back.
The students have studied English and some know the language better than others. Our student struggles with the language a bit and we don't know Japanese so we are doing some improvising during our conversations. During our orientation before the students arrived, we were told that the students may nod while we talked to them even though they don't understand what we are saying. My husband and I chuckled at that and expressed how we had been through such a scenario before. Chance would nod at us sometimes even when he did not know what we were saying. We are onto that technique.
The students learn English, but putting a language into practice in an actual foreign country is a different matter entirely. My husband and I have both lived in foreign countries for an extended period of time...my husband in Spain and I in the Netherlands. I studied the language before I arrived in the Netherlands but once I was there and talking to native speakers, I thought,"What language was it that I learned? These people speak a different Dutch than I know!" The people talked so fast and they didn't use words in the same ways that I had read about in the book. They did use the same words, but they said them slightly different or didn't enunciate the words as perfectly as the way the book had laid them out. So we feel for this boy who is living with us for a time.
He has been sitting in the middle row of the van while we drive since it is easier for him to fit there instead of squeezing into the back with the kids. This has made some conversations very interesting. When I am asking the student for instance to choose between two activities, Chance is in the very back not hearing all of the conversation so he has lots of questions.
"We are going to carve pumpkins?" Chance calls from the back. I had asked our student which activity he wanted to do and he had answered yes to both of them, so I was trying to restate the question using different words so that he might understand what I was asking easier.
"We are going to carve pumpkins?" Chance asks from the back seat.
"No, Hironao might carve pumpkins."
"What?! Why can't we go?"
"Because it is for the big scouts and boys from his school not for us."
"Do we get to carve pumpkins?' Chance wants to know.
"Yes. Later."
Chance's older brother has found himself in the old role of explaining things to Chance as I drive when Chance does not understand all that I have said. Chance can hear a lot, but just missing one word or hearing one thing wrong can really throw off an interpretation of what has been said.
Thankfully, Chance misses less conversations than ever before now. His hearing is not perfect, but he is not missing out on all that he used to. Moments like this remind us of just how well he does on a day to day basis.
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