Literacy with Japanese 2

 

                    わすれもの was the second book I read with my group. I’d definitely would say that this one was a lot more of a challenge than that of the Mantis book we read before. My group struggled a lot with wondering what some of the words met. Having help from our Sensei helped a lot to gain an understanding of what was going on. わすれもの was about a boy attending school the whole week, and each day he realizes he has forgotten something. 

                    I couldn’t grab a lot of vocabulary to learn from this as my group’s main focus was to understand the conversation that the student was having with his teacher. 

                    I noticed a lot of cultural differences in this story. A lot of American vs Japanese differences. The main one being the first thing that the boy forgets, his school shoes. I knew about the idea of changing shoes from outdoor shoes to school shoes. Though it makes me wonder what would he do if he did forget his indoor shoes. Do they have others he can use or does he have to use his outdoor shoes for school shoes? I wonder if that’d be seen as a disrespect to the school if he did. Though other things like him forgetting his lunch and his textbooks I think fit more into an American mindset of what a kid could lose. 

                    The photos in the books definitely helped a bit to know what he was referring to as being lost. They showed a photo of him realizing he had lost the item and then another photo of him telling the teacher. I feel we struggled with the school shoe ones as we don’t have the issue of loosing school shoes, since we don’t change them here.