“Konnichiwa! Kyoo wa taihen samui desu ne. Peyton-san, shuumatsu nani o shita no?” Yumiko Keitges, Japanese instructor at TCU, always begins her classes with a bit of small talk to get her students geared up and ready to study what she considers one of the most difficult languages to learn. The small talk covers the weather (“it’s a very cold today isn’t it”) to interesting pieces of news (last year she talked about Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential campaign) to the students’ activities since she’s last seen them (“Peyton, what did you do this weekend?”). Depending on the class level – there are six levels, all taught by Yumi-sensee as her students call her – responses can vary from a simple “hai” (yes) to actual conversations in Japanese.
Japanese is a difficult language to learn and to teach. It’s similar to Chinese in that aside from the challenge of learning to speak it, there are characters, or symbols, to learn in order to properly write the language. These symbols are called kanji. Kanji represent words or ideas. For example, there’s a kanji that means both “sun” and “day,” and is also part of a larger kanji that means “hot.” Each word is pronounced differently, and the kanji for “hot” has other parts to it. But because all three words are related, they all use that one kanji. This entire system was borrowed from China thousands of years ago by the Japanese who then modified it to fit their needs. The kanji themselves didn’t change, but pronunciation and occasionally the meaning were changed; the Japanese also created two entirely new symbol sets – hiragana and katakana. There are approximately 40 different hiragana symbols, and at least twice that many katakana. The katakana symbols are used to write out words that have been borrowed from other languages, so they have to represent sounds and letter combinations that do not naturally appear in the Japanese language. For example, coffee would be “ｺ-ﾋ-” which is pronounced “koohii.”
Hiragana symbols stand for groupings of a consonant and a vowel, which in turn make up larger words, which are almost always written in kanji. Or as junior Libby Davis puts it, “hiragana is the easy way out if you don’t remember the kanji for a word. Everyone can still understand what you’re trying to write.” Generally hiragana is used for things like particles (my, your, to, from, for, etc), or people’s names; kanji is used for all the other words in a sentence. The Japanese use literally thousands of kanji, and each symbol can range from a simple two-stroke symbol to one requiring fifteen or more strokes. The kanji for “love” is one of those elaborate kanji, while “people” is one of the simplest kanji to learn. If that isn’t confusing enough, individual kanji can have multiple meanings and thus have a different pronunciation for each meaning.
It all sounds quite complicated, but Keitges starts her students off slowly – they write in the familiar Roman alphabet at first so they can get used to speaking in an entirely different language with different grammar rules. Word order, for one thing, is not nearly as important in Japanese: while particles must go with the word they modify, entire phrases can be switched around without sacrificing the overall sentence meaning. Students begin learning hiragana in the middle of their first semester, and move on to katakana after that. Keitges devotes an entire lesson to learning how to write the characters properly. It’s very different from the Roman characters used in English, and a lot of students struggle at first, but Keitges is never frustrated with their progress, or lack thereof. What does concern her is something many teachers of all subjects have to deal with:
“The thing that is the most frustrating is when a student doesn’t come to me for help when it’s needed. I don’t like to see students give up,” she said. “I want to help them but I can’t make students come to see me.”
Depending on how fast the class progresses, kanji can be introduced as early as the late second semester, or early on in the third. And what are the first (well okay, the first and the second) kanji students learn? Why, Japan of course! 日本 in kanji, にほん in hiragana, and Nihon in Roman letters is the land of the rising sun. Which, interestingly enough, is almost exactly what the literal translation of those two kanji are: “origin” and “sun.” If you remember that the Chinese created those kanji, it makes a lot of sense, Keitges explains:
“The Chinese would look to the East and see the sun rising right where they knew Japan was. So to them, it would have looked like the sun was rising from Japan.”
Keitges often uses stories like that to help her students remember kanji. Some are historical; others are just descriptive. For example, the kanji for “inexpensive” is written with the kanji for “woman” underneath a rooftop. That becomes “housewives are cheap” and no student forgets how to write “inexpensive” after that.
Keitges herself is from Japan, outside of Tokyo, the capital city. She knew early on in school that she could not make a career in the business field: not only was she not very good at math and science, but also she “wasn’t good at selling things. I would rather help people.” And so Keitges decided to turn to education. After finishing college, she lived in Japan for a while, teaching English. But that wouldn’t last long. She had always been interested in America, saying that she “was too wild for Japan.” It’s been almost two decades since Keitges left Japan for America, where she started looking for a job teaching Japanese.
“I knew I couldn’t continue teaching English in America since it’s not my native language. I knew it would be easier to get a job teaching Japanese.” And she was right – especially as Japan became a bigger player in the global economy. She lived in New York for a time, before moving to Denton, Texas and getting a job at TCU. It’s a long commute to the university – almost forty-five minutes, depending on traffic – but Keitges doesn’t mind the drive. She lives by herself, since she never married nor had any children and the rest of her family still lives in Japan.
Looking at her now, it’s hard to picture Keitges as a wild teenager. It’s not that she looks old, quite the contrary – Keitges looks young considering that she’s been teaching at TCU for 18 years. Her shoulder length hair is still pure black and styled in a different hairdo every day, ranging from buns to ponytails to pulling half of her hair back with a barrette. Her face, though tanned, is still free of wrinkles, apart from a few laugh lines around her eyes. Her clothes are very stylish and colorful – Keitges is one of a special few who can pull off bright orange pants and baby doll tops, although she is famous for being a cheap shopper. Keitges says she doesn’t buy things unless they’re on sale or really inexpensive to begin with. It’s more that her personality doesn’t exude vibes of wildness. But even her name supports her claim: Yumiko literally means a free and beautiful child. She’s energetic and cheerful, but also a diligent and caring instructor. She’d have to be, since she not only teaches four classes a semester but also coordinates a summer program in Japan for interested students at TCU. Recent graduate Mindy Tomlin adds that Keitges offered to (and did) teach her one-on-one once a week to make up for the class she had to miss due to a scheduling conflict. Not many professors are able or willing to do that much for a single student.
Being the only Japanese instructor at TCU does mean an increased workload, and at first Keitges admits that her task seemed very daunting. Luckily, she received a lot of support from her fellow faculty members, especially from the Dean of AddRan. “He was very supportive of me – if I wanted to go back to Japan to research things he was always willing to finance the trip,” she recalls. Now she enjoys being the only Japanese instructor at TCU – it gives her complete control over how the program runs. It also means that Keitges can spend more time doing what she loves best: interacting with her students. Any of her students she passes on campus are fair game; students who wouldn’t normally interact much with her are cheerily greeted. She even keeps in touch with graduates and former students.
One of her major faults, Keitges admits, is that she can be very soft on her students. She may be one of the few professors who does accept late work and doesn’t penalize it brutally. She’s learned that students often feel worse after she gives them a disappointed look rather than if she just marked their homework down for tardiness. Davis, who has turned in a few late assignments herself and admits to feeling guilty each time, thinks it probably has to do with the fact that Keitges is the only Japanese instructor, so students really form a good relationship with her.
“Most of the languages TCU offers have multiple professors. We’ve just got Yumi-sensee, and after two and a half years, a disappointing look is so much more effective than docking a few points. It’s kind of scary though – because she never gets mad at us for turning in late work. I’ve never seen her get angry,” said Davis.
Keitges concurred. “I’ve only really gotten mad once in ten years,” she laughs. “And even then it wasn’t over a student.” Once she told her Daily Usage students this, they were impressed. The class swerved away from a conversation on “if” clauses and to the incident in question, which unfortunately remained mostly a mystery. Keitges admitted that the other person involved was another teacher and that he had “crossed a line” somehow, but no amount of cajoling could have convinced her to share the details, and her students never discovered who the other professor was.
Not even her first year students’ mistakes upset her and after talking to students in different classes, it seems there is at least one mistake that everyone always makes. One of the basic sentence patterns Keitges teaches is differentiating between a subject of the sentence and the direct object of the sentence. It always ends with one student eating another student. It’s a very simple mistake – there are two different particles, and they determine whether one student is just eating (“anata wa tabemasu”) or if another student is being eaten (“anata o tabemasu”). Everyone, especially Keitges, just laughs. There are no hard feelings, except maybe for the “eaten” student.
Keitges loves her job; she loves teaching students and watching them master the difficult language that is Japanese. There are a lot of laughs along the way, and some of the mangled sentences that students come up with are hilarious. Everyone picks on each other a little bit, but Keitges makes as much fun of herself as any student. Apparently, she can eat 50 to 100 sushi in one sitting! And when learning how to use comparative sentences, one traditional example is that “Yumi-sensee ate more sushi than I did.” Everyone enjoys themselves in Keitges’ classes, and they should. Not every language class can have their own Yumi-sensee to teach and laugh with them.
