Japanese Language Speech Contest

redbeanpork and I went to see the Japanese language speech contest held at Melbourne Uni. I was too late to hear any of the speeches from the year 11 and 12 students, but I was there in time for the open speeches.

I honestly don't know what I expected.... I barely understood a thing. The first person sounded really eloquent and she barely had an accent. She only stumbled on one sentence, which she had to start over, but that's the only thing I noticed. Not that I could comment on the grammar or anything like that, but her flow was amazing. The second speaker was also great.

The third and fourth speakers weren't there, so they skipped to the fifth speaker, and she also barely had an accent, but her speech sounded a bit stilted, like someone who was pausing to make sure she enunciated each word clearly.

As neither redbeanpork nor I were fluent enough to understand anything, we decided to call it quits after the third speech.

It's amazing how people can learn another language. It makes me really regret not keeping up with Italian in high school when I had the chance. It would have really helped when we went to Italy. I have been listening to some Italian podcasts though, and I realised I can watch movies in other languages on some of my DVDs. There are some movies that I've seen so many times that I know what's going on even when I can't hear the dialogue.

When I need to focus at work, I'll plug in some earphones and start coding. I've found that my French Disney music is great for that, because I don't get caught up in trying to sing the song in my head, since I don't even know the words. At least, it did. I'm finding that I'm actually starting to be able to distinguish some words - even for songs where I've never heard the English version, like Au Bout du Rêve, from The Princess and the Frog.

Someone on my team was in a refugee camp with her family when she was a child. She speaks five languages, and said that two she learned from the country she was from, but she picked the rest up from the refugee camp: two from the other refugees, but one she picked up entirely from listening to the radio that the staff had playing all the time. It's really amazing how much people can pick up just from listening.