Day 118 (Osaka) : Day of the speech contest

Today was even shorter than I was expecting. I thought we would have class for the first there hours and then do the speech contest during the original lunch period. I was off the mark by a good two hours. We basically came in for only the first session of kanji review before starting our hike across town to the auditorium where the contest was held. It was incredibly boring and really difficult to understand the people who were talking even though their Japanese was "very" good. A lot of the third year students still had problems with pronunciation and some of their sounds would blur between two or three other sounds so it was hard to be sure what they meant.

This year was almost entirely third year students, which I suspect is the norm for this kind of event. There was one second year student and one first year student, Shou from my class. It was actually pretty impressive listening to his speech even though I thought the theme was kind of lame. His Japanese level was on par with or better than most of the third year students. He even pulled third place at the end. Second place went to a guy who was talking about how to meet new lovers and first went to a girl who used the Chinese Olympic opening speech as her launching point for her theme. Her Japanese was by far the most fluent and natural sounding.

I have to point out that the guy from my class has a huge advantage in that he lives with his Japanese aunt or grandmother and uses Japanese everyday on a regular basis. That and his obsession with Japanese cartoons probably gives him more exposure to the language than I get watching old American sitcoms.