Mind Your Language

As some of you might know I'm originally from Finland, but have lived in the UK for a fair number of years (six, to be exact).
I' d like to think my English accent as fairly good. It usually takes around ten minutes into a conversation for a new acquaintance to realise that I'm a foreigenr and then ask me where I'm from, but no-one ever expects me to be specifically from Finland even though other Nordic countries are sometimes offered as guesses. On more than one occasion I've been thought of as being from the Westcountry. (don't ask me why).
But here is the thing. Even though people usually spot that I am a foreigner after a while, they always comment on my accent: It's very posh, apparently. This is what happened the other night, again. Questions and wonder ensue. Why? How? 'Oh god, you do sound posh, don't you?' . As a foreigner, I should probably have a more foreign accent...? I have no idea why I have developed this 'posh' accent, but I do try to keep it 'generic English'. I think it would be far weirder if I as a foreigner adopted a strong regional accent or perhaps used cockney rhyming slang.

My English teacher back in Helsinki always warned against trying to sound TOO English by using slang, but especially by swearing, as swearing is a very demanding local style of speaking and should generally not be attempted by foreigners unless they are next to fluent. You'll end up sounding like an idiot if you use profanities willy-nilly, without the required skill and that certain panache, and it's actually very hard to acquire that kind of linguistic and cultural knowledge and self-confidence that credible swearing requires. Just as an example, it took me about five years to realise just how bad a word 'cunt' is here, whereas in Finnish it's practically used in the place of a comma in youthful Helsinki slang: I'm really glad I abstained from translating my Finnish linguistic habits directly into English when I moved over here.
I always liked the fact that instead of telling us never to swear in English, Mrs Heinonen told us to perfect our English before using swearwords as swearing is such a forceful form of communicating, and therefore in itself a proper and respectable measure of our linguistic and social abilities. Thus swearing fluently was something to aspire to rather than frown upon. Mrs Heinonen was a fantastic teacher..

My Japanese teacher back in Cardiff, Dr G. Rowley, gave us great advice on how to learn Japanese once in Japan. The Japanese language has strong regional accents, but also carries different kinds of 'social registers' which are used according to your age and social standing, but especially according to your gender. Therefore it is not a great idea to learn male expressions if you're a girl and vice versa. So Dr Rowley suggested that once in Japan and making new friends, you should try find someone who has adopted a similar gender role to yourself (and is of the same sex), and learn from them: you can't go wrong. I thought this was great advice, and followed it during my year in Japan. I dearly hope it worked. I had a German male friend in Japan who, although his Japanese was excellent, spoke like a middle-aged woman. Everyone took the piss out of him behind his back but, being polite, never corrected him.

Please do count the number of grammar mistakes in this post and let me know how many there are. Thank you.

The Japan Times

The Japan Times is shit. It is a compilation of stories whose readership is made up of seriously conservative ex-pats, both British and American, and a random number of Japanese readers who mistakenly think that an English language news story of what goes on in Japan is somehow more liberal and therefore more "neutral" or "international" in spirit than what the Japanese papers publish. This is not true. Take this story about a Japanese 'Eton', published in The Japan Times the other day: This is just the aping of English 'superschools' and elitism made newsworthy, and therefore misleads some Japanese into thinking that these elitist ideals of the (mythical) West contributes to a good educational system.

'Japan's Eton' opens with high hopes

Corporate backers, parents expect school to produce new style of leaders

By MAYUMI NEGISH

GAMAGORI, Aichi Pref. -- For the past three years, Masaya's parents paid 1.2 million yen a year to send him to cram school.
This year, and every year to 2012, they're putting 3 million yen of their combined 8 million yen income into tuition, room and board for the 12-year-old to attend Kaiyo Academy, hoping to give him an edge in the race to become one of Japan's future leaders.
Masaya moved into his dorm room with 122 other students at the new academy -- nicknamed Japan's Eton -- which held its inaugural entrance ceremony Saturday.
"A child's future is determined by his school, and the school is determined by money," said his father, who spoke on condition that their family name not be used. "I want to make sure my son has the advantages I never did."
The school, which will pack six years of junior high and high school education into four, is corporate Japan's attempt to counter the egalitarian and test-intensive public education system.
Complaining about a shortage of promising college grads, Toyota Motor Corp., Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai), Chubu Electric Power Co. and 80 of the nation's most powerful companies have designed an academy they hope will churn out future global leaders who can think independently but also work well with others.
Takamasa Shinozaki, one of the three house masters at Kaiyo Academy, gives an interview to The Japan Times.
No comparable academy for girls is currently on the drawing board.

(The story continues and can be read in full here: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20060409a3.html )

I'd like to comment on that last quoted sentence. 'No comparable academy for girls is currently on the drawing board'. Of course not. If Japan continuously models itself on something like bloody Eton to 'produce' it's leaders, it's never going to be a very equal society. Honestly, fuck the old way of producing leaders through a certain type of education and look at individual strengths instead!
And yes, I know: the Japanese educational system is supposedly quite elitist already, but that's is another issue altogether. I just dearly wish that a newspaper whose motto is 'News without fear or favor' (ha!) would stop strengthening the expat community's pretty widely spread negative and contrived preconceptions of Japan by publishing such crap. In using terms such as 'churning out' and 'producing' 'leaders' for Japan in a story of a boys-only school funded by private money is not doing anyone any favours, least of all the future leaders who will be seen as being 'products' of a certain type of system and not as true leaders who have leadership qualities as individuals. The Japan Times is shit. It's damaging to Japan's image within the English speaking community in Japan and abroad, and therefore needs to be eliminated. Thank you for reading. End of rant.