[gennick]

Hey guys,

I'm a foreigner to the country where I'm in right now. I came, and long before that, I know I've to speak and learn English. That's part of the education. Can I complain that "no one is speaking Cantonese here!!" or "their Chinese is really terrible"?? Things that's not of your culture you'll just have to learn. Now I always blame that my spoken English is really full of grammatical mistakes with an ugly Cantonese accent, which is something that cannot be demonstrated in this forum.

In my dojo here in UK they teach Kendo in English. The technical terms stay the same, like the regular Reigi and "Kagari keiko-----!!!!", but instructions are in English --"Hey Jenny don't do this...". What I find very interesting is that, although there's only a small number of kendoka who studied Japanese before, those who know do intent to think in Japanese during practice. Sometimes you'll notice by their Kiai. A couple of times people had actually asked "Daiijobu ka?", and I've to say "i-i des" all the time (yeah the missed dou cuts on my thigh!!). I don't know if this is a "Japanese Complex" going on?

I remember I saw some Taiwanese kendo visitors back in Hong Kong. During their warm-up when they do haya-suburi, they count in Mandarin!!

There is a education movement called "mother-language teaching" going on in Hong Kong. The officials say it'll be easier for student to understand the lessons in their mother language rather than in English. Still in a debate, which will go off-topic again if I went into the details, I don't know who's correct.

Anyway Kendo is one of the thing which motivates me to learn some proper Japanese, apart from understanding the dialogues in Manga/Anime.....