Growing up in school, particularly in spelling, you’d get a list of vocabulary words. New, challenging words that would come up throughout the lesson– new concepts and definitions and more sophistication.
As you go through language school, they take you through a long list of vocabulary words as you go. There’s supermarket store words. Doctor’s office words. At the bank words.
You get the idea.
When you finish language school, you often don’t really learn new words until they are thrown at you in real life, so language learning is a continuous process, despite becoming proficient.
Case in point. Last year, I went to the eye doctor because I suspected I might need a new prescription for glasses.
I showed up, sat in the waiting room and then headed over to get the mundane things like that obnoxious puff of air in your eye. I had forgotten that such a machine even existed.
I was apparently really bad at it because they did it several times.
For the visual acuity test, they don’t do the one with the big E at the top. Theirs has circles with openings at the top, bottom, left and right. You answer as such.
I finished up my test and waited to be called by the doctor.
I was finally called in and expected to get my new prescription. So, I was completely unprepared to be rattled at in Japanese using a host of words I’d never heard before. I was taken aback, much like being thrown into a lake. I grasped at whatever words I could try to remember to look up later as I tried to get my bearing as she pointed at screens and print-out readings of my results.
What in the world was going on??
Gan-atsu ga takai. Kusuri….
Takai- high. Something is high. Kusuri=medicine.
I’d heard Gan before and it meant cancer.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
But I started putting together other things. Ganka means ophthamologist, a word I often had difficulty remembering, but which somehow came back to me in this moment.
Ketsu-atsu means blood pressure.
Ok, if I take those parts of those words, could it be eye pressure??
Let’s hope so.
As I went back to the waiting room, I started looking up words. Ok, gan-atsu definitely did mean eye-pressure. I started googling to learn what this was all about, trying to piece together what I’d heard during my “lake-splash” moment.
As I read more, I realized that’s why they kept puffing my eye– they were surprised.
And thus, I learned a lot of new words in one day. The next week when I visited the office, I had written a list of potential vocabulary words I had looked up.
Anyway, this is how we learn words. Now, because of more regular visits to the Ganka, I have become a bit more proficient in this arena of vocabulary and feel more comfortable.
Here are some words that I didn’t know until they happened to me 🙂
Haishin- to distribute officially (A PTA word that is the secretary’s responsibility) There’s also Haifu, but for some reason, we’re not supposed to use that word in our documents.
Ininjou- Power of Attorney (another PTA paper I need to haishin and then procure from everyone)
Gakyuu Heisa- Class closure= guess what, school is cancelled for the next few days for your kid’s class due to sickness
Uneiinkai- (and make sure you say each of those vowels in there) A steering committee. This is a long occasional meeting with PTA that helps us navigate what we need to do in each of our groups, giving us deadlines and to-dos and to-don’ts.
Seigaigeka- Orthopedics
Senkotsu- Sacrum (that lower back portion of your spine) To be fair, while this word was not unfamiliar to me in English, it was not one that I would probably recall off the top of my head… but now I know it in English and Japanese.
Ninja Mom 