Cross-cultural communication （63）　

63) My English studies
English was always my favorite subject from the time I started learning it at junior high school. However, it was not until I failed my university entrance exams and had to repeat one more year that I started to consciously study practical English skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking.

During the year I spent repeating my university entrance exams, my method of studying English was to read English novels. I read a paperback novel of around 300 pages a month. I didn't care what genre the novel was, as long as the book looked interesting on the cover. I needed to be able to read on, so I had to find something that was at least a little interesting. If I came across a word or phrase that I didn't understand, I would look it up in an English-English dictionary. I only used an English-Japanese dictionary when I couldn't find an exact Japanese translation. Of course, when I looked up a word, I would always check the pronunciation and accent, and write it down on paper several times while saying it out loud at the same time. I didn't use any of the so-called English grammar reference books that are required for entrance exams. By the time I got to the third or so English paperback book, I was able to read fairly quickly and my understanding of the content was also deepening. My English scores in the mock tests at the prep school and my old high school were also steadily improving. I was a ronin (entrance ecam re-taker) in 1970, the year of the Osaka World Expo. Because of this, the two-language broadcast of TV news started in 1970. In order to listen to the English broadcasts, I needed a special receiver, so I bought one and made sure to listen to at least one hour of live English every day.

It was quite a drastic strategy for studying English for the entrance exams, but in the actual exams, I was almost perfect in English at every university I applied to. It was also fortunate that, from that time on, the English entrance exams in Japan had started to focus more on long-text questions, and the grammar questions that tested the smallest details had disappeared.

In fact, even while I was preparing to take the entrance exams, I was already making plans to study clinical medicine in America after graduating from medical school. So, as soon as I entered Osaka Medical College, the first thing I did was to find a good English school. The first place I went to was the YWCA in downtown Osaka. I attended evening classes three times a week. In the evening, after finishing my lectures at Osaka Medical College in Takatsuki City, I would take the Hankyu train to Osaka and then walk the 15 minutes to Ohgimachi. All the lecturers were American, and they were highly intelligent, so they were able to motivate us well. Despite the hard schedule, I never fell asleep in class. One of the lecturers was a woman in her 60s. She was the wife of an American pastor at Yodogawa Christian Hospital, which was near my father's clinic office. On the way home from class, we would walk home together, chatting as we went. At the time, the underground shopping mall in Umeda was being expanded, and I even had a cup of tea with her there. I think the English I used in situations like that was more natural and useful than the English I used in class. After attending the YWCA for a year, I moved to the YMCA English School in Tosabori. The YMCA was bigger than the YWCA, and I had heard that the quality of the lessons was higher in the advanced classes. I took the test to be placed in the appropriate class, and I was successfully placed in the highest class. My English had improved a lot during my year at the YW, as well as from the extensive reading I had done during my time as a ronin. At YM, too, I had three lessons a week, and the teachers were also three different Americans, each of whom gave us an original lesson with a lot of thought and effort. One of them taught us English that was entirely devoted to casual spoken expressions, while another taught us about American TV, mainly commercials and the history of popular TV programs, with actual video footage. The final teacher often had us debate on a set theme. The English ability of the class was high, and all the teachers seemed satisfied. At YM, we had a test once every six months that was taken simultaneously at all YM schools nationwide. It was a multiple-choice test with five options, divided into three categories: vocabulary, grammar and listening comprehension. It was a test similar to the TOEFL. After six months of attending the school, I took the test and came second in my class. Amazingly, I also came second in the national rankings, so our class at the Osaka YMCA came first and second in the national rankings. The person who came first was a woman who worked for a trading company, and I think it was a natural result, as her English ability in the regular classes was by far the best.

Well, when I had been attending YM for two years, I had moved from the liberal arts course to the undergraduate course at the medical school, and I was starting to run out of time. Also, around this time, I started attending a French language school called the l’Institut Franco-Japonais d’Osaka, so I had to stop studying English at YM. For my undergraduate studies, I focused on reading English medical books, which also helped me prepare for the exam required for the residency training in US. In 1980, ten years after I had been a ronin in 1970, I finally achieved my dream of studying abroad in US. I couldn't immediately keep up with the rapid-fire English exchanges at the hospital in Brooklyn, but after half a year, when I woke up from a nap with the TV on at home, I found that I had understood 80% of the news that had been broadcast. From that day on, I was able to clearly understand the English spoken by my colleagues. Even now, I believe that this relatively quick acquisition of English skills in America was the result of 10 years of strategic English training in Japan.

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