Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Why You Should NEVER Teach English in Japan" video.

My cousin, who was an experienced teacher in Australia, spent 2 years teaching English in a Japanese high school. Her experience was very different to Pearl's. She loved her job, though once or twice cultural clashes led to her being told off by the principal. She spoke English in the classroom and Japanese out of the classroom. It seems to me form this video that Pearl was treating 12 year olds as 6 year olds - that is not a way to earn respect - in any country. My father spent two years in Japan after becoming deeply interested in Japanese culture and classical literature. He found that Japanese all have this idea that foreigners cannot master the Japanese language, and on meeting will often be so fixed in this view they will not show understanding when spoken to in fluent Japanese. But after the ice is broken and it dawns on them you can speak the language, they become firm friends.
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@lookitskazzy Or maybe the rules vary from school to school. School teachers just LOVE rules. They do in Australia anyway. I sometimes say that school teachers and politicians are kin - they both think you can solve all problems by passing more and more laws. I left school after only 2 years of high school, because I had had enough of their silly rules for just about anything. Like no boy was permitted to approach with 2 metres of any girl - presumably because the principal didn't want any hanky-panky. Classes were segregated - boys on the left, girls on the right. We all sat mixed up and next to each other on the school bus though. Question: How do you communicate with your students before they have attained conversational English, if you are not permitted to speak Japanese? Surely you would start off with something like: Ohaya! Eigode wa Good Morning to iimasu (おはよう！英語ではGood Morningと言います.) Then gradually speaking less and less Japanese until your class has acquired enough vocabulary to proceed entirely in English. From what my cousin and my father said, both of whom were fluent in Japanese, there is this cultural thing - it just isn't easily accepted by Japanese that a westerner can be fluent in Japanese. It is not a rule, its just how they think. I used to work for a big company who signed a deal with a Japanese electronics manufacturer. One of my workmates was assigned to fly to Japan and work with the factory over technical details. He did a crash course in Japanese at a TAFE college to prepare. He needn't have bothered - the factory staff all pretended to not understand a word he said.
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