Chicago Speech Contest

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ともだちとのお昼ごはん

ブリアナメーソン

今日、久しぶりに会ったともだちとお昼ごはんをいっしょうに食べました。私は巻きずしとみそしるとえびてんぷらを作りました。巻きずしはおいしくてえびてんぷらも好きでした。        

    セージさんはチョコレートアイスクリームといちごシロップを持っていきましたでも私は食べませんでした。。私はルートビールを飲みましたが、あますぎましたのでお茶のかわりに飲みました。

    そのご、私はいえに帰って寝ました。

    あなたは今日お昼ごはんのために何をしましたか。

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Lunch with a Friend

Brianna Mason

    Today, my friend and I ate together after a long time. I made rolled sushi, miso soup and shrimp tempura. The rolled sushi was delicious, but I liked the shrimp tempura too. 

    Sage-san brought chocolate ice cream and strawberry syrup, but I didn’t eat any of it. She also brought soda and tea. I had root beer, but it was too sweet so I drank tea instead. 

    Afterwards I went home and slept. 

    What did you do today for lunch?

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Reflection:

This assignment was one of the most stressful assignments I have had in a significant amount of time considering  that we had so much time to prepare for what was coming, but looking back, I feel like it was also one that pushed me out of my comfort zone enough that I was able to give up some of my perfectionism. One might think that is a bad thing, but my anger at myself and fear of my own judgment makes me freeze up a lot, so it was very freeing to be able to understand that I wasn't going to do well in my own opinion but still be able to force myself to finish. That was a huge step forward for me.

 

I won't lie; I was absolutely terrified and overwhelmed at the idea of speaking at all, let alone having to write everything down. And that wasn't even considered the fact that we wrote the speeches ourselves. My hands were shaking the entire time, and my nerves forced me to write on the Genkouyoshi paper over twenty times because my wrist would give out randomly and I'd end up writing a line through the kana I was putting down. In the end what I turned in was anything but my best work, but for the me who was in pain and tired it meant more to me that I was trying.

For me, the largest difference in preparing a speech in Japanese was simply the lack of vocabulary. I was forced to condense and simplify what I wanted to say to get my main idea across. While that in itself was very frustrating, when I was able to put together even a semblance of a more complex sentence, the huge sense of pride and relief made it so much more worth it. As far as using the Genkouyoshi paper is concerned, I think that it is interesting that characters receive their own 'box', but it really does make sense to me to help with legibility.