Badminton

So I go to badminton club and it is very interesting.  Every day after school, about 85% of the students participate in a club.  This club becomes something students take great pride in.  For the badminton club, this is no exception.

Each day starts out with a hour and a half training session followed by an hour and a half of drills.  During club, no games are played (this holds true for basketball club too, and pretty much every sports clubs, they mainly do drills and very rarely play games).  So any student wanting to play an actual game of badminton has to wait until about 7:00 pm (school gets done at 4).  After a few games, it is not uncommon to see students leaving at 8:00pm every day.  In fact, when I leave at 7, about a third of teachers and students are still at the school.

All of this practice pays off obviously.  When I was student teaching at Evansville, I challenged a few of the baseball players to a match and none of them scored even a single point on me over the course of about 6 games.  Here, the top half of the boys and the top 4 girls can all score in the double digits.  I've only played 4 of the kids in 1v1 (after club) and am still 4-0, but one of the students lost by a score of 21-17.  I will definitely be beaten by the end of the year.  Or maybe not, but if a student has a good day and I have a bad day [which never happens :)] they could take a game.

But anyways, first badminton practice finishes and the kids form a circle, the coach of the badminton club (who speaks very little English) talks for about 5 minutes while I stand there and I have absolutely no clue what hes talking about.  Finally, as I start daydreaming, he stops talking and there was a second where I got an uneasy feeling like everyone was watching me.

I snap out of my staring at the floor and everyone is staring intently at me.  I'm thinking to myself "omgomgomgomg what did I do?"  I look to the coach and he looks back at me and thinks about a proper English translation for the what he just said.  Finally he just says..."advice?"

Now, my command of the Japanese language right now is pretty similar to the command that a bronze level Starcraft player has over a large army.  I have a good idea of what I want to say, but what I actually end up saying usually isn't quite right.  (A quick example; I spent my first month here asking people "nan de hirugohan tabemashita ka?" which I thought meant "what did you eat for lunch?" and I only received blank stares and people walking away from me.  Finally, my supervisor said, "Why did I eat lunch? Because I was hungry." Finally it stuck me that I had to say "nan yo hirugohan tabemashita ka?") So of course, 20 kids staring at me, I didn't want to make a fool of myself and say something bad.  So I was just like "eto eto (Japanese thinking word, instead of "ummm") zenbu josu desu!"  Which means, "ummm, you are all very skilled."