First of all, the J-List and JBOX.com websites were down for a portion of Saturday due to a site issue (a random DDOS attack). Apologies if you were trying to use the site during that time — everything is fixed now.
Living for many years away from your home country would change anyone, and being in Japan is no different. For those working as teachers of English as a second language (ESL), the long hours of interacting only with students can lead to embarrassing changes in your own language skills — you can actually end up speaking English too clearly and carefully. In Japanese society, modesty is considered an important trait to have — it’s much better to be self-effacing than boastful — and that can rub off on gaijin who have lived in Japan a long time. Japanese roads generally don’t have names, which forces your brain to remember roads spatially, rather than memorize places locations by street names, and I fancied I could feel my brain stretching to adapt to my strange new environment. Also, since the Japanese language uses the katakana writing system to express foreign words, I sometimes found myself losing the connection with how words are spelled in English. For some reason I’d never encountered the famous Louis Vuitton brand before going to Japan, and I basically learned the name in katakana. It took me several years to learn how to spell it in English.
Teaching ESL can make you speak too slowly and clearly.
