Had another listen to this week’s episode - enjoyed again her account of complaining about Americans not using their indicators properly to her ESL classmates only to find they all think Americans are safe drivers (笑)
Episode #13 summary
大きな挑戦: It’s already May and summer is approaching. She wonders if any of her Japanese listeners who live overseas have plans of returning to Japan for the holidays. - she’d like to but can’t afford it. Instead she’s thinking of visiting friends and doing some camping.
The topic for today is her new job working at the community college she attends. She holds a h4 spouse visa which would usually mean that while her husband has permission to work, she doesn’t. However, there is a special scholarship system enabling students without working visas to work within their institution - aimed at immigrant students (many of whom are not legal) from South America, it is meant to help finance their studies and get them necessary work experience. Utaco manages to negotiate with the college director to get accepted into the program! She works a few hours 3 days a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays she works in the campus gym helping people with physical disabilities with their training, and on Fridays she helps out in a special computer room set up for people with physical disabilities (身体障害) and learning disabilities (学習障害)
At first she was incredibly tense because she had to use English - she especially finds the gym work hard, having difficulty understanding what people are saying to her. The program runs only for a term so she’ll finish up at the end of May.
今週のmy favorite: She’s finally found a mascara she likes - Maybelleine New York Sensational curvature(can’t understand word here???) waterproof mascara. She imagines her listeners thinking - what? A forty year old using a pharmacy mascara brand? To which she replies that she doesn’t buy expensive make up.
In Japan she always used a Fasio mascara but because it was hard to get hold of in America, she’d taken to buying pharmacy brand mascaras with the result that her lashes lost their curl after she applied the mascara - at first she thought this might be due to age but when the mascara she’s been using ran out, she spied the Maybelleine counter with products promising curl at the pharmacy and bought a mascara which worked, and as a result for the first time in a while has got excited about putting on makeup
方向指示器あるある: Too many people in America don’t use indicators 方向指示器 - despite them (as she and her husband often note) requiring little effort to use (a flick of the finger) and being essential for road safety. She gives the example of people not using them even on crowded freeways when they lane change 車線変更, saying how dangerous this is and how terrified she is never knowing when people are going to cut into the lane in front of her. And when you drive in town, because people don’t indicate, you don’t know if they are going to turn or continue on straight.
And then there are the people who use indicators but forget to turn them off! - on the freeways and in town, mile after mile with the lights flashing. She wonders why they can’t hear the sound? Maybe, they’re listening to loud music but surely they can see the lights on their dashboard? Nobody’s indicators in America are to be trusted! Although it’s been a while since she’s driven in Japan, she believes that while there might be some people who don’t use indicators, there are very few who would forget and leave them on. Amusingly, when she talks to other non-Americans about this, not only are they not bothered by the situation in America, they actually think that compared to their own countries, driving in America is pretty safe. Hearing that she decides there’s no way she’s driving in other countries. To wrap up, she says that in Japan, the word ウインカー is often used (from British English) whereas in America it’s “blinker” or “turn signal”.
曜日の伝え方に注意: Here she warns about the confusion in English between “this Friday” and “next Friday” & suggests using more explicit terms (like using a date) so there are no misunderstandings like what happened when an ESL classmate organised an outing for “next Friday” meaning “this Friday” which they all attended except the one whose English was more proficient (they’d thought the outing was the following week).