omnibozo22's review
3.0
Bumped into this by accident. I was looking for a different book and this one was nearby, so I got it as well, expecting it to be about deeply cultural Japanese words that were not easy to translate into English. Nope, this was not that. It was much worse.
Frisk deposits a self-deprecating story of his "adventures" learning Japanese and teaching in Japan. His claims of not really being able to speak Japanese despite five years of high school lessons and a couple years of college ring false if one reads the high test score claims in the promo lit for the book. Indeed, learning a language from a book is different from using that language in its home culture. Still, the stories strain common sense. Plus, most of the book documents his purported clubfooted stumbles through Japanese society. Perhaps that's just the truth of ignorant youth, especially ignorant American youth, which he acknowledges repeatedly. Right up to the end it sounds like he didn't really move much beyond that point. He was correct when he discovered that trying to share the living abroad experience with other Americans was difficult at best, and often impossible.
There are much better written books about the experiences of living in and learning new cultures.
Frisk deposits a self-deprecating story of his "adventures" learning Japanese and teaching in Japan. His claims of not really being able to speak Japanese despite five years of high school lessons and a couple years of college ring false if one reads the high test score claims in the promo lit for the book. Indeed, learning a language from a book is different from using that language in its home culture. Still, the stories strain common sense. Plus, most of the book documents his purported clubfooted stumbles through Japanese society. Perhaps that's just the truth of ignorant youth, especially ignorant American youth, which he acknowledges repeatedly. Right up to the end it sounds like he didn't really move much beyond that point. He was correct when he discovered that trying to share the living abroad experience with other Americans was difficult at best, and often impossible.
There are much better written books about the experiences of living in and learning new cultures.
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