At the video store tonight, I overheard a foreign man speaking broken English to the clerk who answered his questions in grammatically correct English. The foreigner was a native English speaker and the clerk was Japanese of course. From time to time I meet foreigners who appear intelligent and articulate and otherwise normal until I hear them speaking to Japanese people in English. Suddenly, their English turns into a gaijin pidgin English. This pidgin is characterized primarily by the speaker dropping verbs, in particular the BE-verb. For example, “My brother, very tall”, “I, very sleepy” etc. Why does this happen? Surely, you wouldn’t speak to a child this way, would you? Once I met an American English teacher who had lived in Japan for a few years and was married to my friend. Although all the Japanese at the gathering were bilingual (many grew up in other countries) he kept speaking the gaijin pidgin. Even when he spoke to me he kept dropping the BE-verb. I had to restrain myself from reaching across the table and slapping him across the face! “Speak normally you dimwit!” Does he think all Asians cannot understand proper English?

Or perhaps this happens after teaching English for an extended period. I noticed many teachers speaking in class like this. Whether they are conscious of it or not, I don’t think they are doing the students any favor by speaking in poor English. When you’re talking to ESL students all day long, it’s true that some of their “bad habits” rub off on you and you do begin using unnatural expressions, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for setting a bad example. When I was teaching, I did make a conscious effort to speak naturally to all my students regardless of level.

This was because of an experience I had when I first came to Japan and could not speak Japanese well. I was attending a class in a senmon-gakko for a few months. One of the teachers there would always talk to me in broken Japanese, every other word was “wakaru? wakaranai?” (Do you understand?) and so on. He meant well, but I found myself feeling like shit talking to this guy. On the other hand, there was a student in the class that I talked to everyday and although we didn’t discuss politics or philosophy I could have a decent conversation. He spoke to me naturally as he did with everyone else and I found that my confidence in speaking Japanese improved. These days, I very rarely experience people speaking to me in broken Japanese, but I’m sure if I were caucasian I’d get it all the time.