A Brand New Perspective I started teaching Japanese in February. It's my first time to teach my native language to people from abroad. Sometimes I come across a brand new perspective during the class. So I'd like to talk about it. The day before the first day of the class, my English speaking friend adviced me to tell my students that each Hiragana characters is always pronounced the same way. When I was given this advice, I was not exactly sure what he had meant, but as I started the class, I realized that each of English alphabets has several way of pronunciation and that's why I needed to tell them Japanese doesn't have multiple pronunciation for each characters. I found it interesting that I couldn't think of it by myself. The other day, I gave my students a print for a Hiragana practice. When the students started the practice, some of them started writing from “わ” which is the last character of the Hiragana chart, and was on the very left side of the chart. Eventhough I have already known that English speaking people write things horizontally from left, I failed to tell them in advance. That's when I realized I was unconsciously assuming that they will start from “あ” and they will write from right to left vertically. This experience reminded me the fact that something that is too normal for me is actually not normal for some people. I felt like my students are giving lots of brand new perspectives to me. I'm so glad that I'm having this teaching Japanese opportunity.