My Hometown 私の故郷 わたしのふるさと

A Japanese Compass Rose, with the directions labeled in hiragana and kanji.
Source: japanesewithanime.com (CC BY-SA 4.0) 

I wrote a ridiculous amount about Overland Park, mostly because I had taken photos in preparation for the assignment and wanted to use them. And despite doing a lot of proof reading, I was still finding typos at the last minute (even in the title of the second slide!).

It was a little weird doing this presentation about Overland Park - although it has been my home for the last twenty years, most people mean the place you were born and grew up in for your hometown.  I haven't visited Birmingham in over a decade, so I couldn't do a good presentation on there.  I could talk about the fact there used to be an awesome Scandinavian sandwich shop there, but it's a MacDonald's now, but I don't think that would be interesting to anyone...

I confess, I wrote this direct in PowerPoint by typing it up, not by handwriting it first.  My main issue was in persuading the Japanese keyboard to not autoreplace everything with kanji that I wouldn't yet recognize and couldn't read to present it.  That's definitely not an issue that I would have had preparing a presentation in English, nor writing the script out by hand on paper... Learning to hit return before the end of the word because that stops it from trying to turn it into kanji, and to type an x before a glide character or if it is being stubborn about ん was an additional challenge and skill to master.  In a way, worse than learning to type in the first place because I have typing muscle memory set up for the wrong responses.  Also, my brain tries to make me type things the way they sound and the algorhythm does not appreciate me putting sha instead of shi xya to make the letters.

In addition to that, there was the challenge of the language in the first place - of having to find out whether you would say northnorthwest in Japanese, or if the order is reversed and it would be westnorthnorth (upper right is reversed from the English way, to right upper in Japanese, so it showed that you could not make assumptions that the order for things like that is universal). And despite the lovely compass rose that I have now added to the top of the post to make up for not having the video all nicely & prettily embedded, I still forgot one of the directions while doing the recording (& had lost the battle over the kanji versus hiragana with the typing for that one... やっぱり).

I did ask the tutor's advice on Friday, because this isn't my original home town & I wanted to be clear about that, without going tons past what we have learned or getting myself gramatically into trouble.  That's where I got the phrase 私の住んでいるまちfrom and also 南にいくなら (if you go south, ...), which is a nice construction for something like this & hopefully I did not overuse it as much as そして in the first writing piece...  

Follow this link to YouTube to see the slideshow...