Difficult Questions to Break the Wall of Politeness
This questions are an attempt to help my students realise that it is okay to ask questions that have no easy answer, so that they can practice saying questions at random to improve their fluency, without having to return to Japanese to check out their question to see that it has a viable answer. The word file is available here and the PDF is available here.
I tried it in my seminar class. Immediately afterwards one of my students was still censoring questions and having difficulty asking questions that might be difficult for me to answer (How often mustn't you praise?). The truth is for a native speaker almost any question is answerable, and this was just after getting them to do the above exercise to have them realise that it does not matter if the question is unanswerable. So the wall of politeness, which may be the same as of meaning, is hard to break.
Meaning is felt to occur when you understand yourself, and ask yourself a question, say or express something that you can auto-respond to and understand.
That went quite well.
Difficult Questions to Break the Wall of Politeness
This questions are an attempt to help my students realise that it is okay to ask questions that have no easy answer, so that they can practice saying questions at random to improve their fluency, without having to return to Japanese to check out their question to see that it has a viable answer. The word file is available here and the PDF is available here.
I tried it in my seminar class. Immediately afterwards one of my students was still censoring questions and having difficulty asking questions that might be difficult for me to answer (How often mustn't you praise?). The truth is for a native speaker almost any question is answerable, and this was just after getting them to do the above exercise to have them realise that it does not matter if the question is unanswerable. So the wall of politeness, which may be the same as of meaning, is hard to break.
Meaning is felt to occur when you understand yourself, and ask yourself a question, say or express something that you can auto-respond to and understand.
That went quite well.