Teaching Chinese students Japanese

I was having dinner at a restaurant last night and caught myself laughing while watching a comedy program on the TV. I usually never laugh at Chinese TV comedy shows, mainly because I can't understand what's funny or can't appreciate the humor. But the guys on the show did the kind of slapstick a typical American can appreciate and I had some guttural laughs.
On Thursday, I was invited by a Japanese professor, Mr. Inomata, who teaches Japanese to Chinese students at Renmin University, to be a guest speaker in his class. I really did not want to go because I feel like my Japanese is not what it used to be, nor did I want to get up at 7 in the morning and go across town in morning traffic over to the university.
However, his passionate pleas and my respect for him overturned my apprehension.
So Thursday I opened the door to his classroom and found an open seat. You can imagine the surprise on the faces of the Chinese students when I entered their Japanese class. The teacher had only told them they would have a guest speaker that day.

Anyway, I was invited to the podium, wrote my name in Japanese in the board, and started to speak in Japanese. The students faces immediately expressed more shock. I told them when I started studying, why and how I got started, and some of my funny and interesting experiences. The students were really cool as well as being very good students of Japanese. They had lots of questions too and the originally scheduled 30 minutes I was supposed to talk extended by another 30 minutes. Afterwards, the teacher earnestly thanked me and said it was a big success. I think the students were excited to learn that Japanese is more of an International language than they first imagined.
In China, often students are not able to choose the major that they will study. Only students who do well on the school entrance exams have choices. Others who get accepted to the school get placed into various majors. The Japanese teacher said at least two thirds of the students of the students he teaches did not originally want to learn Japanese. Matter of fact some students maintain their hatred of Japan and Japanese people because of WWII atrocities and demonization in the media. Matter of fact, he is often the first Japanese person most of these students have ever met, and he sees how the students attitudes change over the course of their studies. First, some of the Chinese students just have to realize that Japanese are human and real. Later, over the years, they may learn to find Japanese and the culture interesting. I have to admit, I think that teacher has courage to face that tough crowd year after year, but when I watched him work, he seemed to have gained the trust, respect and friendship of his students.
I don't go out enough, except for that, work and errands. I have been working on my website day and night. I am going to shut down my old one, the one with pop-up ads, and eventually move everything to my new, ad-free, website. I decided last week, based on the interest I've seen in my websites, that I should pay some money and get a host that is fast, ad-free, and gives me a lot of storage. I chose Yahoo! because they are really reasonable, about $10 a month and I get more than enough storage space for webpages, music, photos, etc. Also, my websites load up pretty fast, even overseas. Plus, now that I pay, there won't be any ads. But this site (if you are looking at geocities.com/firedup05) still does have ads, so I am moving it over to the new site.
It took me a few days, but I finally found a domain name that I liked to go with my new hosting service. The new website is: getpowers.com.
Currently this journal is also directly available at http://mark.getpowers.com/