Negative Stuff

My Japanese Classmate: Impatient and Unwilling to Budge

Fischer-san drives me absolutely nuts. She never waits for someone to gather their thoughts.

Today, we were creating a summary in pairs. We'd already made our own summaries, and we were supposed to use those to form a summary together. Our sensei emphasized to do the main storyline first. Then we could add details.

I was praying that I wouldn't be paired up with Fischer-san because when we get paired up, there's nothing but confusion. There is no progress.

But alas, I was paired with Fischer-san, and it went even worse than I would've expected.

The summary was for the tale of Little Red Riding Hood/LRRH. I read my first sentence and asked Fischer-san to read her first sentence. ... She read her first section. Thus, we had some points that we agreed and disagreed on.

I thought it was important to say "a girl called LRRH" when mentioning her for the first time, so I asked Fischer-san if she thought that was important, too - seeking a simple yes-or-no answer, and we could go from there. But instead, she went on a tangent about how that was in the introduction. (It wasn't, actually. It could be inferred potentially, but it wasn't said directly.) But she also said something that made me think "wait... so she does think we should include it...?"

So I asked again, being as clear as I could (like typing out the phrase, highlighting the "a girl called" part, and saying "I'm asking if we should use this phrase or not"), and she again talked about the introduction. So I said it's not stated directly. But Fischer-san didn't seem to agree (again, there was no actual explicitly-stated answer), so I went ahead and deleted the phrase from our group document. If one of us doesn't think it's important, it's probably not, I figured.

So then we address our next point of disagreement: she thinks the first sentence should be that LRRH's mother gave LRRH food and whatnot to take to her sick grandmother who lives in the forest. I agree that we should mention that the grandmother's sick, so I go ahead and put the phrase "sick grandmother" into the document, but I don't agree that LRRH receiving the food is important. LRRH taking food to her grandmother is what's important. So I communicated that opinion, but Fischer-san was unwilling to budge.

So I go onto the next point: the grandmother lives in the forest. This part is explicitly stated in the introduction, so I say that. She says she still thinks it's important. ... So I'm like, "but you used this exact logic when saying we shouldn't say who LRRH is. If that was unnecessary because it was somewhat implied in the introduction, then small information like where the grandmother lives that's stated in the introduction would be unnecessary, too." She says no, it's still important. So clearly, we're struggling to find a compromise on this, too.

Yoshii-sensei enters at some point, but for some reason, Fischer-san read her first part at least three more times. I was so frustrated and confused, and I'm like "I heard! I heard! I heard! Please wait! Please wait!" And she's still frigging talking, and I'm just trying to breathe, and Yoshii-sensei is like "what's going on?" I'm just like, in quiet English, "I'm trying to calm down."

So that was a f*cking catastrophe. Fischer-san just won't wait for people to gather their thoughts, and she doesn't understand the concept of "compromise."