先生：漢字はいくつくらい覚えましたか。
留学生：毎日10こ覚えるのが関の山です。
Seki no yama
Sensei: Kanji wa ikutsu kurai oboe mashita ka.
Ryuugakusei: Mainichi jukko oboeru no go seki no yama desu.
Teacher: How many Chinese characters have you learned?
Foreign student: Even if I push myself, I can only manage to learn 10 a day.
Seki no yama is the limit of what you can do even if you try your hardest.
This expression originates from a town called Seki, Mie Prefecture.
The town is said to have had a particularly splendid festival float, which is known as dashi in the Kanto region and yama in the Kansai. It means however hard you might try, you could hardly make a.yama as fine as the one in Seki.
As you can imagine, it seems to be a great labor for foreign students to learn how to write Chinese characters.
One of my students from Mexico told me that she makes it a rule to memorize 30 new characters every morning. To my question if her effort was successful, she said, "Yomu no ga seki no yama de totemo kaku koto wa deki masen " (It's as much asIcan do just to read them: Writing them is beyond me.)
That's quite understandable. As a child in Japan, I had been tested on kanji in my own Japanese classes from elementary school right through junior high school.
It's easy these days to forget some of the characters you once knew. You have fewer occasions to write by hand as the wordprocessor is at your fingertips.
After studying Japanese even for only a year, many foreign students reach a level where they are able to participate in everyday conversations. Nichijoo-kaiwa ga seki no yama desu. (It's as much as I can do to take part in everyday conversations) , my students say modestly.
But I think it's a great achievement, especially when you consider that although many Japanese spend from six to 10 years studying Eng- lish, they still can't speak it even at the elementary level.