32 The English that Enryō learned at the Western school in Nagaoka was known as the “distorted style” which was taught by non-native speakers. The word “night,” for example, was read “ni-gu-fu-to.” At this time a standardized national education system for English was yet to be established. Enryō commented as follows. “dē ando nigufuto,” which was a problem. Then, someone told us that we should pronounce the words in the standard style so I started straight away, but old habits are not easily corrected. I the exam. We see here how much work Enryō put into studying for exams. Then came September. The three subjects were English, mathe-matics, and Japanese/Chinese. Enryō talked about the entrance exam as follows. ently, and I didn’t understand a word of it… The answers had to be written in English, but I had never written a full passage, so I was extremely worried. Fortunately I passed. At that time points were awarded based on an average score for all sections combined, and if you got sixty points, you were allowed to go up a class. The result was… I was very surprised… I got nine-teen points in the English literature section and twenty-five points in the essay section, so I was only able to pass because I thankfully got a perfect score in mathematics. By the way, when I was in Nagaoka the guys would read it as worked on it as hard as I could and eventually I was able to take The teacher was a Westerner who spoke Western languages flu-
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