学生生活

The following entry includes events from Thursday and Friday. I had my first lesson, or rather, an orientation session for the Japanese Course. It involved ... lots of tests! First was a mandatory one to check that people knew what they should, to prevent slipping down to a lower-level course. The second was optional to see if it were possible to move up to a higher-level course! I blazed through them both perhaps a tad too enthusiastically - structured, assessed academia after so long? Ecstasy! Thereafter there followed a mass self-introduction-ing; all the usual one comes to expect from this situation - "What's yer name and where d'ya come from?", "Why are you studying Japanese?", "Cal is the only English person here."

A bit later I went along to the office to find out my test results - 84% for the first and 82% for the second. Not bad at all - good enough to get me into IJ600, in any case! Once upon a time I thought it might seem a little arrogant to apply for the highest level course, but I have come to conclusion that the First and Second Year Japanese course at SOAS is the best ever (*shameless plug* - I suddenly love my home Uni more than ever), and I should do right by it by doing the best course I can handle. On an unrelated note, Thursday was the day I spent the least money since coming to Japan, weighing in at 98 yen.

The lessons for Intensive Japanese 600 (or at least the first ones) were held in basement classrooms. For some reason it struck me that there was a lot of wood or wood-effect furnishings, giving the room an overall feeling of "brown" as opposed to the "white" I tend to associate with English classrooms. As for the lessons themselves they consisted of more orientationing and then mostly speaking. I don't like speaking very much, but it was interesting nonetheless to observe, from the way people talked, what differences there are in how we've learned Japanese up to this point.

It also allowed me to see where I need to improve (mainly in terms of working more variety into my sentence structures), which is good from a personal perspective, but later the teacher asked me if I thought the class was going to be too hard for me >.< I replied in the negative - maybe I don't excel in spoken work due to my confidence issues, but if something feels solid and academic then I can sink my teeth into it better. It seems like recently my whole life revolves around the fact that I do things differently to most people ... oh well, that's Friday down so I have a whole weekend to study and explore, yay!

Japanese Snacks Vol. 2 - Choc-Chip Melon Bread: pleasantly sweet, with a light, fluffy texture.