More Details on Class

Today's Japanese Word of the Day:
勉強する
Benkyou suru
(Verb: To Study)

Alright, so my planned post for the day is getting put off because my camera cord is not in immediate easy reach... and I'm lazy. So instead, I've got a few more details on class for you. This should wrap up the daily ritual and give you a pretty good idea of what life is like as a foreign exchange student in Japan.

We leave the girls' dorm at about 8:50 every morning so that we can get to the classroom in time for class, which starts at 9:10. The class is split into four periods of about 45 minutes to an hour in length. Between each class period, we have a break. The first and last are for 10 minutes, and the one in the middle is 20 minutes long (shortest 20 minutes of every day).

This picture was taken during the first break. You can tell because Christian and Demi have their food and drinks. That makes this breakfast time, after having returned from the school convenience store. The main point of the picture is to show the classroom. The carpet is in these squares that are not fixed to the floor, so they peel up every time we scoot our chairs back. However, those desks are about twice as wide as most of the ones at the U, and they have one of those little cubby shelves like the ones in elementary school, so the desks win back some points for the classroom.

In this picture are Christian, Chen, Demi, and Stacey.

During breaks, most people go out into the hallway like this. A couple of people have pocket WiFi, so the phones and tablets come out and games are played. I just love the half-dead looks on everyone's faces here. This was not during the first week, so jet lag is not an excuse, so maybe everyone was just resentful that I was taking a picture.

So yeah. We all come out here and sit on the floor and talk and play games and stuff. Some people (myself included) only stay for the first five minutes or so, and then go back into the class to ask the teacher questions or just have the chair to sit in instead of the floor. We're pretty sure this hall has become the "foreigner hall" because in the first couple of weeks, there were lots of people walking by. There were three kinds of people: those who would walk through this hall we were lining like there was nothing up; those who would see us, become absolutely silent, and sometimes run past before taking up conversations and walking again once they're past; and finally, those who would turn the corner, see us, stop dead, and turn around. More recently, no one really passes, so we've decided word must have passed around not to take this hall during certain times.

In this picture are Daniel's stomach, the side of Rick's head, Miles, Courtney, Shawn, and Jake standing by himself on the right side.

We have four teachers that come on certain days of the week. Some of them don't even teach at Shitennoji University, and bus/train in on their day of the week. This is a picture of all of our favorite teacher, Kotani-sensei. He comes on Thursdays. He's pretty cool.

Ikkai-sensei is the teacher we see most often. I think she might actually teach at Shitennoji University (the short version is IBU [International Buddhist University], in case I've never mentioned it before). We see her twice a week--Tuesdays and Fridays, I think.

We also have Furuya-sensei on Mondays, an older man, and Nishijima-sensei on Wednesdays, a younger woman. I don't have pictures of them.

At the beginning of the program, a lot of us were really disappointed in the difficulty of the class. We're in the lower level, and about three or four of us (nearly half the class) really should be in the high intermediate class, which doesn't exist. It would have existed, but three people who would have helped populate that class dropped out before the program started, and they had to "do what they could with what they had."

As time went on, the difficulty picked up and we started doing grammar points and kanji that were more difficult and helped fill in the holes of what we couldn't remember from our classes, so it's been nice. My foundation for the language has been seriously strengthened, and I feel a lot more competent than I was when I left.

Some staples of our class every day include the morning dictation/kanji test, and the listening comprehension activity at the end. For the test, we write down word for word sentences which the teacher reads off. Then he or she writes up on the whiteboard some kanji, which we write the readings for, and some readings, which we write the kanji for. In the comprehension activity, we listen to a long pre-recorded dialogue on a CD, and then answer true/false questions. Fortunately, these true/false questions are not graded. One of the characters who likes to show up on the CD is named Chin, and he has the most nasal, neurotic voice in the world. Miles, who likes to do accents and sound effects (including a really great Russian accent that I need to get video of), can do a perfect recreation of Chin's voice.

After class (the last period ends at 12:30), we head off to get lunch and eat and socialize and stuff at iTalk, and everyone does what they want to from there.

I know this wasn't the most interesting of posts, but there it is. Thanks for reading, and talk to you later! There is now exactly one week left before I get on the plane (boo)!

~Amanda