Two down, 258 to go…

The end of another week. To be honest I'm not sure I'll be in Japan for a whole 260 weeks, but the length of time remaining in Japan versus time already spent is conveyed nevertheless.

I'm not going to do the day-by-day breakdown that I did in my first week recount, firstly because it would look like mondayclasstuesdayclasswednesdayclassthursdayclassfridayclass, and secondly because it doesn't do justice to the notable events worth mentioning. Boy were there many events this week. I think I'll release them slowly, in more specific, bite-sized chunks over the next few days and weeks.

The first event is the announcement of classes. First thing Monday morning, the results of our assessment test were released in the form of class allocations. The 60 or so people who are studying under the same undergraduate scholarship as I am have been placed into a class somewhere between "A" and "G". Class A is the most advanced, and houses those who are already proficient in Japanese, which happens to include the majority of Korean scholarship recipients. Linguistically, Korean is the closest language to Japanese so they lean to speak it fluently very quickly. Class B to about D consists of people who have some form of Japanese proficiency, to various extents. Class E and below are effectively exposed to usable Japanese for the first time. Each class has around 8 people, which is a good size for personalised learning.

Based on my performance in the assessment test on Friday, the teachers at JLC have allocated me to class C. More or less, everyone in my class has moderate to confident ability in Japanese speaking, reading, writing and listening. Of course, the Japanese background of everyone in the class is different, so I can't make any generalisation. Some people in the class have learned Japanese academically for many years like I have, whilst others in the class have (amazingly) self-taught themselves Japanese over many years through a variety of means, from studying for the JLPT in their own time, to speaking to Japanese people in Final Fantasy MMOs. Everyone in the class ranges from trilingual to tetralingual (notsureifthiswordexists) to varying degrees of fluency, and I feel right at home amongst them. For once in my life, I can speak my English, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese interchangeably in conversation and be considered normal by the group. This isn't limited to just in our class! Virtually everyone under this undergraduate scholarship is trilingual, so it's effectively Big Bang Theory in our residential hall, except in our case it's geekiness of a linguistic kind that we share in common.

Anyway, back to class C, it's been a pretty enjoyable first weeks on the whole. I do admit that I have found the learning content this week to be ridiculously easy, since it's been revision of content equivalent to year 10 Australian high school Japanese, but I acknowledge that the teachers have good reasoning in choosing to begin here, and I'm also aware that I'm not the only one in our class who would like to go a little bit faster (actually, skip a few years ahead). The difference in perspective on education between the (native) Japanese teachers and us "gaijin" (Japanese cultural mini-lesson: gaijin is a term used to refer to non-Japanese people in Japan, connotating ignorance of Japanese customs - which are many, for the record) is that we are happy with an 80% mastery of the basics, whilst they expect 100%. No doubt I was surprised that I got one mark taken off for barely a pencil twitch in an otherwise perfect effort.

To be fair on the others from my class who may be reading this blog post, I empathise with you over the marks you don't reckon you deserve to have lost. I feel the same way. But since the teacher decides what marks we get, our duty is to acknowledge the mistakes she points out and to fix it for next time. To verbalise the diagrammatic metaphor, we are performing maintenance on the foundation upon which the rest of our Japanese language will be built upon, therefore nothing short of flawless will suffice in this earthquake prone country, which is why we need to fill in the chips in our initial foundation built back home.

So that's the Japanese learning component of my first week of semester covered. More to come in future posts :)

To do list

An updated version of last week's to do list.

• Obtain a dorm room (done!)
• Register my existence at the City Municipal Office (done!)
• Open a Japanese bank account (done!)
• Get health insurance (done!)
• Fill out contract for utility bills for my dorm room (done!)
• Get a Japanese SIM card (done!)
• Send out first prayer letter (done!)
• Pay my dormitory rent and security bond (no security bond, monthly automatic payment set up)
• Pay tuition fees (monthly)
• Have my arrival interview with the Associate Professor (hopefully next week)