The first days at school
This is a post without pictures. Yes, unfortunaly I've not had the time to take anything at all.
Yesterday the opening ceremony took place which felt very formal. There were a few laughs when those who hadn't studied Japanese before tried to memorize a small speech they were going to have as self-introduction. As usual I'm very bad at speeches and even though it isn't even 30 seconds and just a self-introduction.
During monday we took the placement test which will tell you what level your Japanese is on and will place you in the appropriate class. I got into D-class and there are A-E where A is the beginner class and E is the hardest. I did both the 3 kyuu and 2 kyuu tests. I wrote about 2 pages in the 2 kyuu test and gave up as I probably wouldn't be able to manage to finish it anyway, or so I felt. Yesterday I was asked to do 2 kyuu test again, because I had nearly 100% on the 3 kyuu test (and I didn't even review my 3 kyuu test!). I was asked to check in with the office to see if I was still going to be in D-class or not.
At first I thought I would be in C-class cause I've not done the book they used in C-class yet and the D-class book is the book which comes after that one. Anyways, during the first two periods we had lessons until 12 o'clock. Iwami was the name of the teacher and she's alright, but very stressfull. She presses on to quickly I think. The lesson was about newspaper articles, which is a damn hard job to read. The headlines in Japanese newspapers are very often abbrivated and you need to figure out what verbs and particles are going where. Then of course the articles themselves are hard to read and my kanji vocabulary is not that good. After some work we had read at least half an article about the earthquake in Kobe 1995.
During the afternoon yesterday I went to one of the elective courses. There are a few to chose between and the one I went to was a reading and listening comprehension. You need real good concentration and hearing for this not to say the least. Listening to the news and try to pick up words fast enough to try to summarize it. The reading part seems hard as well. We need to read godly fast for this one.
During the opening ceremony there were a few of the some 40:ish volounteers there. The volounteers are there to help during the Japanese lessons as well as to spend time with during free time. One of them I already know since my time in Stockholm, Ikuho. She was studying there during autumn and spring. It was nice to see a known face. After some chitchat with some of the Japanese people most people went down to the dining hall. The food here is pretty cheap, about 500 yen per meal (40 SEK). At least there's also Facebook if you don't have a cellphone. Most of the volounteers has facebook. After lunch I went to do my 2 kyuu test again.
After I finished my test I bumped into a few of the exchange student, Ikuho and another volounteer called Maki. I suggested that we could go to a Starbucks in Shinjuku and so we did. Starbucks is really neat. I love frapuccino but I'm afraid to guess how many calories are in them. I ordered the Maccha Cream which is frappuccino with green tea. It was awesomly good and it's been like two years since I had one last time, so it was nice. But now I'll most likely try to keep it down with frappuccino. I don't want to go up that much in weight.
Today has been a eventfulday as well. The funniest part was the last lesson, conversation. There were a few volounteers who came to help out and we were able to chat about anything we wanted and it went well actually. After todays conversation lesson I've become much more happy about my knowledge in conversation. Hopefully I'll be able to get even better from now on. I have to endure the hard way of learning words in order to ease the whole proccess. One of the girls were very intrested in Sweden. She'd been told to write about a country except for Japan during her time in juniour high and she picked Sweden randomly and became interested just like that.
Ohwell, here I am in the apartment again and pretty tired actually. Yesterday I dragged along Gustav for some jogging and it went well. Since we didn't have a map or anything we just ran here and there for 30 minutes and it worked out fine. The roads are pretty calm here but you get hot very fast when jogging in Japan. Jogging in Sweden makes you warm, jogging in Japan makes you boiling hot, litterally.
Tomorrow we have a kanji quiz on the news article so I need to do some studying. I need to do a good first impression at least.
