Since I arrived on the 3rd, it’s not exactly right, but today marks the end of my first month.

Money spent: 53,615 yen
–Entertainment: 14,038 (Books: 11,438)
–Food: 30,551
–Household: 3,644
–Transportation: 2,890 (not counting commute which will be recouped)
–Personal: 1,500
–Misc: 992

I post this so people might be able to get a realistic idea of what it costs to live over here. Factor in that with the exception of the books I bought, this was pretty bare minimum. I doubt you could get along comfortably for much less, but I suppose it’s possible.

A number of things happened this week. First off, we had a Kanji test on Monday and a grammar test on Tuesday. This is the third grammar test so far, and I predict a score somewhere in the middle of my last two. My first grade was a 71 and my second one was a 92 (I received it back on Wednesday). Number three is probably somewhere in the 80′s.

The kanji test, on the other hand, went pretty well.

I can’t get too excited about this, because I’ve basically covered all the kanji that we’ve discussed so far and will discuss already. The fact that this segment of the class is easy to me (a segment that takes up approximately 30% of the class) allows more time to focus on grammar. I’ve mentioned this probably three times already, but the new material is not the difficult part of the test. Looking at the questions I’ve gotten wrong on tests, it’s always one of three things: verb problems (either using the wrong verb, or making some mistake with transitive/intransitive verbs), particle problems, or stupid mistakes (on the most recent test, I forgot to put two dots next to a character to make it “do” instead of “to” [と/ど]). The stupid mistakes just mean I need to spend more time looking over my answers before submitting. The verb problem will come with time. So will the particles, although we spent a long time discussing them in class today and some parts make a bit more sense now (such as the difference between で and に). In terms of what prevents me from speaking smoothly, particles are the major thing. They’re just these little buggers that you don’t even notice until you’re constructing sentences, and then you have no idea which one to stick in there. Oh well, I’ll keep working on it.

The other major event was the speech contest. This is an event that happens once a year, and the entire school gets involved. Each class has a representative who delivers a speech and the other members of the class have to perform a “cheer” on stage before their speech. As I mentioned, our representative was Encaron who is seen in the picture on the left attempting to color the entire Chinese flag with just a red marker. These flags were part of our cheer. Here’s how it went down: The theme song for the Olympics would play, and two people would come in holding a sign with the name of the country on it. Three other people would follow, one carrying the flag for that country. The other two would perform some sort of traditional greeting for that country. The four countries we used were Korea, China, America and Malaysia. Jeff and I of course did the “traditional greeting” for America, which was kind of a fist pump thing. After all the greetings, the cards with the names of the countries were flipped over and it revealed a message which essentially means that Encaron is coming, but it was a parody of the words that are always said over the intercom when a subway comes. You kinda had to be there.

The speech contest itself was on Thursday. The good news was that there was no class that day. The bad news was that it lasted three hours longer than class. We all met in a park in Ikebukuro and were separated by our classes (I’m in class M33).

Having the entire student body of KCP in one place gave me the best idea so far of the size of the school. We also received a list of all the entrants and their classes. From that, I can extrapolate the following information:
*There are a total of 35 classes
*There are 4 level 1 classes, 9 level 2 classes, 5 level 3 classes, 5 level 4 classes, 4 level 5 classes, 4 level 6 classes, 4 classes above that (they are named “S” or “J” but I don’t know what that stands for. Suffice it to say, they’re a high level)
*I could count the number of Americans who were in level 4 or higher on one hand. Matthew Wujak, in level 5, is the highest American as far as I know.
*There are a total of between 550-600 students at the school.

The contest itself took a very long time. It takes a while to go through 35 students. As I was watching, I was very conscious of the accents of the various nationalities. Especially of the American accents. We tend to overstress particles, it seems, and we really want to put inflection in our voices to the detriment of the language and mankind. Besides Encaron, I knew three other people giving speeches. Stephen gave a speech on Japanese literature.

Stephen's class performs a mildly insulting cheer about his native state of Idaho

An American named Jared who I know from the culture classes gave a “speech” on drumming, which was really just him drumming. The crowd liked it all the same. Tall Stephen gave a speech too. I could tell he was nervous, but he made a little joke about how the microphone was “chotto mijikai desu ne” (a little short, isn’t it?) and the crowd thought it was hilarious.

Tall Stephen giving his speech

Encaron pulled off his speech to perfection, but his contents weren’t interesting enough to win any of the top prizes. We got done at 3:00 pm.

That’s about it for this week. On Saturday we have another culture class on “Japanese Psychology and Religion” and then we’re going to the Edo Tokyo Museum. I may be going on a trip out of the city on Sunday, but it depends on how I’m feeling at the end of Saturday. Chances are that I will. So far, I’ve written 22,766 words in this blog. Consider that a typical, mass-market paperback novel contains about 60,000 words. I’ll try to keep up the pace, but it really depends on whether or not I do interesting things. I’m trying to use the blog as a way to judge how much I’m taking advantage of my time over here. If I go a week and am only able to write a few lines that I deem interesting enough to post, it means I’m not doing enough. That said, expect another decent sized entry after this weekend. My physical condition on Saturday evening will do a lot to determine whether or not I’ll post that day or save it all up for a massive one on Sunday or Monday.