It’s almost as if it’s a harder level or something

With regard to tests, I’m not able to sum up my current state very easily. First off, I’m dominating the kanji tests. There’s a kanji test every week, and large tests after every five sections. I’m averaging 94% on them, and I think my latest large kanji test may be a 100%. One good thing about the long commute is that there’s often nothing better to do than to go through the flashcards on my iPhone’s Japanese dictionary that I made for all the kanji. Once the crowds clear out enough that I can move my arms, I’m usually able to get about 30 minutes of good practice in before class starts. By the way, if I’m able to leave the house before 7:00, the trains aren’t very packed. I’m trying to adjust my sleep schedule a bit so that can be possible.

When it comes to grammar… I was more prepared for the chapter 1 test than I’d ever been for a grammar test at KCP. I spent several hours in the library over the weekend, just focusing on the upcoming test. By the end, I had everything down perfect. I took the test, felt awesome about it. I knew that I had at least a 90. So imagine my surprise when I get handed my test back and see a big red “66″ on it.

It turns out that the standard in level 4 is much higher. I’ve heard this from fellow level 4ers as well. Problems that we would get the benefit of the doubt with in level 3 are now marked completely wrong. They want us to use the exact grammar forms taught in class. I asked one of my teachers about some of my answers, and she agreed that some of the ones that were marked wrong were perfectly fine in spoken language, but not exactly what the question was looking for. I also lost points because I didn’t know the definition of some words — unrelated to the grammar points being taught.

So yes, there are plenty of small mistakes that I looked at and thought “duh”, but if you hear me reporting that I got a good grade on a future grammar test, it’s a darn good thing.

The written compositions are similar. I turned in one the best papers I’ve ever written last week and got a 70%. And it actually was probably the best paper I’ve ever written, and there wasn’t that much red ink. But the standard is so high that it just wasn’t good enough. I heard from a lot of my classmates that the average for that assignment was an F.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. At no point during the last four months would I use the word “easy” to describe classes. And it’s good that they are trying to get us to stop making small mistakes. It’s just harder than I thought it would be, and my confidence in the first week seems a bit unfounded at the moment.

On Friday we’re having a school trip to a park, where we’re doing a barbecue and doing park stuff. This means that tomorrow is my last day of school for the week. I’m not thinking much about any excursions next weekend, especially when Monday is our chapter 2 test. Oh well. It’s not a vacation.

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by on October 28, 2009  •  Permalink
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Kawaguchiko

You may remember my hijinks a while back when Trisna and I attempted to go see Mt. Fuji and the weather did everything in its power to prevent us from enjoying it. I decided to try it again, because I still have exactly zero pictures of Mt. Fuji. I decided last Friday that I would go on the next day if the weather was good. On Saturday morning, I looked out and the weather looked great. Not a cloud in the sky. So I took the train over to Tokyo station, and then got on a bus to Kawaguchiko (one of the five famous lakes north of Mt. Fuji). As I was on the bus, I took a good hard look at the sky and realized that instead of being clear, it was actually completely overcast. Not sure how you screw that up (future tip: look for shadows), but I did. I wasn’t completely disappointed, because it looked to be breaking up a bit, and perhaps it would be all the way clear by sunset.

It took about 3 hours in total to get there, which really doesn’t seem that long anymore after my 18 hour trip from Hiroshima to Tokyo. Having an iPod helped. When I arrived at Kawaguchiko station, I just figured that I would kill some time until the afternoon and then start looking for pictures.

First I stopped for lunch. I should say I was stopped for lunch, because I was flagged down by someone representing a nearby restaurant/museum. Of course she started the exchange by reciting a memorized greeting and showing me a poorly designed menu written in English. I don’t know why Japanese are unable to write in English and understand basic design principles at the same time, but it seems like you can have one or the other over here. I wound up eating there anyway since I’m a sucker and the food didn’t look too bad.

At first I politely answered in English to all their questions. There’s certainly an impulse to want to say some really complex sentence at the beginning as sort of a way to say “okay, stop it. I can speak Japanese.” but I resisted initially. Eventually it got kind of frustrating and I broke the ice. After ordering and some light banter, some employees literally gathered around my table and asked me questions. See, this is the main difference between Tokyo and every other place in Japan. In Tokyo, gaijin are such old news. Although most Tokyoites I’ve talked to seemed genuinely curious when they had the opportunity to talk to me privately, in public they adopt the facade of unaffectedness. But here in the country, even in a touristy place like the foot of Mt. Fuji, the opportunity to talk to a gaijin seems exciting. It’s kind of nice when people seem excited to talk to you.

I got some suggestions of other things to do around Kawaguchiko aside from look at Mt. Fuji, because I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do that for a while. I stuffed my pocket with pamphlets and went on my way.

I passed some time by going to a museum which featured a bunch of photographs of Mt. Fuji. I was trying to notice some compositional trends between the way people photographed the mountain. I noticed that a lot of people saw fit to place the mountain centered on the X axis. That’s typically a compositional no-no unless you have good reason, and I did notice that the ones that had it off-center looked the most impressive. Most of the photos were good, but they weren’t my style. My style is… well, you’ll see when I take a picture, if I ever do.

After that, I also went to a museum devoted to automatic music machines… Yeah. It was very cool, in all honesty, and there was even a string quartet that gave a short concert, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. After both museums, I was back outside, it was about 2:00 and the weather had not improved. In fact, it was looking a little worse.

Determined to get something accomplished during this trip, I decided to just walk around the entire lake. It’s a pretty big lake you see, and it took about an hour just to get to the furthest point, where it began to rain.

I stubbornly kept going, determined to finish the complete circle. No I didn’t have an umbrella. That’s silly. All the while, I looked in the direction that Fuji should have been. On a normal day, it would have looked like this. On this day, it looked like this.

After about a full hour of rain walking, I arrived back in the area around the station. The rain stopped just as I approached town and I decided to get dinner. I passed the restaurant I ate lunch at and the flagger-downer saw me and we discussed the ups and downs of the previous six hours. As it turned out, eating dinner at that restaurant seemed like a really good idea, so I did. They gave me a towel and allowed me to stand next to their heater and everything.

So, yes, I am now on strike two for my Fuji trips. There was something redeeming about this most recent trip though, and it’s not just me stubbornly trying to imagine value out of something because I spent time and money on it. I know one thing, I’m not leaving this country before I get one picture of Mt. Fuji that I’m really proud of, so I’ll keep coming back until I do it right.

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by on October 22, 2009  •  Permalink
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The grind

So, the first week of classes in level 4 are over. I guess I should describe it a little.

Perhaps I misspoke earlier when I said the split between boys and girls was about 30/70. I counted again and it was about even. I think my miscalculation came because a large group of guys came late on the first day, and I noticed the NNU-like copious number of girls before the bell rang. There’s also a few Chinese people, and a handful of Malaysian. It’s actually pretty similar to last semester when you break it down.

Watanabe-sensei, who I had earlier mentioned was a new teacher and not quite as polished as other teachers I’ve had, has been getting better every day. I never really felt like it was something to worry about, but the standard for teachers at KCP is so high that it just surprised me a little. Our other twice-a-week teacher, Ujike-sensei, is very energetic and keeps the class engaged. We still have yet to have Eguchi-sensei, because he wasn’t at school on Thursday.

The focus in level 4 is completely different from level 3, in good ways and bad. In level 3 (and level 2 and 1), there’s a backbone of grammar that everything is built around. You can easily tell your progress in class by what chapter you’re on in the textbook. In level 4, the grammar is presented differently, and a lot less time is spent on it proportionately. There’s the JLPT preparation grammar, which is presented in a sort of sink-or-swim way by giving us a test on a bunch of grammatical concepts we haven’t learned yet and then figuring out why our answers were wrong. And then there’s the normal grammar, which has yet to introduce anything I wasn’t familiar with. As such, we have to look at the kanji book as the main backbone, which is kind of strange to get used to.

I think I already mentioned that there is a kanji test every day, which is already getting tiring. In order to fully learn the 5 characters assigned a day, I need to spend about two hours on it outside of class. Of course there is typically other homework assigned as well.

But when you come down to it, intrinsic to learning any language is the requirement that you learn a butt-ton of words. Have you ever seen a dictionary? Now imagine that you don’t know what any of the words in that dictionary mean, and you have to learn them one by one. It’s a daunting task, and at some point it becomes the last thing between someone and fluency. Even in English, I come across words I don’t know about every day. So, on one hand, it’s good that we’re reaching the point where we’re tackling the vocabulary (via kanji) head on, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I got 10/10 on my first two Kanji tests, but I know I missed at least one on the most recent one. I’m aiming for above 90% this semester.

Oh hey. I entered my photo from Miyajima in the school newspaper club’s photo contest and it won the teacher’s award. So that’s cool.

I’m still going back and forth, but it looks like I’m taking three special classes this semester. On Fridays, it’s Intermediate Conversation. On Mondays, it’s JLPT 2 Preparation, and on Tuesdays it’s Koto. Well, hopefully it’s Koto. Anraku-sensei told me that there’s a possibility that I won’t be able to do it because they give priority to students who will be here longer than I am. If I can’t get into that, I may try Intermediate Kanji again. It depends on if the material taught will be exactly the same or not.

So, I know my entries haven’t been totally interesting lately. I wake up at 6:30, leave for school at 7:30, am at school until 12:15 on normal days and 1:15 on special class days. Then I eat lunch, go to work for four hours, go back home, eat dinner at around 7:00 and then do homework. I would love to post something more interesting, but there just isn’t the time to do much. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. With the exception of two hours in the train, there’s no part of my day that I don’t want to be doing. Still, I’m a little nostalgic of days where I could watch Lynda.com tutorials, get food whenever I want, and decide to do things spontaneously. If weather permits (the same conditions preventing me from doing anything in the week before moving), I’ll do something interesting this weekend.

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by on October 16, 2009  •  Permalink
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Different from the last time

Walking into the first day of classes at KCP for the second time had a much different feeling than the first. Much like my senior year of high school, there’s a little bit of unwarranted cockiness that comes from being an “upperclassman.” Without the learning curve that goes with your first semester at KCP, the course content seems as if it is much more manageable this time around, although the scope is by no means limited. We’re going to cover the entire contents of the JLPT 2 test by the end, and things will move even quicker than level 3. The main different is that I won’t have to spend as much time looking up words that everybody in the class already knows but me. On the contrary, I’ve had to explain a couple of words to my new classmates, which never happened in level 3. This three-day weekend seems like a waste, because there’s honestly no place I’d rather be on Monday than at school. Give me a month or so to get exhausted from the daily kanji tests, increasingly difficult reading comprehension, and two hours and twenty minutes on a train daily and I’d appreciate it a little more.

Of course, the classes are shuffled from semester to semester, so it’s goodbye for a majority of last semester’s classmates. I am still together with Encaron, as well as Yi (who lived in the same dorm as me) and his roommate. There are also two other girls who are still in the same class. This semester’s demographics are actually more heavily Korean than last semester, and there’s also about a 70/30 majority of girls. I’m the only American.

It’s too early to draw any conclusions about the teachers, because there’s only been one class. If you remember from last semester, there are three teachers, two teach two classes a week, and one picks up the other. On Friday, we met one of the twice-a-week teachers, who is named Watanabe-sensei, is from Kyoto, and this is apparently her first semester. She seems really young, and seemed slightly more mortal than last semester’s teachers. I recognize the name of our Thursday teacher, who is the really soft-spoken male teacher of my Intermediate Kanji special class last semester. I don’t recognize the name of the other teacher, but I’ll find out on Wednesday.

In terms of content, this semester is weighted more heavily toward reading comprehension. I’m happy about that because reading is a really good way to learn new words, but you need to be at a certain level or else you’re looking up a word or a grammar structure once every sentence and it’s too frustrating to continue. I’ve got five Harry Potter books in Japanese at home that I’m hoping to be able to read when I get back. Other than that, the course objectives are largely based on the JLPT level 2 test that I’ll be taking in the beginning of December. The point being that I won’t likely have to study anything outside the actual course content in order to get what I want to get out of this semester.

Outside of classes, this semester has already been dramatically different than last semester. For the first part of the weekend, we drove over to Chiba prefecture and stayed the night at a friend of Rina’s house. It was a couple with two children, the oldest girl about the same age as Serin, and a boy about 4 or 5. Of particular interest to me was that the husband words at TBS (one of the major television stations in Tokyo, located right next to where I work) directing commercials. We wound up talking for about an hour, during which I found out about the editing software workflow commonly used (he estimated that Apple has recently outpaced Avid, although they are about neck and neck at the moment), different film director philosophies (auteurs vs. collaboratives, and did I mention that holy crap this guy actually met Akira Kurosawa??), and the possibilities of me being able to get a tour of TBS some time (very possible, and he even seemed excited about it.) All in all, it went very well, and we’ll likely have lunch again some time together since we work within a kilometer of each other.

This afternoon, everyone went over to a nearby park and the kids did kid things. While I was sitting on a bench, after pushing their younger boy on the swings, it struck me that this was a situation I would never be in if I were still in the dorm. Heck, I would have considered it a small victory if I ventured someplace beside the 7-11 all weekend.

Of course there are trade-offs. Time is at much more of a premium, and tonight when I was able to lay on my bed and listen to an entire album straight through without being interrupted, I considered it a small miracle. It turns out that six years old is the age that kids just like pushing buttons on people to see how much they can get a rise out of you. I sure would like to be able to sleep in past 7:30 on weekends, but I know that’s the time Serin will enter my room and literally jump on me. It’s all part of the experience I guess, but there are times I like the homestay experience and times I feel the opposite. I’ve been amicable for the most part, but I’ll likely adopt a more firm stance when she interferes with the serious amount of study and homework this semester requires. And of course there’s always the library, but it would be nice to have a period of time when I know I can’t be bothered in my own room. Again, something I’ll probably attempt to make explicit when school starts for real.

But although I’ve mentioned a few complaints, the good still far outweighs the bad, and I in no way regret choosing a homestay over another semester in the dorms.

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by on October 11, 2009  •  Permalink
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One more time with feeling

It’s a little strange to me that the first day of school this semester is on a Friday. What’s more, the following Monday is a holiday. So yes, school starts tomorrow, but it won’t really feel like school until next Tuesday.

I wound up being a lot more busy during the entrance ceremony than I thought. After the beginning explanations by the teachers and the grueling translations into three languages, we talked about the special classes. Mr. Imai, who has this really strange and awesome personality that can’t be described, interviewed three students. I say “interview,” but everything was scripted. Still, talking in front of about 200 people can be tough, especially when you have to use a different language. I think I pulled it off okay.

The second part was the sample conversations. The teachers pitched it as a way to get excited about what you will be able to do by the time you get done with level 3, so there was even more pressure. I mean, what if a teachers says “if you work hard, you can be like this!” and then they motion over to me, I open my mouth and gravy comes out? Luckily, I got all my lines right, pronounced the difficult words “hashiraseraremashita”, and the crowd laughed at the right places. Phew.

I felt some more pressure because I was the only American to stand in front of the crowd during the entire ceremony. I remembered when I was sitting in that crowd just three weeks earlier. I have a habit of viewing people working toward the same goal as competitors — which definitely has some negative consequences — so I would size up any American I saw and try to figure out where I was in comparison. This was during a time when I was agonizing about my own placement test, and the only thing I felt I could use as a yardstick was other Americans. Now I would say I’m a little more secure, and hearing Americans speak Japanese doesn’t make my blood boil like it used to (it actually used to! don’t ask me why).

After the ceremony, one of the teachers had me go down to the classroom with an American who was being put into level 1. There was a Korean translator, but because she was doing the normal program (the American program is different from the normal KCP program, although the classes are the same) she couldn’t go down in the room with the other Americans. So, I had to translate the teachers explanations. It was fun in a way. Not like I want to make a job out of it.

The weather had been cloudy for quite a while because a typhoon was coming. They estimated it to actually hit Toyko in the early morning of the 8th, but it wound up hitting later morning. I had no plans besides work, but I decided to head out at 10:30, right in the middle of it. If I were an old man who just wanted to get to work and continue his routine, I might have described it as “terrible”, but I thought it was fun. Really fast winds, rain, hats blowing off people’s heads. I saw some footage of downtown Tokyo, and it was amusing to watch everybody attempt to maintain their unaffected expressions while their umbrella was being turned inside out. Outside of Tokyo, in the more rural areas and Chiba prefecture, it was a little less amusing, especially if you lived in buildings not made out of concrete. But Tokyo is built for natural disasters. This typhoon was nothing to be afraid of.

While I was working, suddenly the room got bright as the sun finally kicked down the clouds’ door with its guns-a-blazing. (make a mental image) After that, the skies were clearer than I’d ever seen them. It would have been a nice time to take pictures from the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, but I didn’t have my camera and it’s no longer just a quick detour to get it.

In fact, the process of getting from where I live to school is about as bad as you can imagine. Remember a while ago when I posted a video of station attendants packing people into trains? It’s like that.

A train comes about every five minutes during rush hour at my station, and every door of every train has the same sight when they open: people packed all the way to the doors. And quite a few people get on the train at Minami Senju, so it just gets worse. It took me three trains to come and go before I decided that things weren’t going to get better. I turned around, backed up and pushed. Of course, there was a handful of businessmen in line behind me, and I actually got into the subway without much difficulty. So did about six others. The doors shut and I was faced with the common problem when in a subway: what do I do with my hands? You can try to hold on to the overhead rail, but that just means my elbow is jutting out and probably hitting someone in the head. It’s not good to keep them down at your side because people may mistake you for a chikan, “train pervert”, and you never know when a girl will randomly yelp, blame you, and the next thing you know, you’re deported. At least that’s what Mr. Tanaka warned us during our orientation.

The truth is that the train is so packed that it is literally impossible to fall down. Still, I imagine a situation where somehow, everyone falls over and it creates a twill weave of commuters, impossible to untangle. But any room to fall is quickly taken up by people. At the next three stops, more people got in than got off. The third stop (Ueno) had a scene exactly like the youtube video. There were actually a fair amount of people who gave up and waited for the next train. Let me tell you. It takes a darn packed train in order to dissuade Japanese commuters from entering it.

Granted, I have yet to attempt to ride during the time I would normally go to school, about 7:30-7:45. I’d expect it to be a bit less crowded than it was at 8:20, but I’m not going to hold my breath…although I think a doctor would advise me to.

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by on October 8, 2009  •  Permalink
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