A Brief(ish) Note on Class

I am in no way writing this blog post to procrastinate on homework or studying for my quiz tomorrow. 

I just thought I'd update y'all on how classes are going. Yeah...classes. The thing that I actually came to Japan for. 

Here's an overview of how my school day goes:

6:30 (or 6:45...or 7:00) - Wake up. Do morning things. Eat breakfast. 

7:34 - Board my bus. Ride the bus. Sleep on the bus. Become one with the bus.

8:15 - Get to Rifare and either sleep more or start studying for the daily quiz.

9:00 - Classes start. One of the sensees from Princeton or another American university (we change sensees each week) reviews grammar from the day before and starts to teach new grammar. Struggle to not fall asleep.

10:00 - Break from class. Attempt to memorize vocabulary or kanji by any means possible. 

10:10 - Second period starts. Usually learn new grammar and practice talking or reading. 

11:00 - Second break from class. Panic about being woefully unprepared for upcoming quiz. Give up on studying and accept my fate. 

11:10 - Third period starts, and we change sensees to a sensee from Ishikawa. Immediately take quiz (5 min), then somebody presents a new word to everybody. This is followed by dialogue practice and listening practice. Invariably fall asleep. 

12:00 - Run to the convenience store or the station or the department store to buy lunch and shovel food into my mouth. Some days I play some frisbee with Tommy at the nearby park. Other days we have extracurricular activities to go to. 

A couple hours later - Go back home and not do homework. Although I really should because homework only takes about 30 minutes to do...

Level 2 classes move a lot quicker than I anticipated. Memorizing the vocabulary and 20ish kanji for each chapter is a bit difficult, and I find it quite frustrating that I forget the vocab and kanji almost immediately after we finish a chapter (probably due to my terrible study habits). Other than that, class has been a bit boring so far since we've been learning grammar that has already been covered at Yale, but we finally started learning new grammar this week and things have definitely gotten more interesting. The teachers from the States are superb, as to be expected, but the teachers from Ishikawa are a bit lacking, and I find the third period (which the Ishikawa teachers teach) is extremely repetitive, tiring, and a bit unnecessary. Of course, practice is very important for helping to remember new grammar and vocabulary, but by the third period my ability to pay attention is completely gone and I just stare at the clock waiting for the hour to be over. 

On kanji: the Princeton kids learned very different kanji (although around the same amount as Yale did), so it's been interesting trying to catch up on all the kanji that we didn't learn.

That's all for today! Here is a picture to prove that I have actually made new friends.

Her name is Jenny :)

Thanks for reading and DFTBA!