Class in session

I just thought I'd stick in an extra entry about my class, and what it is like studying here.

My class consists of mostly asian people, namely south korean. Then there are swedish, french, taiwanese, chinese and danish people. In my parallell class there are also spanish and british folk. We are about 20 in total in my class though, I think. (Guy in the upper-right picture is Jonas, a fellow swede)

Well, class starts off with a "Minasan ohayou gozaimasu" from our sensei, which translates into "Good morning everyone". From there on, it's showtime. The classes are pretty intense, so you really can't afford to miss anything. I personally have a hard time memorizing everything. However, most europeans in our class suffer the very same fate, and it's beyond me how those übermensch south koreans actually memorize everything.

I must say that japanese teachers are much more fun than their western counterparts. Since they don't speak any english, they try to get their point across by acting out hilarious body language and charades when we look like sitting question marks. I mean, just their 'teacher's notes' are fun! Just look at the examples below.

The above smiley means that you have done something that's... well, not so good. But I mean, it's almost worth doing just that just to get these different awesome anime-esque smileys! I've seen students in our class get smileys that are way worse, so I won't panic just yet.

This one speaks for itself. What western-styled teacher would *ever* make notes in your homework like this? These kind of smileys show that you've done something right, obviously!

Okay, so our teachers are cool - what about the rest of the class? Well, I've known them for just a little more than a week, but it's a cool bunch. Some of them live in the same residence as I do, so sometimes we commute together in the morning (depending on when everyone wakes up). I'm a little embarrassed of the fact that I don't remember everyone's names... I'm having a hard time memorizing some of the korean students' names since some of their name tags are in kanji.

By far the most skilled japanese speaker in the class! Umi-san has helped me countless times with my japanese. She also speaks english fluently, which is cool.

Jack is the one who I was exploring Shinjuku with (which I mentioned in a prior blog). He is the one living with TkyoSam, a semi-famous youtube v-logger.

Two south-koreans who also speak japanese really well. Lee Na Young (left) made a suggestion about meeting up at Nippori station (my train-switch from Matsudo) tomorrow, but I have no idea how we are going to find eachother in an endless ocean of japanese people. Oh, and since my korean is a bit rusty to say the least, we communicate only in japanese, which is *great* practice. Speaking japanese like that usually gets long and hard (that's what she said, huhuhu) but it's fun to be a bit lost in translation sometimes. Kawaii desu ne?

Chinese guy and french guy. French guy's name is Julian, forgot the chinese dude's name.

Today's grammar lesson. Japanese grammar is pretty simple and straight-forward for the most part - especially when compared to Swedish - but because it's so different it gets really tricky when composing sentences. Thankfully, there are not that many irregularities in japanese, so you can memorize a great portion of the language without being a native speaker. Some of it is annoying though... like, for instance, the word twenty (ni juu = two ten) is "hatachi" when speaking of age.

I'm mostly focusing on vocabulary right now though so that I can understand what the hell the teachers are trying to teach. Thank God I know hiragana and katakana... Some of the students didn't acquire them before coming to Japan, and well... the teachers write almost exclusively in hiragana. Some teachers also don't know romaji (our way of writing, the roman alphabet) very well, so it's fun to see them mess up upper and lower-case letters, or accidentally re-arrange the order of them when writing down a word. "Erebeeta (Elevator)" once became "EveLaTor" which was purely awesome.

I hope you enjoyed the brief tour of the class... kind of non-informative, but still ^_^; I'll let you guys (Swedish peeps) know when the video log is coming along!

Sayounara!