Student board work - we earned a red flower for the first time last week. I did #1.

One of the most enjoyable (but also the most challenging) parts of my Japan experience so far is learning the language.  With the Rotary Peace Fellowship program, we aren't required to take any Japanese language classes after the summer intensive course, but I decided to continue with the academic courses offered throughout the year.  This has several advantages and disadvantages.  First, I'm not allowed to take the classes pass/fail, so the grade counts on my transcript.  Unfortunately, the courses are extremely rigorous; on the first day the teacher basically said that they don't give out A's.  Also, it's a huge time suck.  I spend three mornings a week in class which limits my time for research and study for other graduate courses.  It also limits which graduate courses I can take since Japanese takes up three entire mornings.  It also demands a huge amount of work outside of class and we are all required to meet with a tutor once a week and individually with our instructor once a week as well.  The advantage of taking such a course is that I'm exposed to Japanese practice in class over 12 hours a week and it forces me to learn, practice and do work outside of class.

My usual blue flower with a rare red flower on homework

Though the teaching methods are pretty terrible, class sizes are small and we have formed into quite a nice little family.  To give you an example of the pedagogy, we haven't seen a single image or object used to teach vocabulary.  Instead, we memorize lists of words on a powerpoint.  There are little to no communicative activities.  The class is interesting to me because I can compare the teaching style to methods in the U.S. and it also forces me to practice . . . a lot.

Some handwriting practice with lots of correction

The Japanese teachers like to encourage competition between us students which I hate.  The highest reward for a student is a red flower on a paper.  A red flower indicates perfection and there are several students who get a red flower every time, which is announced at each distribution of homework, tests and quizzes.  I've only managed a red flower once or twice and have mostly been receiving blue flowers.  A blue flower is given if you correct your mistakes by yourself and then turn it in again.

Grammar practice for the final exam

This week is the last day of class and we had to perform a three minute memorized speech about "Our favorite person" with visual aids.  I talked about Sean and though I was very nervous, the whole experience was really productive and I learned a lot.  We have to turn in the final essay of the speech next week during the final exam.  The final exam is four hours long (!) and consists of reading, writing, listening and speaking.  It's worth 45% of the grade (!).  I'll keep you posted on how I do in the course.  At this point, the Japanese isn't too difficult, it's just that I don't have the amount of time to devote to memorizing how to write characters correctly.  My handwriting is known to be terrible and consistently shocks my handwriting teacher who bleeds over my grid paper with her red pen.  It's not pretty.  I'm hoping to pass the class so I can continue on to Japanese II but it's going to be a struggle - I'll let you know how it goes!

1 Comment

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