First week at Japanese language school

I got placed in the beginner class but that's ok because I suck at Japanese and seriously need the practise.

Anyway, since my last blog, where I talked about why I decided to come to Japan, why I chose to become a student and how I got here, I've been doing my first week at school. Last time I talked about how I wasn't really happy with how my placement test went, but I think it's turned out ok in the end. I was put into level 1 which is the beginner class. I was a bit disappointed with this at first since I had been studying on my own for a while before coming to Japan and was worried that we would just be going over very basic stuff that I already knew. However level 1 is split into two groups; 1A and 1B; with me being placed into 1B. Not being in the very bottom class has also saved my ego a little; but I'm basically boasting about being high bronze/low silver league.

Group 1A is doing very basic stuff like Hiragana/Katakana (basic Japanese alphabets) and greetings and vocab, and in 1B we're doing stuff like talking about what time we start and finish work, or talking about where we went last weekend. It's still fairly basic and is all stuff that I had covered on my own, but I've found that the class feels about the right level for me since I had very little speaking and listening practise on my own. Although I do 'know' how to say a lot of things in theory and understand some of the grammar rules, when it actually comes down to a real conversation I take way too long to put a coherent sentence together.

The start of the classes are broken up into various sections like pronunciation and writing but then after we've done a few of those exercises we usually spend the rest of the day's classes doing mostly speaking and listening practise. Usually the teacher will introduce some example conversation that includes a few new words and a new grammatical concept, and then we'll go over it a few times before breaking into pairs or groups and practising with each other. The lessons are all taught entirely in Japanese, so they never explicitly explain the grammar rules to us, but they are introduced in such a way that it's pretty easy to understand how to use them. And if there are any irregular things those are introduced after we have covered the basic rule.


I don't have a relevant photo for this section so here's me eating a squid on a stick

I'm quite happy that the classes are mostly speaking and listening because I had heard that the Japanese school system was all reading and writing with very little interaction at all, which sounds like a terrible way to learn language. I also feel like my weakest point is my speaking and listening so it's good to get lots of practise in. Being able to to practise with other students who suck as hard as me also makes me feel less anxious about speaking; sometimes when I have to speak to native Japanese speakers I get nervous that I'm going to make too many mistakes, but with my class mates it's not so scary because we all make loads of mistakes.

At the end of every class there is a short (roughly 15 minute) writing test. When we complete the test we go up and give it to the teacher who corrects any mistakes and then lets us go. The material of the test is just the stuff have been covering in the lesson, I guess so the teacher can check that we've all understood the content of the class. We also get set homework every day, but so far each homework sheet I've been given has been fairly straight forward and only taken about half an hour to finish. On Fridays we have an extra writing/listening test which lasts around 45 minutes. This test is just like a round up of all the stuff we've covered through out the week. I didn't have much trouble with anything this week.

However, I have discovered the value of checking through my written work. Because I can read quite fast in English, it's very easy for me to scan each sentence as I write it and check that I haven't made any mistakes, but my Japanese reading ability is incredibly slow in comparison. This means that when I finish a sentence, it immediately looks like an indecipherable mess of symbols, even though I'm the one who just wrote those symbols. I've found that I make a lot of stupid little mistakes like missing out strokes in characters (like writing キ rather than ギ) or missing out entire characters. For example on my valentine's card to my girlfriend I wrote 大好 (daisu) rather than 大好き (daisuki - love): which means that I wrote something like "I dice you" rather than "I love you"; which sounds a bit more sinister than I was intending. At the end of this Friday's test I made myself check through the entire thing rather than just handing it in straight away and I found a load of really obvious mistakes; so I'm definitely going to keep double checking things that I write.

My class mates are mostly from Asia and all seem alright. I'm embarrassing myself on a daily basis but it's good practise I guess.

When I signed up for this course, I joined a facebook group for other students who were going to study in Japan starting at the same time as me. I found a bunch of other students, mostly Europeans, who were going to the same school as me and spoke to a few of them a little bit before coming. It was nice to know that I wouldn't arrive there not knowing anyone at all. However when I got here, all the people I had previously spoken to, and most of the westerners were put into other classes. My class is mostly made up of Chinese speakers instead. I was a bit worried about this at first since when the class is over they obviously default to speaking Mandarin rather than English, so I thought it might be tough to make friends. But they're all quite friendly, if a bit shy (like me), so it hasn't been too bad. It's also a good excuse to practise my Japanese, since some of them speak little or no English, and I don't speak any Mandarin so we are forced to use Japanese to communicate.

There's also a Korean girl in my class who I ended up sitting next to on the first day. I saw she had a sheet with stuff written in Korean on it so I asked her, in Japanese, if she was Korean, and she said she was. I had previously been studying some Korean on my own (I mentioned about considering going to Korea before in my previous blog), but this was a few years ago now before I even started taking an interest in Japanese, and I couldn't really remember much. I said "annyeonghaseyo!" and she said something in Korean like "oh you speak Korean?" and I was like "uuuhhhh errrrrr no". I asked her her name but I didn't understand what she said so I asked her to write it down (we switched to speaking Japanese; I gave up with the Korean) and she wrote it down in Kanji (Chinese characters) which was no help to me at all. So I said "hangul?" because I can still sort of pronounce Korean characters even if I don't really know any of the language. Unfortunately I've only really seen Korean characters represented on a computer screen and when she wrote them down by hand in some kind of cursive way I couldn't understand it at all. So now I looked like a bit of a dick, starting a conversation in Korean and asking her to write in Korean when I can neither speak nor read Korean. Anyway, eventually she got it written in a character set that I'm capable of reading. I also decided not to attempt Korean again, best to just to stick to Japanese.


This rabbit is not in my class but there is something very unsettling about his moustache.

When I meet a Japanese person and they introduce themselves, I can usually understand their name the first time they say it, or sometimes they have to repeat themselves once or twice if it's one I haven't heard before. Other Asian people's names though I've been having a much harder time with (see previous paragraph). I always thought my name was pretty simple, and anyone would be able to understand it/pronounce it pretty easily, but I guess I had mostly only interacted with people who are fluent English speakers before. My name is Adam but I suppose when I introduce myself I pronounce it sort of like "Adm". Lots of Japanese people, as well as the people in my class have had a hard time understand what I'm saying. So now when I introduce myself I say something like "Hi, I'm A DA MU", which sounds a bit dumb but it's more effective.

The share house I live in is pretty cool. Quite a lot of people live here though and I'm not very good with names so I've been struggling to keep track of who everyone is.

I put a picture of my new room in the last blog so here's this guy instead.

My house is pretty cool. It's a fairly large share house with a mix of foreigners and Japanese people living in. People are from a variety of places and doing a variety of things which is interesting. The Japanese people all speak a pretty good level of English; I think it's common for Japanese people who want to study English to move into share houses with international people so they have English speakers to practise with. A few of the other people who live here are students too and the rest have various jobs. Some of the foreigners have been here for years and speak Japanese very well. One of them did a degree here and has just recently got a job working for Nintendo which is really cool.

People seem to come and go quite regularly; another guy only moved in the day before me, and today we had another new guy move in. I've also met a few people who used to live here and have moved out but still come back and visit sometimes because they know the other house mates. It's been quite confusing though. There's like 8 people who live here now I think, but then there's also frequently been various other people hanging around. Whenever I meet someone knew I introduce myself and ask them which room they live in, but sometimes I get answers like "I don't live here any more" or "I'm moving in next week" or even "I used to live in your room". I'm still not completely sure who everyone is to be honest. I seem to meet some people who don't live here more often than I meet some of my actual house mates.

I was a bit worried that sharing 1 kitchen between so many people would be a problem and that I would have to wait for ages to cook, but there's usually no one in there. I think some people work until late, and others don't seem to cook regularly or at all. It seems like it's possible to eat out all the time in Japan without spending too much money or living entirely off junk food, which maybe wouldn't be possible in the UK. But anyway I haven't had any problems finding space to cook or eat.

I dragged my girlfriend all the way from Tokyo to help me complete some mundane tasks. I also struggle with Japanese cheese.

My girlfriend came to visit last weekend which was nice since we hadn't seen each other for like 5 or 6 weeks. The Shinkansen (bullet train) is really expensive so she got an overnight bus which takes like 8 hours. I wanted to spend the time with her doing nice tourist and couple stuff, but I had been having trouble with settling in and organising stuff here so I kinda had to enlist her as my personal interpreter (my girlfriend is Japanese, see previous blog).

When you move in to a new address in Japan, you are required to register your address at your local ward office within 2 weeks of moving in. I managed to find my ward office on my own which I was slightly proud of, but when I got there I couldn't really understand what I was supposed to do. I asked the guy at the help desk if he spoke English but he said no, but I managed to get him to understand that I wanted to register my address and he told me to go to the third floor. When I got there there was a big office with loads of different desks and lots of different ticket machines so you could take a number and wait for the right department to become available. I couldn't read any of the department names so I had no idea which ticket to take. I just wandered around awkwardly for 10 minutes and then left feeling defeated.


It started raining as we were walking back from visiting the temple in the first picture of the blog. I was the only person in Kyoto who didn't bring an umbrella.

I went to meet my girlfriend at the station and then brought her back to the ward office with me where she helped me find what I was supposed to be doing and fill in the paperwork. I have no idea how I would've done it without her. She also helped me register for Japanese health insurance. She was going to help me open a bank account and get a phone contract too but I didn't want her to spend all her time with me filling in paperwork so we called that off.

I've nearly run out of the cash that I brought with me now and I still haven't got a phone or opened a bank account. I tried to open a bank account this week so that I could transfer all my money into it and avoid paying additional fees for withdrawing money using my UK card. I also thought that I should open a bank account so that I have somewhere to make my phone payments from. But the lady at the bank told me that I needed a phone number in order to open an account. So I don't have enough money to pay for my phone, and I can't open a bank account because I don't have a phone. I'm trying to sort the phone problem out this weekend so that I can open the bank account next week.

My girlfriend and I did manage to get some touristy stuff done which was nice, although it rained most of the time. Before I came to Kyoto people were warning me that Japanese weather would be hotter than I expected and I wouldn't be prepared for it as a British person. However it's pretty much been raining or cloudy every day since I got here, which is pretty similar to what I'm used to at home. I suppose it'll brighten up eventually. I've been joking that I brought the weather with me from England; if the weather is shit here until I leave in October then people will know who to blame.

The start of April is prime tourist season in Kyoto because it's cherry blossom season. The blossoms have started falling now though, which seems like a pretty good metaphor for the end of my honeymoon period of coming here. Rather than just wandering around being interested in the novelty of everything, I've started getting frustrated with the things that I don't understand or want but can't find here.


The rain was causing the cherry blossoms to all fall into the river; from a distance it looked like a river made of marshmallow.

There is only really one type of cheese in Japan; it's just called 'cheezu' and it doesn't really have any taste. I found some good cheeses in a department store but they were all ridiculously over-priced. The tofu section in the supermarket is about 4 times larger than the cheese section. My house mate from Mexico said that when he first moved here he thought that the tofu was some kind of cream cheese and bought some and spread it on his bread, which obviously didn't go very well.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the quality of food in Japan though. I really like Japanese food and almost all of the stuff I've tried (except natto) has been really good. I guess my complaint is more the foods which I'm used to eating in the UK are all slightly but noticeably different here. Other than the cheese, the bread is also weird. It's not possible to buy like a whole loaf of bread; they only seem to sell it in quantities of 6 slices or less. I suppose you might be able to find better stuff if you go to a proper bakery, but I'm mostly talking about supermarkets. The bread is also really thick and slightly sweet which is weird. It's ok for toast, but not so great with things which I don't want sweet bread for. I've been mostly eating stuff based on rice, noodles or pasta instead.

Although Japan is in some ways a very technologically advanced place like everyone thinks; in other ways it's not at all. For example you can't use a card to pay for stuff in many shops or any restaurants or other places. I've seen a few big department stores have card machines, but no where else does. Lots of cash machines also 'close' at midnight which is weird. It's an automatic machine which dispenses money so I don't understand why it should stop working at night time; they all work 24 hours a day in the UK. This means that I'm forced to walk around with large amounts of cash in my pocket; luckily Japan is a very safe country so I haven't had any problems.

I used the subway and buses a little bit when my girlfriend was here, but other than that I've been walking everywhere. My house is in a pretty good location so it's not far to the school or anywhere else I've needed to get to. Doing lots of walking has been good for me too; I haven't weighed myself but I'm pretty sure I've lost some weight (which I needed to do). It's really hard to get lost in Kyoto since the city is all on a grid with the roads either going north - south or east - west. My house is near a river too, so if I get confused I just keep walking until I reach the river and then I just need to know whether to go north or south to get to my house. The only time I got lost was when I walked out of a department store on a different side to the one I came in without realising so I was disoriented by 90 degrees. It was also getting dark and I wandered around confused for about 15 minutes before reaching the river when I wasn't expecting to.


These are octopuses on sticks. Apparently the octopus's head is stuffed with a quails egg. I didn't try one, but I might have a go next time.