Halfway through Japanese studies

So I've been at language school for a full 3 month term now, and completed level 1 (of 5) that the school offers. Next term I'll be in class 2. Some of my friends were only planning to stay for 3 months and so are going home to their countries soon which is a shame. There are currently two level 1 classes, but since quite a lot of people will be going home, I think we might be merged into one class for level 2.

My Japanese has definitely improved a lot. Before I came, I had a reasonably large vocabulary (for my level at least), and was starting to make some progress with reading and writing kanji, but although I had been studying grammar too, my speaking and listening were really bad. I could form basic sentences and had a range of phrases I could say, but I wasn't capable of having a conversation because I couldn't understand anything anyone said, and it took me ages to put a sentence together.

Now I'm pretty comfortable talking, although I think my listening comprehension needs a lot of work still. Lots of the people in my class are from Taiwan and don't speak English very well, so when we speak, even outside of class, we have to use Japanese. This has been pretty good practise too. The conversations usually take a while and are fairly limited but we usually manage to get whatever our point is across in the end.

Talking to the teachers in class and the the other students is different from speaking to other Japanese people though. I still really struggle to understand a lot of what people say, even if it's fairly straight forward stuff. This is partly because people often speak to me in casual language which we haven't really studied in class yet. Although I think I know the grammar in theory, it takes me a bit longer to put together in my mind what they've said, because I haven't had so much practise with it yet. Also people often speak in Kansai dialect here, which is additionally confusing. I don't really know much of it at all, except people sometimes say "Okini" rather than "Arigatou".


The entrance to the monthly market at Toji temple. It's pretty big and there's loads of weird stuff you can buy. I only bought some Takoyaki (balls of battered fried octopus) and some kind of kimchi pancake thing because I was hungry.

Each day, the classes are broken down in to a bunch of different sections, some of which involve writing and reading, but a large part of each day involves speaking and listening. If you've ever taken a language class, which you probably have, I doubt any of the stuff I'm going to describe will be new to you, but I'm going to anyway. We do a lot of exercises in pairs or small groups where we have to use some kind of work sheet with examples on to have a conversation. For example the sheet might show an example question and answer like "what are your hobbies?" and "I like doing Karaoke" and then have a bunch of pictures depicting other example hobbies; so then in pairs or whatever we have to ask each other questions and replace the words in the example with what's going on in the picture.

Other times we have to go round and survey other members of the class. For example if we were doing hobbies still, I might have to go around and ask the other members of my class what their hobbies are and then write down the answers. Then afterwards the teacher might ask me "what was X-san's hobby?" and I'll have to say what it was.

Other times we will have to speak in front of the class. When demonstrating grammar rules, like conjugating a verb or something, the teacher might hold up a card with the dictionary form of the verb, and then ask someone to conjugate it into whatever form we are doing. Other times we'll have to have conversations with other class members in front of the rest of the class. Sometimes they are scripted conversations that we're just reading out, and other times we have to ask and answer questions ourselves (relating to a specific topic or grammar rule or whatever).

Often the exercises mix speaking/listening with reading/writing too, like the previously mentioned survey exercise. Other times we will have to read a page of text or listen to a CD and then write answers to questions about it. At the end of every lesson we have a brief test which usually only takes 5 minutes to complete. We have to show our answers to the teacher before we can leave, and she will correct any mistakes. It's quite good because the test usually summarises everything we've done in the lesson, so it's quite good for consolidating the things we've learned.

We also get set homework most days, which is usually just a 2 page work sheet with a bunch of exercises relating to things we did in the lesson that day. It usually only takes me 30 minutes or so, and I quite like it too because it once again reminds me of the things we did in the lesson. As a result I don't really have to spend much time reading through my notes or studying the text book on my own, because what with the in-class exercises, the end of lesson test and the homework, the stuff we've learned usually goes into my long term memory without any problems.

At the end of each week we have a test. The test covers everything we did in that week and maybe brings back a few older things too. I don't usually have to put in any extra time studying for it and I do fine every week.


Byoudouin, which is a famous temple in Uji, near Kyoto. We went here on a school trip.

We also started studying kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) about half way through the term. This is the only area of the course that I don't feel like is challenging me enough. This is probably because I spent more time studying kanji than other things before I came to Japan. All of the ones we've learned in class so far have been easy ones that I already know how to read in most situations and how to write as well. Sometimes I learn a few new words from it though. In Japanese, each kanji usually has several different readings; sometimes just 2 or 3 but other times a load more. So even if you memorise the symbol and how to read it, it might be pronounced completely differently as part of a different word.

Because the kanji in class is going fairly slowly, I've taken it upon myself to keep studying it at my own pace in my free time. I know how to read and write most of the kanji for the kind of vocabulary we use in class now anyway.

Since it's the end of term, we've been having a bunch of extra tests. None of them have been particularly challenging so far. One of them seemed completely pointless to me; we had to memorise a conversation that was printed on a piece of paper and then recite one of the parts to our teacher while she played the other part. This doesn't really test Japanese at all. I could've read it and memorised it on my first day at school if I had had to, although I wouldn't have understood all of what was being said. I think we're going to have a proper speaking test tomorrow, where the teacher is going to ask us a bunch of questions one-on-one and we'll have to answer them as best we can. There's also going to be a big written test I think, but I'm not too worried about that.

Overall I think the course has been pretty good; the teachers are helpful and the lessons are planned well. Ideally I'd like to be able to stay even longer than another 3 months, but that is really unlikely at this point unless I can come up with a load of money from nowhere.

The course has been pretty good so far and I've got a bit better at Japanese

Lake Biwa: it's the biggest lake in Japan.

I think in my last blog I said that I had an interview for an English teaching job coming up. That was a few weeks ago now. The company is a fairly large English teaching company, and they have a regional office in Osaka, so I had to go there even though I was planning to get a job in Kyoto. I hadn't been to Osaka before but it's not very far from Kyoto and the trains are good here so it was pretty easy to get to where I wanted to go.

I arrived like 10-15 minutes early for the interview and they gave me some forms to fill in. A couple of other candidates turned up too, but they were both applying for jobs in Osaka so I wasn't competing for the same job as them or anything. We then had a seminar with the recruiter guy. He gave us a load of information about the company, although I already knew a lot of it because I'd tried to do a bit of research before-hand. I asked a few relevant questions throughout the presentation which he responded well to, so I think that went well at least. I then had a brief one-on-one interview where I was just asked a few general interview type questions about my goals and plans and why I want to work for this company.

Finally I had to fill in a test of sorts. There were a few interview-style questions like "Describe a previous situation in which your superior gave you constructive criticism and how you reacted to it". I came up with a story which sort of did happen, but not in exactly the way I described in my answer. I had to alter it a bit to fit the question format, but the lesson learned was the same. There were also a few English related questions. They asked us to match some idioms up to their literal meaning, for example "barking up the wrong tree" and "pursuing the wrong course of action" or something like that. I suppose it was to test that we were really native English speakers or something.

Anyway, that interview must have gone ok because I got an email a few days later asking me to come to a second interview the next day. This time the interview was in Kyoto so luckily I didn't have to get the train to Osaka again. I arrived and had a slightly longer one-on-one interview where I was asked a few more typical interview style questions. The interviewer said that, although you don't necessarily need teaching experience to work there, most candidates have some kind of experience or qualification, which I don't. I then had to teach a brief one-on-one lesson with a 'student', although I think she might have worked there. This was by far the most stressful part, but I had read other people's experiences applying for this company so I was at least expecting it. Like I said, I have no teaching experience at all, so I was kind of thrown in at the deep end. They gave me a lesson plan and some exercises to work through, as well as few pieces of advice for what to focus on, so I wasn't completely lost, but it was still very stressful.

The student spoke English quite well already, and the lesson plan was for a much lower level student so there wasn't any difficulties making her understand. Obviously the interview was more about seeing how I behaved than testing whether I could actually teach her anything. I tried to speak slowly and clearly, and ask relevant questions that lead the conversation on to the correct topic before introducing the exercises and working through them with her. I managed to make her laugh a few times too which is good I think (well unless she was laughing at me, but I think she was laughing at my joke). The main difficulty was that I was expected to highlight key points in the lesson by writing notes on a piece of paper. I'm not used to writing and talking at the same time, and to be honest I have a bit of a problem with eye contact when talking to people already, so it was quite difficult to try to be engaging and also write clearly at the same time. The notes started becoming a bit of a mess so in the end I decided to cut my losses on that front and focus on the speaking part. The interviewer said at the end that the notes are actually really important; a lot of the students keep them and use them for reference, so my messy, incomplete notes were quite bad.

In the end he said that I would need to "do a lot of work" but that I'm "not untrainable", which is probably as good as I could've hoped for to be honest. He said he would discuss my performance with the recruiter from the first interview and they would call me in a few days. That was a couple of weeks ago and no one has called me or contacted me in any way. I know I could call them and see what happened, but it seems pretty clear that I didn't get it, otherwise they would've called me. Besides, I'm not really sure I'm really up to the job anyway. I should've applied for a few similar companies but I've kind of lost the motivation to pursue this kind of job. Maybe my desperation will start to outweigh my lack of motivation soon.


Some gravestones overlooking Yamashina

Since then I've had a couple of other English teaching related leads. My friend linked me to some freelance teaching site where you just put your profile up and Japanese people can contact you if they want to have a lesson. You can choose the rates you want to charge and when you are available and stuff. This seems like something more my level, because I could hopefully find someone who just wanted to do some conversation practise or something. To make up for my lack of teacher training I set the rates as low as they would go, at least until maybe I can get some experience. My profile hasn't been up for very long yet, but I haven't had any contact yet either.

Also, my girlfriend's friend lives in Kyoto. She said her boss wants to practise his English, but that he doesn't want to go to a language school. She said he just wants someone to speak English with, and would pay me, or buy me dinner or something. Either of those sounds good I guess. I said I would do it, and I'm waiting to hear back from them now.

In other work related news, I was aimlessly scrolling through facebook one day when I saw a post in the Computer Science Society page from my old University looking for a student to do a summer job at a new start-up. The thing which attracted my attention was that they said the work could be done remotely, which is important since I'm on the other side of the world. I contacted them and said I was interested but was in a completely different time zone so I understood if they wanted someone closer. They didn't seem to mind at all though.

I've since had a skype call with the CEO of the company where he explained the product and the sort of things I would be doing, which all sounds pretty interesting. Next I'm just waiting to arrange a time for another skype call with someone from the company so they can show me in more detail what I need to be doing. I'm not sure about the pay yet, but I'm not expecting much. They said they would be able to pay me 'a little' bit; I'll try to make sure to clarify what that means before I start doing any work. The job would mainly involve testing and writing content for an app. So although it wouldn't really involve any actual programming, it's at least more related to my area of qualification than teaching English is. I'd much rather be doing this than teaching I think (I'll re-evaluate that claim once I've actually started doing it), so hopefully it materialises into an actual job, even if only a temporary, low paying one.

I didn't get the English teaching job I applied for. I've got a couple of small leads fo finding other teaching work and potentially a better lead on a slightly more computer science related temporary job.

The student loans company from the UK has been sending a bunch of mail to my parents' house again. I've already filled out the paperwork a bunch of times telling them that I don't have any money. They come back to check every 6 months or so and I tell them nope, I still don't have anything. Student loans in the UK only have to be paid back once your income reaches past a certain threshold, and since I've only been doing odd part time or temporary work since I graduated, I've never qualified for having to make a payment. I graduated in 2012 so I guess they are really hoping I'm going to find some permanent work soon. Apparently the remainder of the loan gets cancelled after 25 years, but I'm not planning to be out of work for that long if I can avoid it. I've got enough money problems at the moment without these guys on my back.


The British house in Kobe. I didn't come to the other side of the world to pay to get into a British house. Didn't go in.

Because of my failure to find a job so far, my bank balance is looking pretty bad. With my current savings I can afford next month's (July) rent, and maybe have just enough to feed myself over that period too, but after that I've got nothing. I checked the terms of my UK bank account, and I'm fairly confident (although not 100% sure) that I still have a £500 interest-free overdraft, so I might have to use that if I get into trouble, but hopefully I won't. £500 would be enough for me to survive for another month. So in the worst case if I can't make any money, I can live off my savings until the end of July, then live off the overdraft until the end of August. My school term lasts until the end of September though, so I'm not really sure what I would do if I still hadn't got any money by then.

Realistically if I'm desperate my parents might be able to give/lend me some money, but I would really like to avoid having to ask them; they've helped me enough in the past already.

Despite this, I'm going on holiday to Korea with my girlfriend next week. Yeah I know, I'm an idiot. The trip was agreed to months ago when I still had more money, and the flights and I already paid for the flights and hotel so it won't be cutting into my planned rent money now. I found some cash in £ in my drawer so I'm going to try to change that into Won rather than exchanging Yen for Won. Hopefully it'll be enough cash that I won't have to withdraw any more money, because I can't afford to. We're only going for 3 nights so I think I'll be all-right.


Somewhere in northern Kyoto.

I considered backing out of the trip, but to be honest, I'm in a long distance relationship at the moment and I don't think it's going to end very well if I start backing out of previously arranged plans and not seeing her regularly. We only see each other once a month at the moment as it is. On the other hand, she's been considering cancelling too, but for different reasons. We're going to Seoul where there happens to be a MERS outbreak at the moment. She's afraid of catching it and dying.

From what I've read, the outbreak seems to be contained within a few specific hospitals; I haven't read anything about it spreading further (although please correct me if I'm wrong). It seems to me that as long as we don't visit any hospitals we will be fine. She doesn't trust the news though, in typical Japanese style she thinks the Korean government is probably a bunch of liars and the situation might be worse than they claim it is. All the news sources I've checked have said pretty much the same thing though. Besides, we can't get any money back on the hotel room if we cancel it, and I'm not sure I can with my flight either, so if she cancels I dunno what I'll do. Either go to Korea on my own and waste some more money on food and transport and stuff, or stay at home and waste all the money I spent on flights and the hotel room.

I don't have enough money to survive right now. Hopefully I can get a job.

June is meant to be the rainy season, and it has rained a few times, but mostly it's still really fucking hot. I've been trying to go on at least one bike ride a week. I like cycling around because I can cover more ground than I would by foot, but it's not fast like a train or bus where most of the scenery would go by without me even noticing.


Here's a photo of a sign somewhere in the mountains north of Kyoto. I took it while cycling around randomly, hoping to find out where it was when I got home. I looked it up when I got home but couldn't find anything. The two symbols on the left side of the double arrow just say Kyoto, but I dunno what the one on the right says. From what I can tell, the symbols individually are Fish, Valley and Mountain up down? So clearly I was going up Fish mountain or down into Fish Valley or something.

I rode north until Kyoto gave way to some mountains. Then I followed the winding mountain road. It was quite difficult because the bike I have isn't really suited for this kind of thing (see below). It was fun though and I saw some cool countryside.

Another time I rode east out of Kyoto into Yamashina. Apparently Yamashina is still part of Kyoto actually. Anyway it felt a bit more rural. Much quieter streets and small rice fields planted in between houses. There was even a rice field across the street from the hospital. I kept going east after Yamashina and ended up in Otsu which is a town on the edge of the biggest lake in Japan: lake Biwa. It was pretty cool because it's massive, but there wasn't much for me to there so I just ate a banana and started riding home (It was like 15km each way).

Last week me and my friend cycled along a path by the side of the river Katsu which runs north to south along the west side of Kyoto. We cycled north until we got to Arashiyama which is a pretty cool place, although one I'd been to before. We ate some matcha ice-cream and sat around watching cormorants dive into the river for a bit, then cycled home.

Last Sunday I cycled south along the river Kamo, which runs north to south along the eastern side of central Kyoto. I often sit by the river side further north with some friends; it's quite a nice place. This time I kept going south further than I had been before. Eventually the Kamo and Katsu rivers merge further south. I went that far then followed the Katsu back up north.

I found a website which said if I had kept following the route south then there is a cycle path all the way to Nara, although it's about 45km each way which, while not beyond my ability, is way more than I've been doing recently. Maybe I should do a few longer rides before I try it.


The bike that my friend lent me. I posted this last time but here it is again for reference.

My girlfriend came to visit again a couple of weeks ago too. We visited Kobe; it's fairly near to Kyoto but I had never been before. It's famous for beef and apparently also bread. I was only aware of Kobe beef before. We wanted to try it but it's fucking expensive and I couldn't justify spending my weekly budget on 100g of steak. Apparently Kobe was one of the few places that foreigners were allowed to come to in Japan when it went through its isolation period. So there are a bunch of old European style buildings and a few churches too. I guess it explains the bread too.

We also visited Sanjuusangendo, which is a temple near my house that I hadn't been to because you have to pay to get in. It was pretty cool though; they have 1001 life-sized statues lined up in rows inside. At the front of each block of statues is a statue of some kind of Buddhist deity. They were arranged like some kind of army. They had descriptions in English too and it was quite interesting. Unfortunately you weren't allowed to take photos inside.

Cycling is fun. Kobe beef is really expensive.

I've made a few more friends at school recently. A week or two ago I got invited over to a small house party kind of thing. We played some drinking games and stuff, but I had to leave early because I had promised to go out with my house mate later in the evening. Their house was quite far away on the train though (compared to the distances I usually travel each day), and took about 25 minutes on the train to get there.

My friend and I were fairly drunk when we got on the train, but managed to get on the right one without much problem because it's pretty straight forward; they even have English names written on the rail map and sometimes announcements in English as well as Japanese. However, we managed to fuck up when we changed trains, and got on a train going in the wrong direction. For some reason we didn't bother to check where we were going for like half an hour. I suddenly thought "hey wait a minute we should be nearly there by now but I don't recognise these station names at all", so we double checked the map and realised we'd been going the wrong way for the last 30 minutes. We got off at the next stop and went the correct direction, but in the end the journey that should've taken 25 minutes took about an hour and a half. We made it to the bar to meet my house-mate about 2 hours late, but it was a fairly good night anyway (although I think I threw up in the street at one point).

In other train related idiocy, although this time not alcohol related, I managed to put my card in the wrong slot and break the ticket machine. In Japan there is a card you can get that you can top up with money and just swipe whenever you go through a ticket gate in a train station or to get off a bus. It's the same as an Oyster card in London really. I wanted to top mine up but I somehow managed to put the card in the slot that you are supposed to put cash in. I pushed it halfway and then realised my mistake, but by then the internal motors were pulling it further. I tried to pull it out but I couldn't. In the end I had to go and ask the guard for help, which was really embarrassing and quite difficult to explain in Japanese. After he got my card out for me with some tweezers I just fled the station without topping the card up.


Stumbled upon this guy doing magic tricks and some circus performance in Kobe. He was pretty good actually.

I'm still doing stupid stuff regularly.

On a completely unrelated topic, my girlfriend's mum mailed me some cheese a couple of weeks ago. I don't remember if I mentioned this in my previous blog, but last time I visited Tokyo, the topic of food in Japan came up with my girlfriend's mum. I think I mentioned that Japanese cheese is usually not really very good; you can get good cheese from the food counters in department stores but it's really expensive. The next day when I went to their house, her mum had bought a load of really expensive cheese; she must have spent at least £30, maybe more like £40. She got some Gorgonzola and Stilton and something else I can't remember. It was really nice of her, and the cheese was good, but I really wasn't expecting it, and I felt bad for having brought it up the previous day.

Anyway, apparently once was not enough, so after I went back to Kyoto, she sent me a delivery of more expensive cheese in a cool box in a recorded next-day delivery from Tokyo to Kyoto. The cheese alone was pretty expensive, and then with the delivery method on top it must've cost quite a lot. Once again it was really good, but I feel like she is going way beyond what she needs to do for me. I could get used to regular cheese deliveries, but hopefully she doesn't keep sending it because I feel bad accepting all these gifts.

I received some cheese in the mail; it was good.

A song by Future.

I'm half way through my planned 6 months of Japanese school education now, and I'm starting to think about what I want to do afterwards. I don't really want to go back to the UK at the moment, and my girlfriend is making progress finding a good job in Tokyo so it would be nice if I could find a way to stay in Japan too, and maybe even try moving to Tokyo.

The main difficulty is of course money. I currently have no income and dwindling savings, so I'm going to have a lot of work to do in the next 3 months if I'm going to be able to afford to stay here longer. The other complication is visas. I have a student visa that is valid for 1 year, but legally after I stop studying I have to change my visa status within 1 month, so although I'd still have 6 months left on my student visa, it wouldn't technically be valid any more after October.


Kobe.

I could just switch to a tourist visa and stay for up to another 6 months without legal troubles, but on a tourist visa you obviously don't have the right to work, and there is no way I'm going to be able to get the money together for that in advance. Getting a work visa would require me to get a full-time job. My Japanese will be a bit better in 3 months time, but I won't be fluent enough to work a normal job like a Japanese person. Also I won't really have any qualifications despite my 6 months of study; the earliest I can take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) will be December, and it might be optimistic for me to aim to get to N2 (the required level for a lot of jobs) by that time.

This means my most likely source of employment would be English teaching; although I guess that didn't go so well last time I tried. There are loads of English teaching jobs in Japan though, and I'm fairly certain I could get one that would offer me a work visa if I tried hard enough. My only problem with this is that I'm not really sure I want to do it. But I might if I have to.

The other option would be to return to the UK for a bit, save up some more money and then come back either on a working holiday visa or a work visa if I managed to find a job while in the UK. This is probably the safest option financially, but would mean me spending probably like 6 months or longer in the UK before being able to come back here, and I'd rather stay if I could.

The final option is to get married, but it's too early for that shit. And getting married for a visa is a terrible reason so fuck that.

At the moment I'm still mostly focusing on the short term; trying to find a job that will allow me to pay my rent for the next few months. Once I've got that sorted (hopefully this app related job that I mentioned, but I'm not sure really) then I'll try to focus on finding what I'm going to be able to do next.


If you're gonna come to Kyoto, you better like taking photos of temples.

In the even longer term, my girlfriend says she doesn't want to live in Japan forever, and would like to go somewhere else. I like it here, but it would be nice to try living in more countries before I get stuck with a career or house or kids or whatever in one place. She tried to find work in the UK before but struggled, and is now making progress in Tokyo, but maybe if she gets some relevant work experience in her field this year, then she would be more employable when looking for jobs abroad in future.

I don't really know where else I would want to go, but the UK still doesn't seem very interesting for me. Maybe another English speaking country like the US, Canada or Australia would work because we both speak English, and I'm not sure I've got it in me to learn a 3rd language quite yet. Going to any of those places would obviously involve lots of money and visa shenanigans though, so I don't want to worry about it now, especially when my current situation is so unstable.

I suppose an advantage of being able to do programming is that you can do it anywhere really. There seems to be a shortage of skilled people in a lot of places too (or so I've heard), so maybe I'd be able to find work somewhere. Anyway, the provisional plan is to try to stay in Japan for at least a year or so and then maybe think about going somewhere new.

I wanna stay in Japan but stupid things like money and laws are making it more difficult.