Update

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to post to say that I'm still alive. I haven't written anything in awhile because nothing's been happening, really. Just class, grocery shopping, etc. By the way, if anyone knows of any really cheap/easy washoku recipes, I'd appreciate it. Frying eggs and dumplings all the time gets kind of old. LOL.

I guess I could write a little about my classes. Most of what I'm taking are Japanese courses and I've been placed in level 400, which is in the upper tier of the beginner level. Class is, of course, entirely in Japanese (even the grammar explanations). My class is also full of almost entirely Chinese students. Class itself consists of practicing drills (much like my JSL classmates are already used to) but we also do reading outloud, have quizzes to make sure we understand the grammar, and do small group activities. The teachers don't bother restricting what they say to words we already know and they speak as they normally would, so it's not as artificial feeling as OSU's classes. They're also a million times stricter on accent and pronunciation. In fact, it's pretty interesting to hear where the Chinese kids screw up compared to the Americans (read: Zoe and me).

I'm actually in a lower level of kanji because I'm terrible at it. It only meets once a week (like normal classes) so I just had it yesterday for the first time, but the way they teach kanji here is a million times better than what I'm used to. They're organized in ways that make sense and radicals are explained in much more detail. We did some reading practice and even a little radical matching minigame. Interestingly, how to write them (stroke order) was not shown at all. Both for kanji and my grammar classes, a lot of the work is done individually/at home.

I'm taking two other courses in what's called the JTP program. They're taken alongside normal Japanese students and taught in English. Linguistic Anthropology deals with a lot of linguistic topics and compares aspects of the Japanese language to English and other European languages. For someone learning Japanese, it's not only extremely interesting but also seems like something you can only learn in Japan. My other class meets on Fridays and we've only had one so far, which was just an intro day. I'll write more about that later.