First Week

My first week at Konan University is over! Though, technically, I've only had two actual days of classes. Monday of this week was orientation, and Tuesday and Wednesday were testing days where we all were given various tests in order to gauge our Japanese abilities so that we could get placed into the appropriate class.

                                (view from my daily walk from Settsu-Motoyama Station to Konan)

Going into the tests, I was rather nervous: since I hadn't practiced Japanese during the whole summer, and hadn't taken a proper class in several years, I feared that I would get placed into a beginner's level class. However, I ended up getting placed into the highest Japanese class, Level 4. There are 4 classes, with 1 being the easiest and 4 being the hardest. At first I was elated, and truthfully, I still am, but now that I have actually started taking the classes, I've become slightly fearful. It's gonna be hard. Really, really hard. 

The class schedule is a bit strange. Every day from 9am-12pm we have 3 Japanese classes of varying topics, each with a different teacher. For example, on Tuesdays, we'd have kanji practice for an hour, then go over the topics in whichever chapter of the textbook we're currently on for an hour, then grammar and sentence structure study for an hour. After an hour break for lunch, we have classes in English about various topics in Japanese studies, for which we need to sign up for. I'm planning on taking Japanese History and an art history class called The Art of Kansai (the region I'm staying in is the Kansai region). Since those classes haven't started yet, there isn't much I can really say about them yet, but they look interesting. 

We can also choose to join clubs and/or become a paid English tutor for the university. I originally wanted to join wadaiko club, but since my Japanese classes seem like they'll be very hard and have a large workload, I met not. Wadaiko are these huge Japanese drums, and they're played as a performance at festivals and such. I honestly don't know much about it, but the performance the club gave during orientation was super impressive and looked very fun; the members were all jumping and shouting and banging the drums in unified rhythm patterns whilst grinning. It looked a little something like this:

I'll probably try out the club, but if it becomes too much, I'll unfortunately have to quit. I'm definitely going to do the English tutoring though. I heard from other previous students that it's the best way to interact with other Japanese Konan students and make friends.

And that's all for the academic side of my first week at Konan! In a separate post I'll talk about all the stuff I did after classes/this weekend.