Class-Work

So when we're picking classes, they hand us a schedule that has all of the available classes listed in the day/time slots that they are in. Classes are an hour and a half long, so there are four slots in the day (plus one hour of lunch) and five days during which there are classes, so we effectively have 20 time slots at our disposal. 10 of these are taken up with "Foundational Japanese" the required lecture class.

Of those, I have five slots remaining. I'm taking a lot fewer classes than I had meant to, but it's 24 hours of classtime a week. To top that off, I have nine hours of club activities spread over the week, plus the time to get to them and prepare and whatnot. I'm currently only working three hours a week, but I'm in the process of getting some more work.

Foundational Japanese

If you took Okada's class, imagine something entirely unlike that, for three hours each day, and you're getting the right idea.
Even this school's most basic classes are in Japanese, from what I understand, and we do a wide variety of things each day, and that variety changes everyday.

Today, we had the guy I call 元気先生 genki-sensei because he's really excited about half the time, and he's kind of loud. Also, he wears bright green slippers in class with his white shirt, tie, and slacks. He's our only male teacher in level four, as well. We did quite a bit of listening stuff, read a newspaper review of some movies, and did generally 一級 stuff that was way over all of our heads, but is good practice. It's really painful to do this kind of stuff on your own, because when you run into grammar you don't know, you have to hope you can find an explanation in a book or on the web. Having someone there to ask is really nice.

We have different teachers for that class every day, and my level has reading/writing kanji tests every other day. It's only 15-30 compounds, so twenty minutes of studying is usually enough to get a decent score.

All of this is a lot simpler than what normal students have to deal with, but is like this because it's a "Special Course in Japanese" as described by the school. We're welcome to sign up for normal classes if we so desire, but that makes things slightly more complicated. I'm signed up for two slots of normal classes that I didn't include in the calculations earlier, so tack another three hours a week onto that, if you like.

I didn't think about it before, but we're kind of getting screwed on credits. I mean, one credit usually means 1 week-hour of classtime, right? Each class we take should be 1.5 credits (1.5 hours), and then multiplied by 1.5 when we transfer because Japan uses a Semester schedule. I should end up transferring these back to Central for... a little over 50 quarter credits. I figure I have another .75 (1x1.5x1.5=2.25-1.5=.75) credits per base credit coming to me in a fair world.

Alas.