Payoff

Our first week of Japanese class has been a great although difficult success. Last Thursday we woke up at 6:30am to make it to our first class with Yamazaki-sensei. Class starts at 9:30am and being on time means arriving at 9:15. Half the students had semester orientation that day so class ended early. We only had time to introduce ourselves and go over the essentials: "Excuse me", "I'm sorry", and "I'm very sorry".

Our second class was on Monday. By this time we were feeling daring and we slept in until 7:15, but we paid for it when we had to rush out of the house in a frenzy. Fortunately our Monday teacher is Kaneko-sensei, and he was late! But once he got started it was a great class. Kaneko has a gift for hand-puppetry which he demonstrated generously. We had the full three hours and there were a lot of fun games and role-play. We took turns choosing pens from a tote bag and asking the class: "Whose pen?" "That's my pen, thank you." "You're welcome."

All of this paid off yesterday, when I participated in a group meeting at my husband's department in the University. A local student gave a 1-hour technical presentation followed by what appeared to be a vibrant discussion, all in Japanese. Afterward the department chair asked whether I wasn't bored. I was happy to report that I'm already spotting words I learned from my language class -- I was able to catch about 50 uses of the word "sono", meaning "that".