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".

We're Back

We returned to the States on the 18th of September to take care of the last few moving tasks, and it turned into a month-long trip. But we arrived back in our new hometown of Tokyo last Sunday and we have our first Japanese Language class today at 9:30am. We had one of those foreigner moments when registering (What did that administrator say? Does that mean maybe, or no? But she said okay! Is this rude? aaaaahhh!). So hopefully the first class will go a little smoother...