Haven’t updated in awhile. The Japanese classes are pretty hectic. They don’t spend enough time on the material and rush through the lessons. Needless to say my grades are so-so at the moment. The next 2 weeks are midterms, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve been playing video games and building model kits to relieve the stress.
The beginner Japanese classes are also tough for the first time learners. They try to force too much information at the students in a short amount of time. Back home we’d take the entire school year to cover the 101 book (12 lessons). Here they’re pushing 9-10 lessons in one semester. Where the second semester they finish the 101 book and do about half of the 201 book. (The books were created by staff here at Kansai Gaidai)
For my class, we have a test every 2 lessons. This doesn’t help reinforce the information at all. Also, we don’t have books for Level 5 Speaking and Level 4 Reading and Writing. We get handouts every class. This means that the amount of practice material is not as extensive as in the books we used back home, and homework is, although short, not helpful in remembering the material either. Vocabulary lists are twice the size of the lists in the books and, at least at Albany, we got 2 vocab quizzes per lesson. We have to memorize 50-ish vocab words per lesson here and we only get one vocab quiz per lesson, of which they only put 10 of the vocab words on it.
The teachers here are split in their ways of thinking. The Japanese teachers expect the students to study every night while the other class teachers tell the students to go out and have fun exploring Japan. It’s tough doing both and still getting a good amount of sleep every night.
Tags: gundam models, Japan
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