Components Of A Weird Day

[snarp]

1) A job interview.

2) Finding a kind of chocolate you've been on the lookout for for a couple months, and on your way to the checkout being stopped by a woman who'd also been looking for it to ask you what aisle you found it in.

3) Seeing somebody for whom you bought dorayaki last weekend mentioned in an entirely non-dorayaki-related-context on a blog you read every day.

4) The Metro goes aboveground sometimes?!

Comments

[snarp]

Yamasa is the only reason I'm at all coherent in Japanese, so I'm definitely glad I went. The teachers are almost all excellent - I only remember one out of fifteen or so that I felt was phoning it in, and she only taught electives - and their curriculum is really good for spoken Japanese. Reading's a little perfunctory but still fine. They try to keep the mix of the classes so that there won't be too many people in one class who spoke the same language to force you to speak Japanese more.

(I mean, in practice, what this meant a lot of the time was that 45% of the class speaks Chinese, 45% speaks English (not always as a first language, but most of the Europeans and Brazilians knew it), and the single Korean was the only one who couldn't default back to a language she/he knew better. It actually does work pretty well as an incentive, though.)

On the downside, their approach to kanji is kind of: "Hopefully You Already Speak Chinese, But If Not, We Will Give You A List. Memorize The List." They do have specialized kanji classes you can take as electives, but they're basically just quizzes, flashcards, and writing the kanji over and over.

They also grade a little leniently, but as far as I could tell, not so much that they won't hold someone back at the end of the term if they think the person needs it. There's an optional evening program, involving a combination of online and private lessons, which I tried for a while and don't think is worth it - it's just not integrated well with the main curriculum. Their server kept breaking when I was there, too.

Unrelated to actual educational material, they also do these field trips on the weekends that you can sign up for pretty cheaply - I did the shrine at Ise, the Wedded Rocks, and Mt. Horai, and I nearly fell off Mt. Horai. There's also a bar on campus! One of the administrative guys was talking about starting a private brewery for it? A lot of beer is consumed at this place.