I'm starting to see the difference between Westerners and the students from neighboring Asian countries. The whole class started off at baby level kanji, meaning we started at 1 kanji and work through the book to more advanced kanji. That gave me a reason to be overly optimistic thinking we were all starting off on the same page. Now that homework is becoming more frequent it's becoming increasingly obvious how large the distance is between my level and theirs. We might be learning basic kanji but the homework and text book both have upper level kanji.
We had our first group exercise after lunch when we did the typical, introduce your buddy exercise. I was in a group of three with a girl from Korea and another girl from Hong Kong... maybe. They were writing notes for the introduction with full blown kanji for everything, even the station names which some of my Japanese friends have a hard time reading.
It's only day three after all and I'm kind of digging the work load. I spend about three to four hours studying at home after class so I think I have been able to learn a lot in just a few days. Learning new things is the easy part. Reinforcing it until it becomes habit is the difficult part. I figure if I do it all day, everyday it will eventually make more and more sense. The important thing is that I'm in high spirits and everything is going well, can't ask for more than that.
On a side note, I've activated mail blogging so I can send posts with pictures from my cell phone at anytime. I'm not sure when I'll try it out but if it works well I might do it from time to time. Don't expect it to become a regular deal though. Typing more than a few sentences using only your thumb is a huge pain in the (_!_)
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