Day 45 (Osaka) : White Man's Burden Redux

Today was the exam/kanji test combo. It's pretty impressive how quickly they grade assignments. To be honest, I don't even know how they get it done. I'm guessing during one of the ten minute breaks they take them down to an aid who does the grading because the teacher's don't seem to have time to grade everyone's work during class. I squeaked out a 64/100 on the exam and managed a decent 28/30 on the kanji test. My weak point right now is verb grouping and conjugation charts. It should be easy with only 3 groups, but the school doesn't use ~ru verbs and ~u verbs. They use their own Group I and Group II headings, so it really isn't clicking in my head even though I've studied it before.

I realized today that the difference in my Japanese level and my classmates is just a tad bit greater than I thought before. To put it in perspective, I would say that the gap between my medical knowledge and the average intern would be about the same. This was highlighted when I was giving my little speech on my hobbies at the end of class today. When I was listing off the author's that I read like Natsume Souseki, Kenzaburo Oe, Masuji Ibuse, Yukio Mishima, etc. the teacher would look at the class for a life line. I would say out of the 17 students in my class, a good 14 were stroking the kanji out in the air with their hands to help the teacher out. In Japanese the kanji used for names and places are especially difficult because they're often older kanji that is rarely if ever used.

So yeah , most of my classmates have an average of fifteen or so years of background studying kanji over me. I'm going to try not to think about it and see if that helps me get back into mix.