Day 111 (Osaka) : Surprise visit

Yesterday was a typical extended Friday. I was doing the math during lunch, since old lady sensei teaches twice a week we lose two hours every week while she reads the kanji a bajillion times. I think that explains why the class below us, 1E, took the Chapter 16 test on Friday while my class was taking the Chapter 11 test the day before. Yep, five chapter tests apart. One of the girls in my class already spoke with our home room teacher about it and received the following answer. "Our class isn't going slow, the other class is just going fast. There's nothing we can do. 我慢して。"

The last part was "gaman shite" and no it doesn't read the way you think it does if your pronouncing the word naturally in English. My dictionary defines the word as, "tolerate, put up with, be patient," but the way I translate it in my head is much closer to "suck it up". Following the teachers advice we're only going to loser two hours a week until the next placement test in about six school weeks. So what, twelve more hours of wasted time reading the kanji book. It occurs to me that Japanese schools do regularly include reading exercises where a class will read through a book consecutively, while translating or pointing out grammar usage in their respective passage. That kind of exercise would be pretty interesting, especially if we were reading something culturally significant.

I suppose that rant is long enough for this week. As the title suggests my class had a visitor, the cat from Mongolia that left after the short six month term. The funny thing is that he was one of the coolest people in my class. Because his wife was Japanese and he was the only Mongolian student he spoke 99% of the time in Japanese. Which explains both why I enjoyed his company and why his Japanese is still better than most of the other students despite the fact that he is no longer studying at the school. Now I just have to figure out if his Japanese is so much better than mine because of similarities between Japanese and Mongolian (no kidding, the teachers even pointed out how easy it is for Mongolian sumo wrestlers to pick it up because of how close the grammar is between the two), the frequency he speaks Japanese everyday, or having a Japanese wife. You know, necessity being the mother of all kinds of things.