あの日

One Day

Today nothing too interesting happened. It rained, and I was stupid enought not to bring an umbrella to school, so I had to ride my bike down a super steep hill in the pouring rain! Japanese class is going well; I'm doing good on my quizes, but the stuff is really easy. We would be moving along a lot faster if it weren't for my classmate, who takes half a minute to conjugate a verb into plain form (something he learned last year...he's been in Japan for more than six months now). It's just a little frustrating to sit there and wait while he struggles and I have the itch to just blurt out the answer...but since there are only two of us in the class, I would very quickly look like a dousche. Today I had Modern Japanese Novels and Japanese Business as well.

In Modern Novels, we took a quiz on the first book we were supposed to read (I finished it two weeks ago). There are only four questions, so I'm thinking: great...if I miss one, that's a C. Then we find out that if you miss one, you get one point subtracted (not just not getting a point...like the SAT). So if you miss one and get three, that's three points won and one point lost for a total of two points: 50%. What should happen? I missed one...I was pissed. These quizes are only supposed to check if you read the material...which I did. ::sigh:: Oh well.

The teacher for Modern Novels is this old Japanese woman who lives in Sydney half the year; she's very nice and funny, but rather boring most of the times. She gives us a hand out and reads at us...but we haven't started discussing the literature yet, so maybe it'll liven up next week.

After novles was Business with Professor Collick. I love Collick Sensei! He's an Englishman who moved to Japan to escape the mundane jobe he had in England and married a Japanese woman. They raised their kids back in the UK, but the wife speaks no English, so she would only speak in Japanese to Collick (he said that in all their MANY years of marriage, they have spoken no English to one another). The result of this being that their kids are perfectly billingual in Japanese and English (arguably two of the hardest languages). Business is a great class, because Professor Collick is a great teacher. He's funny, dynamic, and pretty smart.

I have a Kanji (chinese character) test on Thursday, so it's back to studying for now.