My Classes

I promised my mother that I would talk about my classes here at Kansai Gaidai. She is under the impression that I am failing all of my classes from my lack of talking about them. (HAHA Oh mooooooom).

My Japanese speaking class is kind of fun. We do a lot of pair work having conversations. Some days there is an odd number of people and I get paired up with either the Sensei or the two teacher assistants. The two teacher's assistants are students of Kansai Gaidai about to get their teacher's license. They are both going to teach Japanese to foreigners, either abroad or here in Japan. They are very nice to talk to. Anyhow, sometimes I get paired with them which is only bad when I have not been paying attention and don't know what we are talking about. Anyhow, most of what I go over in this class I have learned before, but I'm learning how to apply them better. My Reading and Writing class, which I thought would be difficult at first is prob my easiest class. I know usually about half of the kanji in each week's lesson which makes studying easier. (THANK YOU YOUKOSO!- name of my old Jpns textbook) I feel really smart in class to. I have very little diffifulty with reading the assigned passages, and when I write, the only thing I ever get wrong is a word or two and some particles, which have always been my downfall. I'm not doing as well in my Japanese classes as when I was at home, but Jpns at Towson is reeeeallly easy. I still maintain solid A's for these classes so far though.

My sumi-e class is amazing, and it's a great time to sit and relax during the week. When class starts I have to take off my shoes (tatami mat art room with low sitting tables) and get my supplies to my seat. I fill my water dish and start grinding the sumi-e ink. The grinding takes about 10-15 mintues and then class starts. Sensei/of who's name I don't actually know, demonstrates a technique or a new 'item' such as a flower or rock and then the class is left to experiment with it. The second class of the week is also a technique class. The third class of the week is just free time to paint whatever I want, or work on a technique or finish the hand-in assignments. I have to hand in three pieces of work a week for my porfolio. I will be graded on my porfolio at the end of the semester. I've been getting better, but I am still working on tonality. Basically having more than a one or two shades on the painting. I am also still working on getting away from the 'Western art perspective.' This basically means that Westerners like art that is definit, equal, balanced, while Eastern perspective likes messy, random, and asymetrical. I am also always conciously thinking of this as I paint. So far I have learned two techniques of bamboo, one type of flower which I don't remember the name, rocks, and next week we get to learn chrysanthemum.

My Culture in Everyday Life class is also a good class. It is an anthropology of Japan class, basically. The big assignment for this class is one or two interviews with strangers on a topic of my choice. I have to annalyze both interviews. I am not very good at picking topics but I am excited to do this interview. The book for this class is a collection of articles about different aspects of Japanese culture and I completely love to read them! I'm already ahead in the readings because I find them so interesting. We get to read about the Japanese school system, minorities in Japan, etc. AND speaking of minorities in Japan: last semester I ahd to do a proect/write a paper on Koreans in Japan and one of the sources I used was really interesting. As it turns out, the Professor that teaches in this class wrote the article I quoted and used as a source in my paper! What a coincidence!!

My business communication class is my ultimate favorite class in the world! I hate business. But I love this class. We get to learn theory about interacting with other cultures in a professional atmosphere and I think that the things I learn in that class I can apply to working in my future. The project thing for that class is maintaining a blog. Heh well I haven't really been updating on my other blog. I think having two blogs is unnecessary, so I figure that this blog is fine for now. (Until he says otherwise I'm going to use this as my class project as well HAHA)

All in all, school in Japan is great. The professors understand that you are in Japan for a once in a lifetime opportunity and they make it very easy to learn and still do things outside of studying all the time. My life here in Japan rocks! ;P