My Japanese placement test and nerds.

Today I did my Japanese placement test. I did alright. I’m strong in some areas and really weak in others, but I think I got into the class I wanted to get in. The intensive classes are three hours a day though, which is quite a bit, but it will also be really good for learning the language. I’m not a big believer in learning a language in a class setting. I think I’ll learn most of my real communication skills from my own self studies and figuring the language out myself through interaction and other method. However, classes will be good for kanji and somewhat good for grammar.

After the placement test we got our commuter pass. This last week of traveling to and from school cost me about 36 dollars. I’ll get reimbursed for it though through my CIEE program. They reimburse a lot of stuff actually. If I want to do something cultural, they will reimburse me up to 36 dollars with a total of 120 dollars. They also buy the ticket and lunch for us on events that take us outside of yotsuya. My commuter pass was cheap. It was only about 220 dollars. Some people had to pay like 500 dollars. It was all reimbursed by CIEE though. Of course nothing is for free. The CIEE program is more expensive than if we just were normal exchange students.

There was a welcome part today too. The welcome party was pretty cool, but Japanese don’t really spontaneously introduce themselves like Americans do. They like to meet in social clubs, through work or through friends. The party was pretty good but me and a few of my friends left early and got dinner. We got dinner at a local Japanese restaurant. It’s kind of cool how they deal with orders in Japan. A lot of the time you just buy a ticket from a vending machine and then give the ticket to the cook. That’s what we did in this case. I liked the food I got but I can’t remember the name. Japanese food names are probably the hardest thing for me to learn.

After dinner we went to akihabura again. It’s a fun place. There is a lot of young people in akihabura, and a lot of nerds. There is huge arcades all over the place. The arcades are sometimes 4-5 floors of a building. My friends and I bought into the one game together where you keep a card that saves your data. So as a team we will work on this one game.

Ah, I’m really tired and its almost 12. My host family doesn’t want me on the internet past 12 o’clock so I’m going to have to cut this blog short. I think today’s blog was kind of boring. I’m going to start taking more pictures for the blog. I took two pictures today but I forgot to click the save button.