Midterms...

I was in Iwai last weekend and haven't had a chance to post about it yet. But right now Sophia is in the midst of midterms. Japanese has been brutal. The Japanese midterm starts tomorrow and there are 3 days worth of testing, all together about 5 hours worth of speaking, listening, reading, grammar, and kanji. I've never had a final or midterm stretched out over such a long period of time.

Pretty much everyone is getting burnt out in my intensive Japanese class. Since we have the midterm tomorrow, only half the students even bothered to show up today. Yesterday we did some pointless review games. Two girls even cried in class. The prof we had yesterday isn't necessarily mean, but she isn't sensitive either. We were giving directions and doing it individually. If we messed up the prof would call us out, "no that's wrong," but didn't follow up with an explanation. It was very embarrassing and kinda kills your self esteem.

Haha, I was telling one of my friends yesterday that I swear my Japanese gets worse when I'm in Japanese class. Two people that sit directly behind me are from Chicago. So with their nasally accents, their a's are always stretched out and emphasized. It makes for strange pronunciations when they speak Japanese. Two guys that sit near me cannot distinguish Japanese r sounds either. So everything ends up coming out "raw, row." You'll know what I'm talking about if you've taken Japanese. But just imagine it is the difference between the pronunciations of l's and r's.

There is just an utter lack of creativity in the way the class is taught and tested. Everything we do is verbatim, word for word, right out of our textbooks. No doubt, this is going to be one of the hardest classes ever to stay motivated in. And here we are only at midterms...

I am so jealous though, because all my Japanese friends at Sophia don't have midterms at all. And other exchange student friends at Aoyama haven't really had major testing at all either. Lol, I am going to the wrong school and am enrolled in the wrong classes!