Today brought my first meeting in my primary classroom in the Aoi building for my program. There's only two of us in the class! Talk about small student to teacher ratios. The other student is Chinese, and seems to have a pretty decent grasp of Japanese already, but she explained that she was weak in the "conversation" area as shown on her placement test (they didn't make me write one since I am so obviously starting from scratch), so she was placed with me in the absolute beginner class. It seems a shame that so much of the early days will be rehash for her, but they seem to know what they are doing around here, so I'm thinking she's in the right class.
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| My dorm room has a heater/air conditioner mounted on the wall. |
The school seems very well organized; most of the difficulties for me have been as a result of my not understanding Japanese. A very nice Portuguese member of the support staff is the only one who seems to speak any English in the main office, and I met him yesterday at the orientation. He very kindly takes it upon himself to help me out whenever he happens to run into me around campus, the past few days; however, most of the time (such as today), the end result isn't so helpful due to the fact that he has only been working at Yamasa for three days, and that his English is pretty minimal. At first he tried to tell me that the 1:00 appointment written down for me on a paper during yesterday's orientation by a non-English speaking staff member wasn't correct. I had my suspicions though, and thankfully showed up for the meeting in my classroom on time; he had the best intentions though!
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