To sum up

I’m only a few days away from going home. Most of my family has been reading my blog (they likely made up about 4,000 of my 6,300 total views), but once school starts back up in January, I’m likely to be bombarded with that wonderful question that well-intentioned acquaintances who only realized you were gone when they see you come back tend to ask. “How was it?”

Okay, I understand the mindset behind it. I’ve often been on the opposite end of that question when one of my friends gets back from a study abroad experience. Where do you start? Hey, you’ve been gone for six months, give me an adjective. But it’s so difficult to sum up everything into as concise a package as the asking person would like. Because people who simply ask the question “how was it?” aren’t actually interested in the coin operated showers, or the grading schemes in the classes, or the historical significance of Ginza. If they were, they would begin with, or at least follow up with something more probing. They just want a summary. One or two quick sentences that can give them an idea of how I responded to six months of stimulus.

So let me start by figuring out how the heck I managed to spend six months over here.

July
I arrived on the 4th, met my fellow American students and KCP’s English support staff at the airport. We were taken individually to our places of residence, mine being a dorm room in Shinjuku which had plenty of room for a bed and a desk, and if you squeezed, a person. I took the placement test, where I was very quickly humbled and placed in level 3.

Class began, and I struggled. Being self taught, I had a lot of holes in my education and pretty much all of them were exploited early on. I made friends with a Chinese guy named Encaron. On weekends and after school, I would go wander around by myself. We also had a few culture classes, which were just for the American students and taught in English. The quality of these varied, but were usually enough to make me excited to get up on a Saturday.

About halfway through the month, I visited the offices for the first time. I work at JapanesePod101.com and make videos with two other people. I would later begin working every weekday for four hours after school.

Near the end, I went to see fireworks at Sumida-river with an American (originally from Indonesia) named Trisna, who would later be the person I went with on trips outside of Tokyo. No, we were not dating.

Then finally, we had a speech contest. I was not a contestant, but Encaron was our classes representative and we got to do a cheer for him onstage.

August
The culture classes continued and the summer weather got even more hot. I learned that I had a family that signed up to have me stay at their house, but it fell through. They wanted to try again in the next semester.

Then I took my first trip out of Tokyo, going to Fujiyoshida with Trisna. Fujiyoshida is famous for being very close to Mt. Fuji, but the weather was terrible the entire trip. Mt. Fuji strike one.

KCP held a cooking class, which I attended. I also went to the Ghibli museum for the first time. In less fun news, I had Midterms for the first semester.

In the middle of the month, we had our big culture class outing to Enoshima and Kamakura (pt. 1 | pt. 2). I got to get to know the Americans a little better.

We also had a summer vacation coming up, with an entire week free. Trisna and I planned a three day trip. We first went to Nara, and then Himeji castle. Then we went to Hiroshima and the nearby island Miyajima. I took some of my favorite pictures during this trip.

September
After summer vacation, school got a little more quick paced. We also took a school trip to a nearby park.

In addition to taking many tests in a short period of time, I got a letter from my future host family that got me excited for the prospect of living with them. The Americans who were leaving after the first semester took a special final exam early, and left about the middle of the month. Mine wasn’t until the 25th, but there was a five day break immediately before it. I wound up mostly studying during that break.

I took my final exam, and finished level 3. I had a week of freedom, during which I didn’t attempt anything too strenuous, except for go to the Ghibli museum again, and then it was time to move in with my host family.

October
I moved into my homestay in Minami-senju, and spent the second week doing stuff with them. In the excitement of making a good first impression, I signed up for a 5K race.

I found out that I got an A in level 3, and they asked me to do a sample conversation with one other classmate in front of the next semester’s orientation. The next semester began, and I was feeling a lot more at-home at KCP, being the one-semester veteran.

On the first weekend, the host family and I went over to a friend-of-the-family’s house in Chiba. The husband happened to be a commercial director at TBS (tv studio), and I discovered that the secret behind speaking a language well is finding someone that you really, really want to talk to. I kept in touch after the weekend, and he seemed to like me.

I approached the next semester of school as if I were aiming to get 100 percent on every test. It’s amazing how the difficulty of KCP can beat such optimistic thoughts out of a person. Upset that I had long passed the halfway mark and had yet to see Mt. Fuji, I took another trip by myself to Kawaguchiko, which met a similar rainy fate. Mt. Fuji strike two.

November
Another semester, and another school excursion. This time to a park in Tachikawa for a BBQ.

My host family had long since tired of me, and essentially rented me out to some of their friends for a weekend. It was nice to be around people who were excited to talk to me again. I finally ran the 5K race, got 21st in a group of about 120 people, and felt moderately good about myself. Then came the second midterm.

November was when I started studying hardcore for the upcoming JLPT 2 exam. I would spend entire weekends in the library, and studied in whatever cracks existed in my schedule. As such, the month felt like a blur compared to the lazy summer days.

December
I took the JLPT and I’m fairly confident I passed. After the test, my energy wavered a bit, and I slugged through the last bit of classes. Work got hectic as I had to make sure everything was in place to make the transition from “has Matt” to “no Matt” go smoothly. I got offered a job by my boss for after I graduate, a decision which has yet to be made.

One weekend, I decided to give Mt. Fuji one last shot. I woke up at 5:30, took the 4 hour trip back to Kawaguchiko, and was greeted with a sight I have almost been trained not to expect — Mt. Fuji. I tried to get as many pictures as I could, and got a few that I could be proud of. I stayed there the entire day, until the sun set. Mt. Fuji, homerun. (well, perhaps a triple. It got cloudy again in the evening)

I also went to a party with some co-workers, where we mostly played video games. It sort of reminded me of parties back home.

And today, I went to the Ghibli museum one last time.

Tomorrow is Monday, and my last day of class, and then Tuesday is my final exam. Wednesday, at about 4:30, I’m flying out of here.

Suffice it to say, Japan has been a ton of work and a ton of fun. Not that it was either one or the other, but they both happened at the same time.

So how’s that?

Leveling up and out

There’s a significantly different feeling between a typical vacation to a foreign country and a long-term study abroad. During my 18 day romp through Europe, there was a ton of stress to get things done and see what you needed to see. Enjoying yourself seemed to take a backseat to checking off a list of everything you needed to do before you left. It requires a different kind of personality to take a week long vacation in a very vibrant place, be content to sightsee only when you feel like it, and otherwise just enjoy yourself.

Obviously, looking forward to a six-month stay, I didn’t feel that urge to get everything done. There was no ticking clock compelling to make every day count. If my plans for a weekend were ruined by rain, I would just shrug it off and try it again in one of the many upcoming weekends. No sense of urgency, no real reason to get worked up.

I don’t need to look at a calendar to tell me that the end is drawing near. I’m starting to feel antsy, I find myself more conscious of what’s taking my time and I want to make the most of what time I have left. There are no more holidays. One more full week of class, one more final exam, two more weekends. The upcoming one will be the most free, because there are things scheduled for the last weekend. So, although I’ve been able to watch weekends come and go and figure that there will be plenty more, that ends now. I don’t quite know what I want to do. I’m kind of okay without knowing that. All the weekends that I’ve truly enjoyed involved stumbling upon something that I didn’t expect. The best I can hope to do is go to some of the last places that I haven’t set foot in yet.

I’m also feeling classes wind down. Although there’s nothing relaxing about the tests that are scheduled for the remaining eight days of classes, I seem to have lost the mindset that I had early on — I’ve got six months to devote almost purely to language learning, let’s see how far I can get. The push to get to the JLPT 2 level feels more crazy as I look back on it. I can’t remember ever devoting so much of my time and energy toward a single objective. At school, where I’ve averaged 18 credits over 6 semesters, it’s always felt like I could concentrate on one subject only as much as the other classes would allow me. I wanted to devote myself to my Cinematography class, but I had history classes with demanding work loads. I wanted to succeed in my graphic design classes, but communication classes soaked up my energy until I could just sputter out a passable project. But over these two semesters, I’ve taken a total of 24 credits on one subject. I managed to get further than I expected and I feel something that I hardly ever feel: genuine satisfaction that I gave it all I had.

I’m not going to lie. It hurts to still get slapped with 69 and 70 percent grades on tests like I did today. But I need to put it in perspective. The Japanese language is significantly harder for western students. When I think about how frustrated I get about not being as good as my friend Encaron (Chinese), I think about how he’s grown up his whole life knowing the kanji. When he sees a compound in Japanese, there’s a good chance that it looks very similar to a word in Chinese. He understands words just by seeing them, and can give an educated guess on the reading (which is often accurate). I, and all my American classmates, had to learn from step one. Literally, we had to be taught that “一” means “one”, and that it is read “ichi”, except when it is read “hito” or “itsu” or “i” or “kazu” or one of eight other readings. It was a nice motivator to pretend like we were on the same level and I could get ahead by just working harder. But it’s time to come back to reality. This is a freakishly hard language for westerners to learn. Every gaijin living over here who has a working command of the language, I give complete props to. It’s a very long, steep road to walk, and the number of people who think “gee whiz, I’ll learn Japanese” is much, much larger than the number of people who can actually pass JLPT 1. I don’t care if you had the luxury of classes available to you since junior high, or a large Japanese population in your home town, or a Japanese friend you could practice with. All the Americans at KCP deserve a ton just for making it over there.

I’m not complaining. And it’s not like I’m suddenly realizing that this is a hopeless endeavor. I started learning because it seemed hard. I figured if I had one really difficult-to-acquire skill under my belt by the time I graduated from college, then I could look back and feel like I deserved some of the responsibilities and freedoms that adulthood naturally give you. I used to call it “justifying yourself.” When you hit age 22, it would be nice to say that you accomplished something. So I’m completely okay with this being difficult. It will make it that much satisfying when I can finally reach the peak of this metaphorical mountain. For now, I’ve found a nice spot to stop on the side, where I can look back at the path I just walked and appreciate the view.

So, I’ll still do everything I can to do well on the final exam. Getting out of this place with straight A’s (on the “80 and above = A” scale that KCP thankfully employs) would be a nice stat to pat myself on the back with. But for the most part, I know that this huge ordeal that was so long on the horizon is about to come to an end, I met it head on and performed as well as I could hope.

In the end, that’s what this trip was about. I know that the travelogues kept people interested, and my pictures may have been a nice touch, but in the end the point of this trip was to stop complaining about how circumstances are always less than ideal and doing what I could with the time and the resources given to me.

So I’ll take my 69 and my 70% papers home, look over my mistakes and try to learn from them, but I’ll ignore the note written next to my score. “A little bit more!” Mr. and Mrs. KCP, you’ve gotten everything I have to give.

JLPT

So, I randomly had 125 hits to this blog yesterday with no referrer (which means people are typing henrymatt.com into their address bar). I have no idea what caused this. The internet is weird.

Today was the culmination of a lot of hard work. True, a lot of times I say that I work hard and I don’t really work hard, but I spent four consecutive weekends in the library, including the afternoons of Tuesday and Thursdays and whatever time I could fit in the cracks going back about three months preparing for today, the JLPT.

Back in June, I figured that by this time I could take level 3 if I was feeling bored, but level 2 was way out of reach. But during midterm consultations with one of my teachers, she told me that I could probably take level 2 and have a good chance at passing it. Considering that I usually have much more delusional expectations of myself than others, this surprised me enough that I decided to give it a shot.

The course content of level 4 at KCP targets some JLPT 2 material specifically (under the creative title of “JLPT 2 Grammar”). The idea is that by level 5, all the material for the JLPT 2 has been covered in class. Me and many of my classmates who also took the test, being in level 4, had to do some significant work outside of class in order to have a chance.

Regardless of whether or not I actually passed the test (which I at no point considered a done deal — even now), it was nice to have some sort of guide post to look to. As I’ve thoroughly documented in this blog, I came to Japan with a very lopsided understanding of the language. I knew a ton of kanji but I didn’t know any of the words that people actually use in daily life. I could carry a conversation, but I would make about three errors a sentence and nobody ever corrected me. In my first semester at KCP, I would go from finding certain things incredibly easy to suddenly be completely lost in a five minute span. This is because I taught myself, and I’m a terrible teacher.

So one of the main things that attracted me to attempting the test is that it would allow me to get my skill level up to a certain, standardized point. Every category of the language needs to get to a certain, definite point. It forces you to work hard on the parts you’re weak at and balance everything out. So, while having a certificate that says I passed JLPT 2 would be nice, I was more looking forward to being able to concretely measure where I’m at. I now know that JLPT 2 books are going to contain material that I’ve already covered and JLPT 1 books are going to contain something new. All across the board. So I don’t need to think “oh, this book would be good for grammar but the kanji is way too easy” or “here’s a good book for kanji but holy crap these example sentences are ridiculous”.

Going forward, past the sheltered environment of KCP where I am protected from my own foolish mistakes, this is important for choosing my own self study curriculum. I also talked with a level 5 teacher and he said that I could basically just get some JLPT 1 test preparation books and it would be pretty similar to the curriculum I would have gotten in level 5 and 6.

But as for the test itself… I went to sleep really early the night before and woke up at 6:00 in order that I could act like a responsible student and take a shower, have breakfast, and be alert enough for test. It took about an hour to get to the test site, a university. The staff of the test were all very professionally dressed, with a yellow band around their arms indicating they were staff. I found my way into room 202, a large classroom with about 64 seats. The demographics were pretty predictable: mostly Korean or Chinese, with a lot of Malaysian students as well. Of the western kids, I found out that most of them were actually Italian. In my classroom, there were perhaps four Americans including me, although I can’t know for sure.

One thing I was happy about was that I was seated in the very middle, in the second row back. The listening comprehension exercises at school are typically from a cassette tape (seriously, Japan?) and the recording quality ranges from bad (the professionally made tapes) to awful (the ones that KCP teachers recorded themselves, from the sounds of it, in one of the bathrooms). It’s perhaps a cop-out to blame poor performance on this, but it’s kind of a big deal.

The JLPT is split into three sections, with a break between each one. The first section was Vocabulary/Sentences. This mainly focused on the usage of words, and matching kanji compounds with their readings. If it’s possible for me to say I have one section that I’m good at, it’s this. After the first section, I was feeling pretty cocky. There were also about three questions that I only knew the answer because I had studied them the day before. That’s probably more luck than anything, but so often in tests I get asked the one word that I didn’t study, so it was nice to have a reversal when it actually mattered.

The second section is the dreaded listening comprehension. But I found that it was surprisingly manageable when I actually hung on each word like grim death. In class, perhaps my eyes glaze over a bit during the long listening comprehension lessons. For the hour that this section took place though, I made sure to listen to every word. One of my teachers gave me advice when I brought up my difficulty with listening comprehension at the most recent midterm discussion; to visualize something while listening. I found that trying to listen to each word and hoping that no words I’ve never heard of pop up just results in my entire train of thought being shafted as soon as those words inevitably do pop up. Instead, my teacher told me to imagine the situation being described as a situation, cast friends in the roles, and just build the image in your head with the description from the audio. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, because I’m a visual person to a fault, but it made a lot of sense when I put it into practice and the listening section went well in part because of it.

After the second section, I grabbed just enough lunch that it would keep me running but not so much that I would get tired like I always do. I also had a chance to talk to one of the Italian dudes, who was a designer. I like to glorify what I do as “motion graphic design”, so I was able to talk to him a little about that. I find that getting burnt out is a state unrepairable by anything but sleep, so it was nice to talk about something completely not Japanese for a few minutes. Similarly, when I study in the library, I often go and look at the English books when I start to feel the onset of burn out.

The third section is reading comprehension and grammar. It was worth the same amount of points as the last two sections combined, so I couldn’t coast on it. Whether or not I can do reading comprehension well or not is depending on my mental state, and I haven’t exactly pinned down the formula to get to said state. Sometimes I’ll just look at a sentence and think “that makes no dang sense” and sometimes I’ll breeze through a paragraph.

The reading comprehension confirmed my suspicion that the practice books I was using actually contained harder material than the test itself. Usually in a long passage, there will be about eight very difficult words with footnotes that explained the meaning, but there were perhaps twice that many words within the passage that were just as hard. In the test, I understood almost all the words and even some of those that were called out in footnotes. The questions were a little abstract for my liking. There were hardly any questions that had answers that jumped out as definitely right or definitely wrong. I also had to read very quickly. Although I didn’t bring a clock with me, my internal clock was telling me to book it even though the meaning of the sentences were a little uncertain. After all, it would be a shame to not get to the 40 grammar questions because I was hung up on the 20 reading questions.

Accepting that I was not going to get a hundred percent on the reading, I finished up and moved onto grammar. Here, I also had to thank the books I used to prepare for the test, as I recognized a lot of question patterns. As I got closer and closer to the end, I started to think that it would probably be very cathartic to finally be done with this. Just ten more, just five more, just two more… I literally filled in the last bubble as the proctor called time. And rather than feeling as if I completed something large, I felt like there was still a lot of work to do yet. All memory of the first two sections were gone, and I was too focused on all the half-guesses I had to make during this section. I still had a lot of work to do…. not in order to pass the test — I think worst case scenario I still pass — but in order to get to the point where I can leave here feeling like I’ve really accomplished something. How’s that for lame? Look, I’m trying to feel good about my accomplishments, but my brain won’t let me. Oh well.

As a reward for myself, I went to Kinokuniya and bought a book in English. Reading it on the train back to Minami Senju was a nice feeling. Like, “ha, I can understand every word!” And then the word “exsanguinate” popped up and even that cockiness was gone.

Oh, by the way, we have a test tomorrow and some homework due as well. It’s a good thing I don’t have a social life over here…