Well, it's been a little while but I finally have the time to get back to this.

Like I mentioned, I'm on a study abroad program learning, ostensibly, college-level Japanese here in Hikone. I'd actually intended to write this a good while ago, but...

Here's how it works. There are four Japanese classes offered that ascend in difficulty (obviously) and are supposed to be equivalent to a year of study at an American university. So for example, if you can take a year of Japanese in the US, come here, take level 2, then go back and expect to get into level 3.

I said "supposed to be" just now because I think their idea of what constitutes a year of study isn't based on what American college students actually learn in a year -- it's based on some lofty ideal from a perfect world where no one skips class and everyone cares about what they're studying. I've heard horror stories of people studying Japanese for two years at America and testing into the first level here, and apparently there have been years when no one tested into the fourth level at all.

So I was pretty nervous about this and essentially spent the entire summer studying for the placement test. My big fat weak point when I got to Japan was definitely kanji; when I was in college, my strategy was basically to cram like crazy before tests, memorize as much of it as I could that night and then promptly forget everything once I was out of the classroom. So as a result, I'd "studied" somewhere around three hundred kanji and retained somewhere under fifty -- and I'm just talking about the ability to read them, I don't even want to think about how few kanji I could write. For those of you without Japanese experience, imagine that you know about umpteen gajillion verbs and nouns in spoken English and about forty in written English. Same thing. So I decided I needed to learn somewhere around a hundred kanji a week, a pace I kept up for the most part throughout the summer program; at the time of the placement test around a week and a half ago, I had around one thousand memorized, which sadly is still not enough to make you literate or even close but you do get the delightful experience of "I can read every single word on this sign except the one that completely determines what the hell it's talking about."

So I figured with my level of Japanese experience I would have a lot of trouble getting into level 3. I've had friends on this program and they said level 4 Japanese is basically impossible to get into, like it's equivalent to grad-level Japanese, so I didn't even think of that as an option.

Anyway, the placement test was really tough and I thought I botched it but you probably know where I'm going with this. I'm one of the 四天王 of the Japanese program here, one of the only four who made it into the fourth level.

This is like a mixed blessing. I have somewhere around seven hours of homework a night, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to see quite as much of Japan as I wanted to and who knows what kind of social life I'm going to develop. But on the other hand, the conversations I get into with Japanese college students basically go like this: "What bands do you like? Oh that's cool, so what movies do you like? What do you think of Japanese food?" Now that's pleasant enough, but it's not what I talk about in English and it's not incredibly fulfilling. Class is essentially three hours of discussion, and it's stuff like "what do you think about Japanese gender inequality," "explain these Japanese grammar constructions in Japanese," etc. This is Japanese I can actually use to communicate the way I like to in English, and I don't think it's something you can practice in quite the same way at, you know, the arcades.

So that's my status now. I figure next time I write I'll talk about the karaoke place back in Iida. I promise this will be more interesting than it sounds.