I'm the student again

I could go into a whole philosophical rant about how we should all be students of life and learn everything we can each day. Every experience is a gift, even the bad ones and we should take something away from living each day. But, this time I mean literally, I am the student in a new Japanese class I just started last Friday.

So way back during the international festival in Koga, I met a man who is very involved in the Koga community. He invited me to join in the Japanese class the community center offers for foreigners. I told him that I would really love to be in a class again and decided to join. Our first class after the New Year's holiday was just last Friday evening. The class, as it turns out, was completely different than what I was expecting. In this class there are people from all over Asia (China, Vietnam, Philippines). And because we all have different native languages, we are split into four groups for more personalized study with a volunteer teacher that speaks our language. The woman that is helping me is named Yasuko and she is actually one of my students from the Heartful conversation club I teach!

The way they run the class is probably different for each teacher, but she likes for me to read from the text book. So there are no written examples or exercises, but I do a lot of reading and creation of new sentences based upon example situations and vocabulary. I think the class will be very helpful in giving me practice speaking Japanese in common and colloquial situations. Hearing myself use Japanese, and being conscious of what I am saying has already really helped my confidence in using Japanese. I have noticed a difference in the frequency with which I use Japanese and the wider range of my conversations. Granted these are small changes so far, but I am confident it will get better.

This same community center also had a New Year's party the Sunday after my first class. I went to this party and it turned out to be a lot of fun. We did Japanese calligraphy (which rocks!) and played bingo (I won some picture frames). After the festivities at the community center, we all went to karaoke. I will never turn down a karaoke invite and we ended up having a group of about 15 people there! Given that we were all from different countries, I heard a lot of Chinese songs and Korean songs. I was the token white girl singing in English. :) It was so much fun to hear everyone singing in their native language, and then when I got my chance to sing (You Were Meant for Me by Jewel). It was really fun because they heard me sing and then they started to treat me a little bit like a celebrity. It was fun and made me feel really special. They started choosing songs for me to sing and just clapping and cheering every time. It's a little silly, but they make me want to be famous.