School is about to begin

Today was the first day officially spent with Japanese classes. Although they started from 9 AM I got up at 7 AM just to make sure that I am not late even by a second as we were strongly suggested not to be late or skip classes without any good, verifiable reason. The Immigration Bureau has direct access to the school's attendance register of all language schools in Japan. They probably want to make sure that people actually do what they claimed they would be doing in the visa application form.

After having breakfast I headed to the school to check out my new class. I was assigned to class 'G'. In The Yamasa Institute classes are labeled with the letters of the Latin alphabet being 'A' the highest possible level. The last letter for this quarter was probably letter 'L'. This is what I anticipated, not too difficult, but still has its challenges. It also turned out that my room mate is in class 'F' so we really are at about the same level in Japanese studies.

Starting from today I have 11-15 new classmates and who knows how many teachers. We also had to pick 4 extra classes by the end of the lessons. 2 of them were preselected to be communication but we could pick 2 freely to match our interests. Although the cooking lesson was very tempting I picked reading practice and the level 2 kanji practice as I am willing to take the JLPT Level 2 this December. For those of you who don't know: the levels are ranging from 1 being the most advanced to 4 being the most basic - and I already passed level 3 last year. Even though there is high a chance of failure for level 2, the exam is held only once a year in Hungary and twice a year in Japan, thus it just did not feel right to ignore this possibility. That said, applying actually costs more in Japan than in Hungary which is somewhat obnoxious if you ask me.

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