Ashley From Abroad: I'm alive.

It’s been almost two weeks since I arrived in Japan and I’ve already got quite a large mental list of raves and rants. Once I can get them sorted out in my head, I’ll be sure to let you all know..

There are six of us international students that just arrived a couple of weeks ago. Jamie and I (both from USD), a German girl, a French girl, a Chinese girl, and a Korean guy. I see all of them throughout the week but both the Chinese girl and the Korean guy do not speak very good English (they are really good at Japanese though) so it is difficult and semi-awkward with them a majority of the time. They have a hard time having a basic English conversation saying something like “We are meeting downstairs in an hour” so I am not sure how they are going to survive the English classes here.

I’m pretty surprised by how much the school seems to be focused on having us learn Japanese. They aren’t offering an Elementary Japanese class for us (never offered in the spring, FYI) but all the international students pretty much study Japanese as much as they can in their spare time. When I told the German guy I live next to that I hadn’t studied Japanese back home, he replied with a simple “You’re brave.” The language barrier has been a bigger hurdle than I expected. No one outside of the university speaks English and really only professors that obtained degrees abroad seem to be conversational. We went to the campus IT office and thankfully they had English instructions on how to set up the internet proxy because no one working knew English. We had a “crash-course” in Japanese our first week here - what a joke. The first day of this tutoring they handed out worksheets that had no English on them and assumed that we knew how to pronounce and read all 100 characters of their combined alphabet system (which we didn’t). I had memorized 50 of the characters on the flight over and was scrambling to keep up with what they were saying while the other girl from USD hadn’t learned anything and was just sitting there laughing to herself about how over her head this all was.

The international office here has a fairly good library of books to learn Japanese and I’ve been going there every few days just to take a look. I would say 95% of all the international students have been studying Japanese formally in their home country for at least a year prior to coming here. Many have taken various levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) so being from an institution that doesn’t offer Japanese puts me at a severe disadvantage. I’ve been studying Japanese at least 3 hours every day and am planning on registering to take the JLPT Level 5 Proficiency Test in Chicago this December. Level 5 is super easy and basically shows that I could have a conversation with a Japanese 4th grader but nonetheless is pretty kickass in the nerdy way of things. I am required to know 100 (out of 2,000) Kanji (Chinese) characters, about 800 vocabulary words, and a small, but confusing, amount of grammar. I need to use up the frequent flier miles I accrued to get here somehow and the test itself is only around $40 I believe.

The European girls I hang out with quite frequently and I have come to the conclusion that one really needs to be interested in learning the Japanese language to come here. The amount of free time we have here is pretty large and because of it the program almost seems like a language school of some sort. (Go to one class a day and study Japanese in your room for at least 3 hours before going out with friends) In other words, if you are a Spanish minor - don’t waste your time. Five months is a long time to spend in Asia if you have dreamed of partying in the Netherlands all your life. To be honest, my friend from France here is disappointed about how quiet the campus and city life are right now. She studied abroad in Scotland for two years before coming here (and had the time of her life) and is thrown off by how low-key things are here. After another girl and I sat down and talked to her, we came to the conclusion that studying abroad in Europe involves “immersing” yourself in their culture while coming to Asia places more emphasis on “analyzing” their culture. You will never completely fit into Asia - foreigners are always foreigners - and this has been a depressing reality for all of us I think. A girl from Germany said a girl from her home institution left Otaru a semester early because she had a bad experience and didn’t like the school, the culture, or the city. Japan really isn’t for everyone. I’m 100% positive that I could not be here for an entire year, but that’s just me. I don’t know enough Japanese to be able to survive here for any longer than a semester.

I got interested in learning Chinese in high school but am grateful that I am in Japan because Japanese is 1000x easier to learn! Japanese uses Chinese characters but pronounces them in a much simpler way. One character in Chinese may have several different pronunciations that you wouldn’t be able to know by immediately looking at it and everything is a “trial and error” in terms of reading and pronunciation. Japanese is really straightforward once you get past, what I refer to it as, the Chicken Scratch Phase. Once you learn the sounds associated with different characters it is just like learning Spanish or something - different word, same meaning, different sentence structure, same idea.

Well, it is 4 p.m. here and all I’ve managed to do all day is sit on Facebook and Skype. Saturday is a big day for me (considering we have 3 whole weeks here of nothing to do). I am auditioning for the orchestra here and am meeting a Japanese friend for a conversation lesson! I’m planning on walking to the grocery store around 6 p.m. tonight for cheap sushi! All the prepared sushi for the day gets marked down 50% after 6 so you can get a really good deal!