Japanese classes have....started

and they suck (so far)

Monday and Tuesday i have a level 2 advanced writing class and a level 3 advanced reading class(highest offered). When I look around in these particular classrooms, everyone is either a) Chinese/Korean or b) grad/masters students. What does this mean? well, it simply means that the placement test at this university SUCKS. I actually was brave enough to go to these 2 classes, and was blown away by the amount of kanji characters on every handout that i couldn`t even read... AND, in the adv 3 reading class, our first task was to read an article directly from the japanese NEWSPAPER (read: it requires 2000plus characters to read a japanese newspaper) and THEN answer questions on it...all in Japanese of course, WITHOUT using a dictionary... needless to say i wanted to run out of the classroom.

Todays class, kanji and vocabulary adv 1, was by far the most tolerable. I think they may have placed me in one correct class so far (aplaud)...

btw, the weather here is SO cold, and its always raining at some point during the day. Basically, cold and wet to sum it up nicely. Its about 45-50 degrees now most of the time. If the sun comes out, its actually bearable, but when that wonderful 30 mph wind kicks up, not fun at all...

with that,

cya!