Hello, I'm a student from Singapore. I started studying in KICL during
the spring enrollment in April 2015. As of right now, I'm halfway through my
second term here. Let me start off with a little bit of how it was like when I
first arrived.
I came here without having studied Japanese back in my home country.
What little I know came from casually watching anime and playing Japanese
games. I literally skip through all the reading dialogue and don't pay
attention to the Japanese speaking while reading the subtitles in English. As
you might already know, this school puts you into classes based on a placement
test when you first enter the school.
I took the test and somehow got put into Intermediate level 1, I was
absolutely sure there was some kind of mistake and was pretty lost during the
quick review of basic grammar terms in the first lesson. But the rest of the
class was actually easy to understand and I soon got used to everything. Now
I'm glad that I got sorted into that class. I have since passed my exams and
moved up to another level. So don't worry if you know next to no Japanese
before coming over! (Just get familiar with hiragana and katakana though, it'd
be super useful.)
By the way, there are plenty of really cute cats near the school
building. So it's great if you like cats. Even if you don’t like cats, the good
news is that they don't go near you or anything. They just sit there. Or go on
their way to do important cat stuff. So don't worry about random cats coming up
to rub themselves all over your leg.
Classes here are actually really fun. I have no idea how the teachers
manage to make grammar lessons which are really technical information fun and
engaging. But it is. In both my first class and the current class I'm in, the
teachers are all very nice and fun. I've been the type of student that hardly
ever studies all my life and I was honestly not expecting to study much here
either. To be honest, I expected this whole studying in a language school thing
to be really relaxed with lots of time to do whatever I want but it's really
quite intensive sometimes. That's not saying that there is no time for playing
because lots of people still go out and explore and have fun after school and
during the various breaks. In fact, the school encourages you to go out and
experience life in Japan instead of staying at home all day studying.
Over here we have the famous Jidai Matsuri, a festival held annually
in Kyoto where people parade in costumes from the various time periods of
Japan, Kinkakuji the famous golden temple, Fushimi Inari Taisha, that crab in
Osaka, Nagoya Castle and Shirakawa-go. You'll be able to identify everything
easily after you've studied here for one term. You will have plenty of time to
explore other parts of Japan during the term breaks and various public holidays
such as golden week.
There really is no need to study too much because if you pay attention in class, you'd get most of
the important stuff down. Except for Kanji.. If you love kanji then that's
great, you'll be seeing a lot of that. If not, then it'd be best to start
liking it because that'd make remembering all the kanji less painful. That
said, when you actually go out there and do stuff, you can use your dictionary
so it's all good.
The school is not all about studying either. There's a reason why the
world 'culture' is in the name of the school. There are extra classes you can
take on various subjects like calligraphy and the culture or history of Kyoto.
I took the culture class and it was interesting. The teacher introduced a lot
of fun facts about Kyoto that I would never have know or even think to search
up myself. There are also excursions where we go to see the things the teacher
mentioned and they will have more detailed explanations once there.
Other than that, there are also activities in the curriculum like
culture day and off-campus activity day
(or field trip, not sure what that's called in English). For culture
day, you get to pick the activity you would like to participate in. They are mostly
traditional Japanese crafts and activities like making traditional Japanese
sweets and Japanese dance. I picked something called Kiyomizu-yaki, a kind of
special way of making pottery passed down from long ago. We only have to paint
the design on so no hard work involved. Of course, we get to draw whatever we
want on our piece of pottery. Here are some photos of my bowl, example bowl and
cup and some pictures of the place.
The teachers said that we'll be drawing a
cup. They showed us examples of cups they drew, the pictures on the paper
explaining a bit about the history of this technique and the place we're going
to had pictures of cups. But when we went there they gave us bowls.. I made a
design for a cup.. So there you have my design meant for a cup on a bowl. I did
that last term, my friend went this term and she got a cup. I don't know why
they gave us surprise bowls but it was still fun. Just wanted to warn anyone
reading this that intends to do this to be prepared to put your design on
anything, even if they told you that you were going to draw on a cup.
The school also holds a sports day event in
place of the regular off-campus activity during autumn/winter where everyone
from every level and class goes off to some sports hall in the countryside to
participate in some activities the Japanese students do during their sports
day. It was fun doing the radio exercise with everyone. (Also quite amusing to
watch teachers doing it with everyone)
Not only do we get to learn more about
Japanese culture, we also learn more about a lot of other cultures from fellow
students coming from various countries in class. When we talk about a
particular aspect of Japanese culture, the teachers may ask us how it is like
in our country. Then we take turns explaining it, in Japanese of course. I've
learnt so much that would either be very boring to read from a book or just not
possible to find online.
Overall, it's usually fun everyday and when
you realise you can hold a conversation without much trouble with Japanese
people and don't need the English menu anymore, it's a pretty good feeling.
Thanks for reading till the end and putting up with my rambling! Hope to see
you in school someday!
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿