well, midterms are almost here, meaning i've been in japan on exchange for almost 2 months now. here's some more random thoughts about how the classes are and what we're doing and so on.

luckily i have no midterm tests and only have to write some crap (= homework) instead. the grammar class is totally useless, not because i already know all the grammar (i don't know ANY of it!) but because they don't usually explain "how grammar A is different from grammar B meaning the same thing", or give enough example sentences (typically we get 1-3 but even if we get 3 they're all basically the same thing). their explanations are usually vague enough that you can and do misunderstand the meaning. so instead of relying on class for grammar i have to just look it all up myself as usual.

when studying grammar, remember that it's much much easier to learn its usage when you have a whole chapter or paragraph of context instead of when you're seeing it in single isolated sentences like in the average grammar textbook. even if it says "this is used when you're super shocked" for example, you don't *actually* understand until two years later you see it in "WHAT?! Luke's actually MY BROTHER?!".

speaking of, i thought N1 grammar appeared almost nowhere since i wasn't seeing most of it in manga, anime, news articles etc and no one online could tell me where various points were used. now that i've been reading harry potter i've realized it DOES appear often if you're reading LONG FICTION NOVELS - not short stories, not nonfiction (though nonfiction has its own set of N1 grammar that appears more often than in other places). harry potter is using N1 grammar all over the place but you need to be reading, say, 20 chapters in relatively quick succession to be able to learn it from context because the grammar point only shows up once every 2-3 chapters.

i think you *can* read harry potter if you're N3 level, if so you'll get the bare-bones info (you won't get "he said loudly" or "he said quietly" but you'll get "he said"); at N2 you'll be able to learn a lot from context if you just keep reading. i bought all the e-books sometime this month and loaded them onto my 3DS to read during my commute to school etc, now i've made it to chapter 16 of the first book.

for some reason the teachers keep forgetting we're not all at the same grammar/vocabulary level, so despite that i've studied japanese at least one semester less than my classmates coming from the same school (= me 3, them 4+) — and that some of the students from the other schools have only studied japanese for ONE single semester before coming here - the teachers go "oh you all already know this right?" etc about like, N1 level (= highest level) grammar and vocabulary, or about words you supposedly see a lot in everyday japanese life (like "expiration date", which i don't see since i'm almost blind and can't read those easily)... in general the teachers don't understand that i/we haven't studied specifically N3, N2, N1 grammar - i know grammar the others don't know but that's because i read manga, it's not from a textbook, so then the teachers are confused about why i don't know "easier" grammar compared to that manga grammar for example.

i got my essay corrected and handed back to me for the first time and the corrections were useless, they just corrected without explaining why i was wrong so there's no way i can learn anything.

starting at the end of november and throughout december we'll be visiting random elementary and middle schools, giving presentations about our countries and/or teaching the kids some songs/games from our countries. these are kids who've basically never met university students or foreigners before, and who don't know anything at all about foreign countries. in a couple cases we're actually getting paid 2500-3500 yen to do this.

my listening has progressed to the point where i can understand 90% or so of what goes on on the average tv show, and maybe 70-80% of the news (which still feels too difficult). there's still a lot of stuff i don't get in general but it's definitely diminishing.

my classmates are REALLY thinking they know japanese a lot better than they do so they're making a lot of "real-life" mistakes due to it. ex. at the bank, not being able to chose the option they wanted just because they misunderstood the bank lady. or misunderstanding the usage/nuance of a word, or thinking grammar/word A is super rare and only in dialect B when it's definitely not. for example, one was going on about "ありがとう さま" and "ありがとう　さん" as if it was extremely strange and rare, when i've seen it a bunch of times in random places / from random people.

one classmate (who's been living here for half a year already) in particular seems to just be feeding us lines from what he's heard from other people about how japan is. like "it's hard to get to be close friends with japanese people", despite that that's a hard thing in ANY country and is even more true in HIS country than in japan (based on personal experience). plus no one is gonna wanna be your close friend if you have no common interests and talk as if you know *all* there is to know about japan despite having only lived here for 6 months, stuff like that, but he seems to think you just magically should be making close friends all over the place or something... anyway, this classmate is really trying to press his opinion that "in the beginning of living here you think it's all great, but after 6 months or so you'll see all the bad sides of japan, you'll see".

i keep telling him, i've already lived (for multiple years!) in 3 different countries before coming to japan, i haven't yet had that experience once. as in, even if i've found out the bad sides of a country that hasn't made me magically forget/hate the good sides that i originally loved or something. if your everyday life is better in country B, you're going to think country B is better even if the rare stuff (dealings with the government, for example) is a lot worse. and i have a lot of *relative* experience: if i've being discriminated against when looking for an apartment in japan because i'm a foreigner, well, it's already happened to me in another country so my thought is "eh it's just the same as x country, no big deal". even the first time it happened in my life, i just thought "well it's natural they don't trust me, i AM a foreigner!". this one thing doesn't make me suddenly hate the whole country or something. stuff like having trouble with apartments only comes up once every few years when you need to move, it's not a constant daily hindrance so you shouldn't care about it. and anyway it's still a lot better than, say, the USA where in order to even get an apartment you first have to get a credit card, create a credit history with that card, get a co-signer etc; or sweden where apartments are 2-3x more expensive and 10x rarer as in japan. i don't get how people think.