To start off the morning, I had arranged to meet Zian over at the bus stop we both used to get to Ritsumeikan from, at 7:45 am, and we both joined the line of people queueing for the 205 when we got there. The queue wasn’t terribly long yet, and we managed to fit onto the second bus that came along, although this one wasn’t an express bus and also didn’t stop all the way inside the school grounds, instead stopping just outside the gates, which meant our walk was extended by about 1 minute or so. No big deal. It’s much better than the 205 that I took during my first evening in Kyoto, since that one stopped out on the main thoroughfare before zipping off somewhere else, and it was about a 10 minute walk from -that- bus stop to Ritsumeikan plus another several minutes after that to get to the right building.

We took that bus to Ritsumeikan, and then Zian dragged me down into one of the cafeterias, a different one from where we had bought lunch from yesterday. This cafeteria was serving breakfast from 8 to 9 am, and breakfast here consisted of 1 bowl of rice, 1 bowl of soup, and 2 side dishes of the student’s choice from a bunch of options on serving trays. The best part of it is that this breakfast usually costs 100 yen, but was completely free this week due to some post-Golden Week promotion going on, apparently sponsored or supported by some Association whose name roughly translated into Parents Education Support Association or something, and the reason behind the campaign was something about encouraging students to get up on time and get used to the new time cycle of school. Hahaha. It certainly worked for us — free is free, and even 100 yen is really cheap, I can’t say no to these breakfast options! Here’s what I had, and then what she had, for free.

This really reminded me of canteen lunches in Singapore schools, back in Primary and Secondary school (Rosyth and Dunman in particular, see here), except there we chose from a menu and that was largely it, and here we have little side dish options, basically building our own little teishoku, or set meal. And there there were many separate food stalls specializing in a certain type of food, and here it’s one kitchen making everything.

Anyway, we had a great free breakfast and then headed up to class together. Our placement test was today, and although we were first separated into two rooms, we were all ushered into the same room before the start of the test since there were only 8 of us anyway. The test was… not so much difficult as that it included lots of stuff that I had since forgotten, like conjugations before grammar phrases. There was also an oral portion I didn’t do very well on, and my paragraph for the essay/paragraph long was just a couple lines because I just about ran out of time as usual… anyway, suffice to say they might have to create a new lower beginner level just for me. The oral portion was very interesting though, because

We fould out via comparing answers during the intermission after the placement test that the two groups of students had received different placement tests altogether from the staff — the other one had some focus on kanji, for example, whereas we did not. After that intermission, even though we had moved into this class for the placement test, the other group of 4 got kicked out instead and we got to stay in this classroom that we had invaded just prior to the test.

Our lesson plan only stated that we had the placement test today, but the test itself was only 75 minutes long, whereas we had a 3 hour block booked off for the morning. For the rest of the time, one of the teachers came in to our classroom (and one went to the other one as well} and gave us a bit of an informal lesson. We started with a basic introduction to get us started on talking, and ended with a vocabulary list whose phrases the teacher went through one by one and talked a little bit about. Apparently tomorrow we should try to study and remember what we can from the list, although I don’t think there’s a formal test per se…

It’s interesting too that the way the system is set up, we are having a different instructor/teacher each morning of the week as well. The teacher today was Mr Katsuki, and he was our teacher for Mondays and Wednesdays only. Yet the lessons themselves semed to be contiguous, like the instructor tomorrow would carry on talking about that vocabulary list we were given today, and Mr Katsuki even talked about how we would get our textbooks tomorrow and so on, so the setup is pretty unique overall.

Upon comparing notes with Zian at the end of the class though, we realized something — Mr Tanaka yesterday had said something about the class names were reversed, but what I don’t think he mentioned and what neither Zian nor I had certainly realized up until that point was that our class difficulties were also swapped, and the class I was in was actually the Intermediate 1 class, whereas the other class was Beginner 2. We were wondering about this the day before because Zian had said that she had only done less than a year of Japanese study, and about 3/4 of the way through one of the Japanese starter textbooks, and was somehow in the Intermediate 1 class on the listing, whereas I had done five classes and was on my 3rd textbook and yet somehow was in the Beginner 2 class. Time away from formally studying Japanese notwithstanding.

Anyway, after comparing notes, she said that their class had started doing something about the te-form, which is a verb-ending conjugation that would have come either late in the first textbook or early in the second one, and that in their own class introductions, everyone there had between a few months to a year of study. Comparatively, our class had 3 people between 2-3 years of study, and one person with about 6 years of study experience. We then finally concluded that yes, the class difficulties had been swapped on the listing as well, and this made me feel somewhat better.

We then had lunch, and I opted for kitsune udon and some side dishes including an egg that then cut open inside the udon and let the creamy yolk gush forth and gently caress the gentle surface of the soup…. as you can see, this was a great combo and also made me feel even better yet

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