End of Japanese Classes (for now?)

Yesterday marked the end of Japanese classes for me. Yay, I was getting bored of them anyways. I got put into level 3 which out of a scale between of 1 (being introductory) and 6 (being expert). The speaking and listening classes were boring unfortunately. I had the most enjoyable time in my reading, writing and Kanji classes... grammar was so-so.

I might take more Japanese classes later on depending on if I need them, but I didn't think they were all that useful. The bastion standing between me and Japanese fluency are vocabulary, kanji and expression.

The biggest hurdle of the 3 is learning the kanji. According to sources, there are about 1900 kanji basic characters, the number goes up to about 3,000 for people doing technical work. During my Japanese classes, we learned about 20 new kanji per week. That put me at 80/month and I did this for 4 months. That puts me at about 240 new kanji learned. There has to be a faster way of learning them... I've found a few a few books out there on learning kanji and I'm going to give them a whirl. I will be very satisfied if I am able to read 80% of a Japanese newspaper. We shall see...

So classes ended. What did I do? Party! Naturally. There were atleast 3 parties happening in the dorms that day. There was a double b-day party, my party and a going away party for one of the students going back to Korea.

I invited Misha and Diego and whoever else that popped by to enjoy fried chicken appitizer and crepes as dessert. Making crepes was kind of interesting. I use a recipie that I found off the internet but I generally change the proportions a little to make the crepes a little thinner (the recipie by it self makes things more like pancakes). For some reason the mix got thinner but got a little sticky when I cooked it, which made flipping them a total pain.



Had a few issues with holes :)

Abby, Misha and Diego

Kai-Ling dropping by for Crepes

Mmmmm... Crepe stuff

I got challanged into a beer drinking contest against Abby (cf. Image above) and lost horribly. The beer was super fizzy and really burned on the way down (excuses, excuses) oh well. She's a beer drinking force to be reckoned with... she also stole all my mandarin orange bits that I wanted to use for the crepes. Girls, I tell ya (/me ducks :)

After my party we headed off to the roof to see off Min from Korea. Plenty of drinking ensues. Heh unfortunately we got kicked off the roof because the guard man came up and told us we were too loud. It's a game of cat and mouse with the guard man. When you have 20 people out having a party vs 1 guard man (who is kind of old) all he can really do is yell at us. We pretend to clean up and leave... it just means that we pick some other place in the building and continue. Heh heh heh. We be bad.

Seriously though, they have this stupid role that people aren't allowed to use the lobby for parties at 11:00 pm... the lobby is away from the rooms and indoors so the noice doesn't get out to bother other people. Why oh why do they shut down the lobby is silly to me.