According to our teacher, the class we’ve been placed into based on our placement exam results is just before the intermediate level *shrugs* At least now I’m more clear on the placement.

The class is taught in 100% Japanese; our teacher uses only Japanese to teach us Japanese. In the first five minutes I thought my head was going to explode, but for some reason, I can understand nearly 90% of everything she says. I don’t get it. Some people I can understand nearly fully and some people may as well be speaking Chinese to me.

We first went around the room doing introductions (no English allowed): where we’re from, our hobies, major, and so on. From there on, we got an introduction on the books we’ll be using this semester (written only in Japanese) along with the guidelines and expectations and all of that other usual first-day stuff.

I can already tell that just by simply attending this class alone, my Japanese listening and comprehension skills are going to improve tenfold.

This morning we also had the kanji placement exam, which I’m ashamed of how poorly I did. The test was extremely short, divided into two sections: reading comprehension and writing comprehension. The reading consisted of sentences with several underlined kanji which we had to translate to hiragana while the writing section, again similarly, consisted of sentences with underlined portions which were in hiragana which we had to write the kanji for. It was extremely easy and I knew all kanji except for one from both tests but I still did badly, because as of lately I’m used to using the computer to read and write and I spend much time reading books, which I can guess the kanji’s meaning without having to know how to read them.

This afternoon, after class, I went to a nearby restaurant and studied there for about three hours.