Metamorphosis

Ok so I realized I was totally approaching things from the wrong angle. It was pretty selfish and naive actually. I always thought my coming here was about me, me, me, me and me learning Japanese. But of course, it's more than that. I'm here as an ambassador to Canada and, in a way, the rest of the English-speaking world.

So to right my wrongs I've lightened up a bit and with those that speak English with me, I speak English back and teach them as much as possible. It's a rare opportunity for them to converse with a native English speaker, but I have the opportunity to speak with a native Japanese almost every moment of the day. And even though I'm not speaking Japanese with everyone, and those I do speak in Japanese with is only for a few minutes a day, I'm finally starting to notice an improvement. It was really crazy when I started to watch Beautiful Life again for the first time since on the plane ride and I swear to god, it felt like they were speaking slower. I was like "why the hell are they speaking so slowly this episode?? They never speak this slowly!" But then I was like, "idiot, it just means my hearing is getting better."

There was nothing to worry about - believe it or not we have SEVEN hours of Japanese instruction per week lined up. That is, once, the obon holiday season is over next week. 3 hours per week with company-provided lessons; and 2 hours each at two different volunteer-staffed Japanese classes throughout the city.

The company-provided lessons started today. I took a placement test so they could gauge my level of Japanese proficiency, but I don't think the test did a good job of it. The entire test was at the Japan 101 level. Barely skimming the surface of what I know. Hopefully she got a good idea of my ability from my speech.