Typhoon

Well, term has well and truly started here, but it's been an odd beginning. The very first day, which I've detailed already, was on a Friday, and right after the weekend was Respect for the Aged day, a national holiday, which means there were no classes. Tuesday was fine, and I'll detail that in a bit, but today's lessons from 1pm were cancelled due to concerns over a typhoon passing over Tokyo today. So, while there have been four days since the start of term, I've only really had two "full" days.

On Sunday, I made a visit to the Tokyo Game Show, but as that's almost exclusively videogame related, the details of that will be over at Samurai Rocket. But other than that, my days have mostly been spent studying in my dorm, going to university and back. The daily grind has well and truly begun, it would seem.

Regarding classes, I've had my second Japanese language one, which was exclusively for speaking, and it wasn't bad at all. With the content relating to relatively simple things like restructuring a sentence to convey the same meaning, or talking amongst ourselves to ask eachother what our favourite foods are, it's really quite comfortable. I'm convinced that the next level up would quite possibly be too much for me, so it's a bit odd that the level I'm in right now is straightforward. It's doing a good job of proving to me what other transfer students have told me, in that you'll only really learn and improve outside of class. That being the case, it's almost just as well that I'm enjoying going out by myself for a wander and immersing myself.

Yesterday was a bit odd on that front, however. After class I made yet another trip to Shibuya to meet Rory, another transfer student from my year in Sheffield, and Daiki, a student from Hosei who had studied at Sheffield during the second semester of my first year. It was a very bilingual day, but I found that it kept taking me a few moments to adjust between English or Japanese. Staying in one language was fine, but switching over on the fly made things troublesome, even moreso when I started really thinking about what I was saying. I can only assume the problem was that I was trying to speak in Japanese while thinking in English, which could explain some of my struggles at Sheffield really!

As I've been writing this, the intensity of the typhoon has increased, and my attention from this has been diverted somewhat to just how strong the rain and wind is coming down. I think it's going to be most intense around 9pm tonight, and it's currently 5pm. Be interesting to see what tomorrow morning brings.