So how is my host family?

Last time I wrote about my adventures I had said how I was worried about communication with my host family, and that I had a tough time introducing myself and talking on the way home from the school.

However, things are not as bad as I thought they would have been. In my opinion I have one of the better host families but there is also more work involved for me than some other students perhaps.
What I said before about language is still true.  My family can't speak English, and I can barely speak Japanese.  However, it's not been an issue at all.  I think it could have been an issue, but because I have an extremely nice and accommodating family, everything has been perfect.

I spend most of my days so far at home from around 5pm to midnight.  During that time I actually end up talking to my host mother almost the entire day every day.  It means that I've been too busy to update this blog or even do things that I normally do, but it also means that between that and school I am 'studying' almost every hour that I am awake.

There's really no english inside the house.  Once in a while I will tell my family what a word means in english, or ask them what a word means in english, and they might know, but they don't know enough grammar to form english sentences.

So, how do I communicate with my family?  Just a bunch of trial and error, along with a little Japanese knowledge and a little hand and body motion.  I am able to talk to my host family because they are very patient.  We will rephrase sentences until we either understand or give up, but usually we can get a rough idea of what each other is trying to say, so we are able to talk about many things.  I spend hours with my host mother talking about all sorts of random things, and even though I can rarely understand a whole sentence it just doesn't matter as long as I can recognize the main words of the sentence.

For example, tonight we had talked about how my day went at a party I attended, phone technology, and I talked a bit and showed off a bit of what I do in some of my computer engineering classes.  The night before I remember finding out that my host mother took economics in college but that most Japanese like to party in college as opposed to studying, and that she likes spanish as a second language, that she grew up right outside of tokyo but then moved to singapore, then china, then back here due to her father's occupation.  Then I remember talking about japanese names where she told me that her maiden name is uncommon, and she also told me that when she was my age that she took a trip to america and visited new york, vegas, and disney land. Even at a super market a few days before the host family's child was telling me by demonstration that in the tokyo area people go up escalators on the inside wall and in our area people tend to go up them hanging on to the outside rail.  It's impressive to be able to have this communication with my lack of language experience.

I can't remember everything that shocked me when I was able to talk about it in Japanese, although I'll write down what I remember later.  It's just that I'm really happy that I am fortunate to have a patient and fun family where we can talk about anything as long as we have the time to use any means possible to get the idea across.  The family also has one of these children's toys which has proven to be extremely valuable so that we can draw out some of our explanations - it's sometimes like a charades or pictionary game over here.

Also I hear that some people are busy hanging out with friends or even staying in their room most of the day.  By contrast by spending all of my free time out in the living room with my family, I am getting a huge amount of practice.  I'll learn some new words, but I think the main thing that it will help is the speed at which I can speak and listen in japanese.