Where have I been? School!

I don't think I've talked much about school, but it's basically the reason why I don't have time to update this blog daily.

My daily life in Japan at the moment is to go to school from 9:30 to some variable time depending on the day of week, but like 2:30 to 4:30.  After that, I end up hanging out with my host family which helps me practice my Japanese, and then eat dinner, study, shower, and go to bed.  Really quite busy.

The class schedule is interesting.  Every day of the week I have a quiz on vocabulary I study the night before.  So that takes some time out of my day to study.  After that, we learn a new piece of grammar / sentence structure for 2 hours.  After that there is either a listening test or reading practice which would help people who needed that practice, but I get enough of it just being in my house.  Each class is 50 minutes long with 10 minute breaks in between.  But after the third class, the reading practice or listening test, there is a 1 hour lunch break.  During breaks I go to either school vending machines or the school convenience store.  The vending machines have some pretty interesting items for under the equivalent of 1 dollar.  Things like corn drink, cold strawberry cocoa, banana milk, and regular drinks.

Then the last class of the day is either some sort of writing practice or 'experiential learning' which varies but 2/3 times so far has involved interaction with native japanese public.  Which is something I'd rather do at my own pace instead of doing it for school.  An example of experiential learning was last week when my group of 2 was tasked in buying some item from some store in the city around the school.  The local sweets shop we had to find the item at was operated by some very nice lady who gave us additional free food and asked us about being foreign students.  It was nice of her to give us free stuff and want to talk to us.  It was a bit of a learning experience though because she talked in a way unlike anyone else I have met so far where words sort of blended together.  Hard to understand but nice.

Also, on certain days of the week there's a 5th class for some special activity, like on mondays it is a lecture in english that talks about japanese culture.

Oh, and every friday there is a test on the grammar and vocabulary learned.  There's also daily homework to reinforce the stuff learned.  And on top of that every week there seems to be some variation to the schedule that results in me having more work to do at home.  So I don't have much free time with daily homework, studying for daily quizzes, and weekly tests along with extras.

Besides the rapid pace of the classes, one issue with the classes is that they are taught in japanese.  So it could potentially be challenging to learn something new when I don't understand what it is supposed to do since we are doing this all in Japanese.  The teachers know english, they just don't use it unless they need to.