Been a funny day today. In some ways a little frustrating, as I spent about 4 hours trying to do the simplest bit of coding in MS Office Access, but failing. I’m hoping I have an early morning breakthrough tomorrow as I have every time I’ve run into a difficult problem with it so far.

Despite the frustration, I didn’t really feel all that frustrated. Which I was happy about. Those books work wonders :-p

The view from the office balcony: looking between the neighbours

Last night’s sloppy blog post did cause me a bit of disappointment, disappointment with myself. However, I’ve decided to take it as one of those precious lessons, and thus something to be grateful for, not regretful of.

Work at the office is starting to pick up now, with my telephone-conversation ‘classes’ (5 minute phone calls on topics such as personal info / directions / social issues in Japan) now taking up about four hours a day. [My job is firstly: taking 5 min conversation calls and marking written essays from my 300 students. Secondly: recruiting teachers for in-company classes throughout Japan]. The lower level calls are pretty easy, allowing me a little brain rest as I go through the routine. I find the higher level students really stimulating though, especially those who have lived abroad or are non-Japanese – being exposed to other cultures makes a huge difference in terms of attitude towards life.

As the departure of my British colleague approaches so I’m being slowly trained in what will be my new job. My core role will be recruiting new teachers, which necessitates a lot of good ole’ human interaction, not just with potential employees, but also with many of my Japanese colleagues. This is something I positively look forward to – I really want to improve my Japanese, and this will provide me many opportunities for doing so.

It will also give me the opportunity to develop a new teacher-recruitment workflow. Whilst the existing system works, it is pretty laborious, requiring far too many tedious stages that could either be automated or scrapped. I’ve started thinking how I might work this. Ideally, I’d like to be able to use my Mac to get it all sorted as Japanese Windows XP is pretty pants when it comes to automation (and more importantly it lacks the sex appeal of Leopard), but there may be some issues with data security, i.e. carrying a laptop to and from work each day. One way around that could be to keep everything on the shared server, and just use my mac as a portal. Well, we’ll see.

Tonight I had my first tandem learning session with my new (qualified) Japanese teacher, who also taught my classmate Phil and whose brother taught another classmate of mine (all ‘coincidentally’). Bloomin’ marvellous.

As mentioned in previous posts, whilst I do use Japanese at home with *Twinkle* at times, on the whole we’re using English so that she doesn’t forget what she already knows …the idea being that I use Japanese everywhere else. Which I do, but not very well. I’m too inclined to fall back on familiar grammar patterns, or simply Japonize English words. At work I tend to give up when I hit unknowns, like today when trying to explain the problem I was having with my database. Everyone speaks at least a little English, so it’s only too easy to do.

My new teacher, Nami, gives me the opportunity to take the time I need to recall the vocab I’ve already learnt (but is buried at the back of my head). She corrects my persistent errors, and explains terms that I hear often but don’t quite understand. She teaches me new vocab. Reminds me of kanji meanings. Prompts me to use polite Japanese.

Polite Japanese is possibly my weakest point. Yes, I can use it if I think about it, but I have a bad habit of slipping into casual speech. With Nami, I deliberately stick to polite / formal japanese in order to help develop that habit within me, as I’ll need it if I’m going to do business in Japan.

She also took the time to explain to me the ‘all new’ Japanese Language Proficiency test, being introduced in 2010. I won’t go into details here – my ex-classmate from Bristol has done a good job of outlining the changes a here if you’d like to know more – but basically, after 2009 it’s going to get a lot harder as previous exam papers will no longer be published.

She’ll not only be helping me learn the actual language, but will also be teaching me specific exam techniques that help one to pass JLPT.

I’m inspired by Nami (she also happens to be the first Japanese person I’ve met whose been as happy as I am to see Obama elected), and thus will be taking JLPT level 1 next July (as of next year the top two levels, 1 and 2 will be biannual). This excites me. She reminded me how much I love the Japanese language, and how much I love getting better at it. It’s vital I have a goal to work towards – this is perfect. It would be only too easy to just get by with what Japanese I’ve got. There’s nothing wrong with that as such, but it’s not what I want for me.

How stiff are your whites?

Anyway anyway, I’d best tidy up and put the hottlebots on. It’s getting chilly, and this house has an amazing ability to amplify the outside temperature, Need to be up early too for the second jog of the week 🙂

xxx