School Diary Part 1

So the first 1 1/2 hours are done. 21 left with lots of fun and learned stuff. And I have my frist entry for my school diary series.

I was really excited what kind of people will attend the school as well and how the classes will be.

I will say something about both later on. Just be patient.

First I have to thank Buku, because he decided to attend class together with me. Vist his Blog !!1! It is in german, tough. This was really beneficial for me. I wasn’t in a room full of strangers alone and I had someone who knew the area a bit.

Including me, we are only 17 students and we got students of each generation. An elderly couple, two men in their 30s and everybody else is between 16 and 25 years old. Well, I just guessed so. We got a wee bit more ladies than men.

So what did we learn today?

Since not everybody knew hiragana and katakana before hand we started off with some basics. We learn that there are 3 writing systems in the japanese lessons and for what purpose each one is used and we started with learning our first hiragana symbols. We learned the ones who are important for the first lesson in the textbook.

sa, n, ko, chi, ra u etc etc. our teacher introduced us to 27 hiragana symbols. It started a bit slowly because Kana knowledge wasn’t a requirement for this class. But since I knew all of them it was really boring.

But there was something I learned. The term for the strokes to form a ka into a ga is “tenten”. Funny and interesting.

What else? If a m/p/b-symbols follows a n-symbol the n-symbol is pronounced as m. I didn’t knew that either.

Since this is the first lessons everybody was really shy about pronouncing the symbols. So we had to take turns and everybody has to pronounce one row.

At the end we learned some basic phrases which every japanese student learns at the beginning. Ohayou gozaimasu, konnichi wa, konban wa, sayounara and oyasumi nasai.

The next lesson will probably be the exact same and we learn to write the remaining hiragana symbols.

Mata ne

Ryu