Back to school… it was hot early this morning, and so I had to sweat it out at my desk for an hour or two until they turned on the air conditioning. Since I had no classes today I did lots of vocabulary memorization, and I did some data entry of grammar to be memorized. Grammar is a lot more time consuming to memorize, but it’s immediately useful. I’m hoping this will help me smooth out my spoken Japanese a little.
All of this studying is in preparation for a standardized test that I will take in December. The level that I will take is probably too advanced for me, I seem firmly in the middle – above the level I passed last year, but not quite at the next level. Hopefully a summer of intense study and a little more conversation will get me on the right path.
After school we had a CPR training course, and it is pretty tough to do CPR with Japanese instructions. I did OK by watching the instructors carefully, looking at the pictures in the pamphlet, and recalling what I learned in high school. The CPR dummies have come a long way – they’ve got digital readouts to tell you if you are pressing in the right place, how much air is getting in, they even measure the speed at which you work. We even got to play with defibrillators. They were simple to use, they talked to you and told you what to do. Of course I couldn’t understand the spoken instructions so well, but we got it figured out.
Tonight I cooked a simple rice bowl with mushrooms and green peppers that I grew out on my patio. I used lots of garlic and some MSG that I found. That stuff tastes great!
I’m off to bed soon – I’ve got the bedroom cooling down right now, and soon I’ll get in there, do some reading, and then hit the sack. Tomorrow is an easy day – just a closing ceremony and some speeches. I’m sure they’ll squeeze in a staff meeting or two, so I’ll probably get stuck working the whole day.
