That end-of-term feeling

As we enter the penultimate week of Autumn term at language school, that can only mean one thing: unit test! Two days worth of examination on everything we've done since the 25th of September... So I thought I'd take this opportunity to avoid revision by explaining a bit more about what I'm actually doing out here!

Our Japanese classes are from 9-12.30, Monday to Friday. The five of us from the group who began term as beginners (a logical enough place...) have been lucky enough to be in a class together. Next term we're going to be mixed in with everyone else - apparently the normal class size is about ten or fifteen, with a good international mixture and a particularly high number of Koreans and Taiwanese.

The teaching is full-immersion, so the lessons are entirely in Japanese. The school proudly states that its "basic teaching method and principles remain as up-to-date today as they were innovative in the 1940s", whatever that might mean... We have three teachers on rotation, with all three teaching us for one lesson per day, and one teacher getting the pleasure of our company twice.

The method (I feel almost like that should be 'Method') is also pretty test-heavy - we've got homework twice or three times a week, five or six new kanji to learn every day, and a test every week on the past couple of chapters. The only problem with this is that it tends to favour good old short-term-memory-cramming, so it'll be interesting to see how much has actually stuck.

Although the teaching method can be frustrating at times, particularly because it's very difficult to get grammar explained during lessons if you don't understand it, it does seem to be working - I feel strangely like I know instinctively what form or particle to use in a lot of cases, so something's going right!

Anyway, I'd better get back to revision...