Watashino Nihongo no Kurasu

Being an illogical person that I am, a contrast to the logical me at work, I have finally decided early this year that I am gonna join the Japanese Lesson Summer Intensive Course for the first time in my 4 years here. The sole reason is at that time I was deciding that this is gonna be my last year in Japan. I was ready to pack up and go back to Oz just to be near my family. So, since I'm leaving, I figured that I should try and learn a bit of Japanese. Of course, this doesn't make sense at all, but that's what girls do sometimes :)

The class runs for about 2 1/2 weeks from 28th July till 12th Aug. The title 'Intensive' no doubt fits the reality.. every day from Monday to Saturday 9am till 12pm we gotta be in the class. If we attend 80% of the classes, we will be awarded a certificate.

For that brief period of time, I felt like I was in a sort of training camp. Every morning rushing off to school under the heat of unmerciful Japanese summer, pushing the brain to work intensely for 3 hours(!) and then trying to get a quick bite before rushing off to work, again pushing the same brain to run. After that, I still have homeworks to do (not that I do all of them of course, but the thought of having homeworks to do is a burden in itself) and then at the same time my social life was in full gear too with 3 weddings happening in a row and in one of them I was the bridesmaid and organizer for the after-church-service-party. Plus there were things happening at the bible study group that I was helping. How I managed to get through all these intact still remains a mystery till today.

Anyway, one of the few joys I have from this intense time of study was that I got to be in a nice class with many funny people around. There were so many laughters in the classroom and that really helped me going through the classes. Also I like to see my class as a United Nations class, considering that we have around 20+ people from differing countries:
Australia (guess who)
Cambodia
China
Egypt
Germany
India
Indonesia
Italy
Laos
South Africa
Taiwan
USA
Vietnam

It is such a rare and precious opportunity to have a contact and study together with so many people from different nations and backgrounds. I really treasure this.

And finally Tuesday 12th Aug arrived.. the long awaited day.. I have managed to skip only 2 classes, one for my friend's wedding and another one for being nice to myself and granting myself a one day break. In theory, that should qualify me to get a certificate. But when they distributed the paper with a list of names who will get the cert, I couldn't find mine on it. I scanned and scanned, and literally read every name but my name is still not there. This can't be happening.. it was like a nightmare coming true.. after all the efforts I put in and the hard times I went through, I gotta have at least the cert to reward myself because I did it! Not that I wanna show the cert around.. that would be a totally useless thing to do since people know how little Japanese I could speak and thus I don't need the cert to tell them that I should know, but I don't.

So there I sat in the mid of the closing ceremony (yes, they have ceremony for that!) trying to find an elegant way to ask my teacher afterwards about my missing name without embarassing myself too much (knowing that I'm not quite a good student actually :p). So I started with a question.. if I don't do all (most?) of the homeworks, does that disqualify me from getting a cert. The answer is no. Without further thinking (somehow I could see the light at the end of the tunnel), I confidently proclaimed that there must have been some mistake because my name is not on the list. And then comes joker question.. have you been coming late? My goodness! I should have seen that coming! Well, apparently.. this is a fact that wasn't mentioned anywhere, if I come in late twice, it would be considered as one time absence. I felt that it's unfair that such important fact is never mentioned before, but I don't wanna pursue this issue too much. I don't think I deserve that cert anyway since I haven't been doing the homeworks much and been coming late quite a lot. The hardest part is the disappointment I felt for not getting something that I've been expecting so surely to get and also the thought of having to wait for another year before I would be able to give myself a chance again. One year!! Oh well, I guess now I have a good reason to stay back in the country where God has brought me in from the beginning.