Nov. 6th

Melissa: Yep, alot of people at Shimane ride their bikes to class. A lot of the bikes look the same, so in order to find mine more quickly, I attached a cute bunny keychain to the handlebars :). Things have been going good so far. The weather warmed up a little thankfully. I seem to have caught a small cold, but its not too bad. I even went to the store and bought some of those facemasks that Japanese people always wear when they get sick. I haven't used it yet. So far I've just sucked on cough drops so I don't cough and let people know I have a cold :P. I started another Japanese class yesterday so now I have two Japanese classes. I still struggle to carry on conversations in Japanese, but I can make basic small talk now. In class the teachers mostly speak Japanese, which is great practice, but it can also be very frustrating at times. Sometimes the teachers ask us to do something and we don't understand the question. Or sometimes we have a question but don't know how to phrase it (By we I mean every other student in the class who, like me, speaks little Japanese :P). The teacher does speak a little english though. In fact, everyone speaks a little english. Not enough to form real sentences, but they all know a lot of vocabulary. Enough so that if the teacher says a word in Japanese and no one knows it, she'll say it in English and then most everyone then knows what she's talking about. So in a way, english is used as a tool in the classroom, which is nice for me. But although everyone's english vocab is pretty extensive, their english grammar, and sometimes their pronunciation, isn't very good, so I can't really carry on a conversation with them. Its interesting to see though how english is becoming a universal language, and how its being used as a tool of communication between other cultures that don't even speak it natively. It'll be interesting to see what happens to english in the next 50 years and how widespread it will be.