Done!

Yesterday was my last day of work. I was imparting a lot of information to the new teacher, and didn't actually have all that many classes myself, so it felt a bit atypical. I gave Tim Tams to every student for the last week.

A couple of former students - a mother and daughter - took me out to dinner after school, which was nice. They invited me to do a lot of things with them, and they gave me - I can't quite believe this - a real pearl necklace. !!! A real pearl necklace!! These are the same people who gave me souvenirs to take back to my family in Australia, and who invited me to see the daughter playing in an orchestra.

But a lot of students have been wonderfully generous, and I've been flooded with presents. Mostly, the students I've taught a long time, or whom I've developed a good relationship with, were the ones to give me things. So I am touched.

Here in my hotel room is a vase with a huge bouquet of pink and dusky purple roses; it must have cost over $50. The student who gave it to me is a guy I've taught for quite a while; he was fairly reserved and shy for a long time and only in the last few months have we begun to develop a good rapport. ^_^ One 6-year-old child made me a bracelet and drew a picture of my class. I got a picture from one of my 2-year-olds, too.

One lady, who previously gave me some of her homemade yuzu-shu and cherry-shu (liqueur), gave me a big bottle of homemade umeshu. Umeshu is plum liqueur - my favourite drink - and she said this bottle had been maturing for six years, so it would have a really good taste.

I'm having a farewell party on Saturday, and really looking forward to that. I love a good party. About 60 people are coming. ^_^

***

Right now I'm still staying in a hotel, but tomorrow I will move into my guesthouse. It's only a few blocks from here, so I'll spend a couple of hours tomorrow ferrying my stuff back and forth from my school and hotel to my guesthouse.

Today I joined Kumon. The approach is to basically do lots of worksheets and lots of reading and writing in Japanese. I am not very fast at them, though they are fairly simple for me in terms of grammar. For example, my communicative and listening ability is quite a lot higher than my reading, which is slow (and I can't read many kanji confidently). As for my Japanese writing, well...

The thing is, when I have studied Japanese previously, I have focused mostly on learning new grammar and communicating with it. Therefore, I've always taken notes in romaji (eg, writing Japanese words using English letters). I've done some textbook work in which I have written a fair bit of hiragana; therefore my hiragana is not too slow. But writing kanji and katakana is not very fast for me.

Also, knowing how to say something in Japanese doesn't mean I can always write it totally accurately. For example, 'hello' is 'konnichiwa'. But in Japanese characters, it's written こんにちは (konnichiha), as the 'ha' character is often written as 'wa' in romaji. Another example is that I know to pronounce 'coffee' as 'kohi', but when I actually write it in Japanese, I have to pause - are both sounds 'long' (eg コーヒー) or only one sound long (eg コーヒ or コヒー). I can often guess or remember it right, but when I've never or rarely written it before, I do need to think about it, or check somewhere. Hence, I am slow.

So I think this Kumon approach is just what I need - very concentrated practice reading and writing. I'm also going to have a few private lessons with my original Japanese teacher.