Lecturers

We started lectures again two weeks ago. Due to bad scheduling, almost everything I wanted to do clashed with something else I wanted to do, so I ended up with very little choice. Timetable wise, I have Wednesdays and Fridays free, with four lectures in a row on Thursdays and three spread between Mondays and Tuesdays. It's probably the worst timetable I've ever had. Yes, I have a lot of free time, which might sound fantastic, but in a tiny little country town like this, there's nothing else to do but go to lectures.

Apart from that, the lectures are much the same as last term: generally boring, with a few rays of sunshine here and there, and very very easy to pass. One of my classes requires 60 points to pass, and gives 60 points if you turn up to every lecture. As we've found, Japanese universities don't put too much emphasis on actually studying. It's bad for me; I've become very lazy since being here and going back to England is going to be a shock.

Grumbling aside, what I was going to write about was a trend we've noticed among Japanese lecturers. Basically, they ramble. I don't mean they go walking over moors looking at flowers, I mean they spend 90 minutes of a lecture talking about everything except the actual subject.

My level 4 Japanese language teacher is a fairly good example (he once spent twenty minutes at the beginning of a lesson teaching us about palm reading), but the worst I've experienced is my new Classical Japanese teacher. In the first lecture we had with him, we did around ten minutes of actual work, and spent the rest of the 80 minutes listening to him air his views on a range of topics. His name, as we learned, can be read both Tawata and Tawada, but is indeed definitely Tawata, and any poor soul who gets that wrong must beware the consequences. Korean characters, as well as Japanese ones, are also derived from Chinese kanji. The phrase "I think, therefore I am" is said in old-fashioned language in Japanese, English and French.

The second lesson brought us discussion on the stupidity of English plurals, particles in Russian, and Japanese puns. If the rest of the term is the same, I will come away with absolutely no knowledge of Classical Japanese, but a large range of fascinating and entirely random facts, mainly based on Languages of the World.

Well, it should be fun, at any rate.