Vacation... at last!

After three months of grinding our brains on kanji, grammar, listening and speaking exercises, we finished our first term at the Yoshida School for Japanese Language with a big bang: exams.

There was fairly little time to prepare for the test since it followed immediately after the regular classes were done, so there was quite some pressure these last weeks to combine the usual workload with reviewing past chapters on what we learned before. When the test was over we we're both a little anxious about how we'd done. Laurens finished his grammar test only just in time and Daphne (who is a level higher) had to apply all sorts of new difficult forms of (extremely) polite speech. In the end we both did fine though: Daphne ended up number 2 in her class (from 18 students) and Laurens finished first (only seven students :P). That means that we both go to a next level! Hopefully we'll do just as fine there.

Part of the school tradition is a little trip to relax after the exams. This time we went bowling. We gathered at Takadanobaba (try saying that three times fast with cookie crumble in your mouth :P) and followed our teachers to the bowling alley. It was the biggest free-time center we've ever seen! There was an ice-skating hall, a mini-golf course and an enormous bowling alley. 'The perfect place to show-off my bowling skills',or so Laurens thought. Daphne needed a little warm-up time since her first throws ended up in the gutter but then... strike after strike! In the meanwhile it turned out Laurens didn't have any bowling skills at all...
When the time was up we gathered in conference room where our teachers had a little surprise in store: prizes for the winners! Daphne, to her own surprise, ended up number 3 amongst the female students and won a fashionable Yoshida Language School T-shirt (see picture below). Laurens finished nearly last of ALL the students and won a consolation hug from Daphne.

We had great time this trimester and would like to thank our teachers and friends from the Yoshida for the things we learned and the fun we had. These next three weeks we have a spring-break and after that it's back to school again. In the mean time we will go sight-seeing in Tokyo, train at the dojo, review some kanji, and go on a trip to Kusatsu: a famous hot spring town. So please look forward to our next blog-update!

Daphne's price

The Official Yoshida T-shirt!

Our bowling scores