日本語のクラスは楽しそうだ！

Class has taken a turn for the better. I say this now in case it eventually eats me alive and I start to loath the teaching methods employed here, but considering I am on a high of good grades right now plus actually debating grammatical semantics with the professors (in a good way no less!) I am definitely enjoying this term worlds better.

Probably because, in all honesty, Kurokawa is a superior professor. That, and the class is half the size it was in Japanese 2. So, no sections, no having 5 different professors. We primarily have Kurokawa for grammar, Hiraki for video/listening comprehension, and Waki all day Friday's for reading comprehension and composition.

But the past few days have been especially fun to note. We are learning how to pretty much reiterate to others what we have heard from one source or another, so each day at the beginning of class, Kurokawa will ask us to tell her some news. The past topics have been:

The Iraqi Shoe-Throwing-at-Bush Incident
Barack Obama being named Time's Person of the Year
How the economic recession has affected F1 racing

The last one, more than anything else, was unexpected. It appears Professor Waki is a fan of rally racing and I actually found out, through her, that Honda and Subaru have pulled out from Rally Racing and currently only Toyota and Mitsubishi remain, though it seems the teams are suffering budget cuts.

Wait, what? Subaru has disbanded it's Rally team?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I mean, yes, I'm a Mitsubishi girl, but damn. Subaru is my second favorite, and the Impreza is a wonderful piece of machinery (again, me and Professor Waki were bantering back and forth about the Impreza and the Lancer Evolutions). To hear that the economic woes are stopping sweet, sweet rally racing makes me sad. Especially since the competition between Subaru and Mitsubishi was pretty intense.

Sad panda.

On top of all this, I feel much more confident in the class, especially when we had to peer-correct each others speech scripts and I had one of the highest scores in the class. Couple that with exceptional grades on my quizzes and first test and I'll say that this term is going to be much better than initially expected. I am having an easier time comprehending everything, so good vibes.

While I'm on this high of good vibes, I also think that when I return home, I might volunteer to tutor the first year Japanese students back at GVSU or even seek an internship with Professor Robinson while I study for the GRE to apply for Stanford, Irvine or Berkeley. It seems to me like California is the place to go, and I have good friends out there to boot.

うんん！ファイト！頑張ろう！