my wife now gets to be my official "ledsagare" (person who leads a blind person around in order to get them to places in town and stuff) for 15 hours a week and she'll get paid a bit for it, and it means her bus tickets will be free when she's with me so our finances will be a bit better from here on out... the current problem is just that no one's recieved the "intyg" (doctor's.... note??) saying exactly how i see, so they can't officially give us acceptance yet. the intyg was supposed to come weeks ago and i also need to give it to my school (definitely before i go to japan!!) so they can go a bit easy on me in grading, and so when i'm in japan i can get help from the japanese school and stuff... i might also need it as proof i see badly for the JLPT or TISUS (japanese/swedish language proficiency tests) although no one's said anything about it so far. in general it's a really useful paper.

it's just frustrating because the american system works completely differently, i've never had to have "official proof" of my eyesight before (except for for one specific university teacher one time, who was breaking school rules anyway) because it's obvious just from looking at me or watching me try to read a book that i see badly. and it's so stupid that i'm only finding out i need to be registered here and there and this and that NOW, at age 25. i went my whole life not knowing i qualified for special blind help until last year, bascially. and finding out was only an accident because i went to the unemployment office.

otherwise i found out that there's only 2 people in class (out of 13-15) who haven't even been to japan: me and 1 other guy.
— 4-5 (i think one quit class?) people are living in japan right now and have been there for at least a year. 1 of those has a japanese wife and has been there for 7-9 years; 1 has japanese parents and a japanese-fluent (foreign) boyfriend.
— 2 people have japanese parents in general; 1 of those lived in japan when they were a kid and still visits often
— 1-2 people were exchange students at some point
— Basically everyone else has stayed there for several months at a time on vacation and/or have visited multiple times.

I'm not "better" than anyone who's actually been living in Japan, except I actually am better than a couple of them in grammar / vocabulary (I've noticed just recently). And as usual, maybe they can "say" something better than me but they have no clue why they're saying it, they don't get how the grammar works and they've just memorized set phrases / "this is what you say". That kind of thing is like... well... I'm not saying you can't learn Japanese that way but you'll probably end up sounding like you've just swallowed a phrasebook and are spitting out sentences you've copied from somewhere. Everything you say ends up sounding kind of fake or even pretentious because you're thinking "this is how they say it" instead of "this is what I mean/want to say". I meet a LOT of people who speak Swedish / English / Japanese this way and it gives off a really strange, not good feeling.

But (of course), all those guys living in Japan are light-years ahead of me in speaking and they know a ton of random stuff I don't. I think I can catch up super fast though once I actually get to Japan.