well i finally got my student computer account at the school, meaning i can use the wireless at school and THEORETICALLY the wireless in my apartment building (as all unis in japan have the same internet system and my apartment is a student apartment from another university) but the apartment wireless is only accessible between certain hours so i might not end up using it much there anyway.

i'm going to sit in on a braille course and see if i can understand anything, and then i MIGHT sit in on some other course i didn't catch the name of that two of my exchange student upperclassmen are taking that apparently always wants the exchange students to sit in on. these aren't for credit, but if i can sit in on a bunch they should improve my japanese a lot. since coming to japan i basically haven't studied or been reading stuff aside from like, street signs and shop signs. i've just been going out and seeing the town every day and trying trying to talk to people (people don't normally specifically correct you or specifically give you the correct way to say something if you're wrong, as long as they can understand you. so it means you're not normally learning much even if you talk a lot).

in all the classes we're learning JLPT N1 level stuff (kanji, grammar, vocabulary...) BUT the teachers are really lax about everything. apparently my upperclassmen are almost never turning in homework and aren't studying at all and they still passed last semester just fine. each class goes through what classes in my swedish school would have either gone through in 10-20 minutes, or would have assigned as homework. so for example, today we had listening class: we listened to a recording once, then i think once more, then listened again while filling out answers on an answer sheet, then we all went over the answers together, then we all read aloud from the transcript of the audio together as a group while copying after the teacher (no individual reading aloud). and that took an hour and a half, and the only "homework" so far is to mentally prepare how you're going to explain traditional houses/rooms from your country to the rest of the class next week.

there's a speech contest the teacher's trying to get us to do aaaand while the teacher didn't say it, an upperclassman said last time there was actually a monetary reward even just for PARTICIPATING (not just winning!) so i guess i can try that.

we went to a catholic church mass thing last weekend with my one (esperanto) japanese friend who lives in the area, afterwards they picked weeds on the church lawn and then there was "church coffee". it took a while but by the end of the coffee time everyone was chatting with us, and both me and my wife got contact info from some japanese people. some old guys knew a finnish teacher who they were going to ask if they knew anyone who needed a swedish teacher (so my wife could get a job teaching swedish), the one i talked to wanted me to teach his kid (and probably him) english and was actually a teacher at a high school; apparently he's also in the "international club" and his hobby is taking photos. he super loved my exchange blog haha.

it seems like the other exchange students
1. aren't going out (like to neighbourhood/town festivals and other random events)
2. don't really have real japanese friends (just, maybe, classmates)
3. definitely aren't studying
4. somehow have magically forgotten what classes at our swedish school were like, thus have forgotten ex. that we already have to write essays and research papers and things in those and are acting like that's impossible for us lowerclassmen

overall the impression i get is they get home from school, eat then sleep (i guess??) and then if there's a holiday they might go somewhere. i dunno, i think that's a pretty sad way to pass the year. one of them has a real superiority complex, or i'm not sure what to call it, but he really doesn't notice either his own faults or when other people aren't the same as him (ex. i've already started reading novels in my free time since last semester; these guys still are barely doing it now, but this guy acts like i must not know as many kanji as him and thus can't read the classroom name etc; but i can.)

i mean i know i am worse at them in various aspects, most especially speaking and handwriting, but it's pretty annoying. and the vocabulary i know is different from them (ex. they know a lot of "specific to living in japan vocabulary", ex. ID card, nationality, living place, and classroom vocabulary etc) but i'm not sure they're actually all that advanced in general terms because it's not like they use many words i don't know when they're SPEAKING....... well whatever.