Some good friends have been asking me to write a post about my academic program in Kyudai, as well as the life at the university.

The reason why I had not done so until now is simply to avoid boring my readers with petty stories of my everyday student life, since I really do not consider it to be very exciting and I prefer to write about temples, parties and curiosities, which could be of more general interest.

However, since some good friends have conveyed a sincere desire to know a bit more about my academic life, right here and now I inaugurate a new section in my blog dedicated to my dear university: “Kyushu Daigaku” a.k.a. “Kyudai” 日本語では 九州大学です。

Kyudai is one of the oldest and better known universities in Japan, it was founded by emperor Meiji during the restoration era in 1903 and actually hosts around 20,000 students (undergraduate and postgraduate).

Everyday I have different lectures about International and Business law subjects and occasionally I take intensive Japanese law courses during the weekends that start at 9:00 am and finish at 6:00 pm.

Nevertheless, the hardest subject for me has been Japanese language. We are required to attend Japanese classes everyday from 8:40 am to 10:20 am, and more than ever before i realize that it is a very complicated language.

Problem is that Kyudai has many foreign students who ONLY study Japanese, meaning they have all day to do homework, memorize words and study for the next day. As a result, classes cover a lot of material and usually include heavy loads of work which are very hard to carry on when you have a master thesis to write and many other subjects to read.

Even when I know I will very probably flunk Japanese course, I am still trying to learn as much as I can during the classes, since it is the only way to gain some authonomy in Japan and being able to do stuff by yourself without feeling lost in translation.

So far, my best friend in Japanese classes is a machine that I call “Euclid”. He is a wordtank dictionary that can translate words from Japanese to English, viceversa, and can also identify kanjis (Japanese characters) by stroke number, radical, sound or even writing since it includes a touch-screen pen. Also it can teach you how to write any kanji by means of a special program called “Kanji Master”, so far I have learned 120 kanjis from Euclid. This is my friend and the end of this first Kyudai post:

 

PS. I bought Euclid because I remember Carrie has this same machine, thx for the tip Bee.