23 June
This was the first week I officially got to Japan and started the program. The surprise of arriving in a new country still hasn’t disappeared, and I discovered that I really like the city Kyoto.
In class, we are covering the grammar (primarily conjugations) at a very fast pace. Classical Japanese is different from modern Japanese in which it has more inflected forms for verbs, adjectives, and auxiliary verbs. There are six of them: Mizenkei, Renyoukei, Syushikei, Rentaikei, Izenkei, and Meireikei. The rigorous structure of every sentence has a precise and concise mathematical beauty, and I really like this pattern. It is hard to believe that we covered 11 chapters of the textbook in 5 days, which is usually taught as content for a whole semester. Besides, we also learned the historical orthography: as a relatively fluent speaker of modern Japanese, it is kind of amusing and a slight struggle to read てふてふ as “ChouChou”.
I will talk about life in Kyoto more detailedly in next post.