How I made my school pay for my language holiday in Japan
Each year an award is presented to that year’s best graduating student at my high school. In my year, this award included funding for a language holiday of the student’s choosing.
Thus, I flew to Kyoto, Japan, in September after graduating from high school and spent a month there learning Japanese.
After some deliberation with the Japanese Language School (JaLS) Kyoto, I was assigned a room in a “share house”1 in a calm residential area of Northern Kyoto. It even had a roof deck with the view seen on the right here. :)
From there, I’d take the bus every morning into the downtown to participate in my Japanese lessons until noon.
I could then spend the rest of the day as I wished. Some days, I joined school-organised trips to noteworthy sites or events. The teachers were all incredibly kind and took us to temples and local ceremonies. Other days, I would go out by myself or with friends I made at the school and explore the city, ultimately applying my Japanese lessons to real interactions.
impressions
Famously, the Japanese writing system comprises three distinct character sets: the two syllabaries hiragana and katakana, collectively known as kana, and the Chinese logographic kanji system. It took me two weeks to learn the kana. Kanji eludes me to this day. However, with basic grammatical structure and some vocabulary, the lessons were enough to hold simple everyday interactions. So much so that after losing my keys in a bus one evening, I managed to track them down through the city and its public transit’s lost and found infrastructure, including multiple offices and phone calls—where employees only speak Japanese.
After a month spent in this way, I gave a farewell presentation to the student and teacher body and was finally handed a certificate of A1-level Japanese. Incredible.
Now, granted, this month of learning Japanese in my past has not instilled the lifelong ability to converse in Japanese in me. I am far from it. Nevertheless, the trip allowed me to confront new and unfamiliar territory in many ways: unknown people, customs, culture and language. It is an experience that I will not forget. Thus, I thank my school for having granted me this opportunity.
a facility in which multiple privately rented rooms share communal bathrooms and a kitchen within one house ↩︎