The trouble with computers

Today was the first day of class, and I found out that I wasn't placed in the very-very-very beginner's class, but it is still pretty basic.  All of the material covered today is stuff I learned long ago.

I talked to the teacher, and it turned out that she was the one who graded my placement test.  I was good on vocabulary, and good at grammar, but my writing really was awful.  I misspelled things all over the place and my penmanship sucked.  None of this was really news to me, I just really never thought about it very much in the grand scheme of things.  The problem is that 99% of what I've written during my studies has been on the computer...and the Japanese input method on the Mac is very forgiving of mistakes.  And of course, it doesn't help penmanship at all.  So I never really developed those skills.  Also, my speaking is pretty good, but I often have to ask for something to be repeated 2 or 3 times before I understand it.

I considered asking for a transfer to a more advanced class.  But then I thought, better to spend the time here improving the skills I need work on, rather than learning more vocabulary and more grammar.  After all, it seems that I'm pretty good at learning those already.  To address the listening problem I'm going to ask for some extra conversation tutoring.

It's a VERY diverse class.  Besides me, there are students from Korea (3), Taiwan, Mongolia, Finland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, India, and Sri Lanka. One amusing thing we did today was go around and have each student count from 1 to 10 in Japanese, while showing how to show the numbers on their hands in their own country's manner.  It turns out that Americans and Japanese do it the same way, and no one else does it the same.  I thought the Chinese way was pretty interesting...they do 1, 2, 3 by extending fingers horizontally to look like the numbers（一　二　三　the same as in Japanese) and they to 10 by crossing index fingers to make a plus（十）.