A Hop, Skip, and a Jump...

Hello all, this is Abby Hosch. You're probably wondering why my blog has changed, and if you're not then you're probably new. I loved my old blog site, but putting up pictures was such a tug-of-war that it kept me from posting a lot of the time, so I decided to give up and move back to blogspot - it's just easier this way. I'll be moving over all of my old posts over soon, and now that I'll be able to get a little more involved I plan on putting in a video or two. My plans are: a virtual tour of my room, of the Nagoya Gakuin Daigaku campus, Shirotori Garden, the Nagoya Congress Center (if I'm allowed to do that), and possibly Nagoya Castle.

For anyone reading this from Coe College, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm a Third-Year at the moment, majoring in Asian Studies with minors in English and Creative Writing. I have been in Japan since Fall semester of 2010 and will be here until July of 2011 [unless I find a reason to stay ;)]. I lived in Murray for the two years I've been at Coe and am a proud member of GeekFest. I took two years of Japanese at Coe before I came here, and I do not recommend trying to come to Japan unless you have at least that or you will probably not enjoy yourself very much. When I took the school sponsored placement test I put in to Level 1 Class 2, and most of the other Coe students were put in to Level 1 Class 1. Level 1 is the lowest language level, but it is not for beginners. All classes are intermediate level and above, so trust me, take two years first if you can. It's not that you won't be able to learn easily or to communicate, but the second year give you a much more structured platform to base the rest of your language learning off of. Plus you learn a lot of extremely useful vocabulary and the all important sentence structure - because Japanese does not resemble English in the slightest!

That being said, I absolutely love my school life and my social life here and I wouldn't give it up for the world. I originally planned to stay here for one semester, along with my good friend and roommate of two years, Gretchen Sager, but both of us knew by the third week of being here that one semester would just not do. We both applied to extend our stays, were accepted by both Coe and Nagoya, and incidentally both of us received JASSO Scholarships based on our class performances (thank God, because getting to and from Japan is very expensive). Once you're here, though, the food prices and transportation are very well priced, comparatively.

I took 13 credits worth of classes last semester here: 8 credits worth of Japanese grammar and speaking (required), 2 credits for Japanese Culture, 2 credits for Beginners Karate, and 1 credit for a conversation class. You are required, at the moment, to take at least 12 credits a semester, which really isn't that bad. I love my language courses, Culture was an extremely eye-opening class and I loved the professor, Karate was down-right epic, and the conversation class was okay - it all depends on the Japanese speaking partner you are assigned to, so it can be hit and miss.

If you have any questions at all, either about Japan, other countries, studying abroad (anywhere), Coe, or anything else, please don't hesitate to comment or to message me. I'm happy to help in any way that I can.

That being said, I'm going to move over my older posts now, so I'll write again soon!

-Abby