Interpreting School (1): First Day

I'm not going to write lots of details so I don't get googled, but I started interpreting school yesterday, yea!  The school is a little over an hour from my house and meets every Saturday for four hours.  There was so much to do the time flew by!

Our first day went like this:

- housekeeping (paperwork, how to use the Language Lab, etc.)
- teacher self introduction - we translated this in pairs consecutively
- basic interpretation theory
- student self introductions in our second language, with questions from the class

- lunch!

- shadowing both in Japanese and in English
- reading the shadowing text aloud in Japanese and English
- a retention exercise

One day, half a binder of study material.  Oi.

How was it, you ask?  It was... okay!  I knew this wasn't an ideal situation going in - what's easy for a Japanese speaker will be hard for me and vice versa.  So when the teacher decides to start off "easy" and work her way up I get thrown in the deep end and slowly make it to the shallows.  We get material to prepare for the next class ahead of time so I'm hoping today was the worst.  It helps that my classmates (every last one female, by the way) are very nice and welcoming.

There's a lot of homework of both the "thou must" and "thou ought" variety.  Next week there's an oral vocab test where we'll get tested on 30 words from a list of 60.  On top of that we got copies from a "dictionary of current terms" as learning more words now will make upper level classes that much easier.  Other weeks we'll have a newspaper reading test on English articles about a particular subject but I'm not so worried about that because hey, English!  There's also 30 words to study in preparation for next week's lesson.

That's the required stuff.  In addition I'll be shadowing and reading aloud using the material from today's classes, doing retention exercises using an English speech, and straightening out numbers in my head (not easy!).  It's a lot of work but it'll be worth it.

The plan for today is to get my flashcards set up and start pounding away at them.  I'm a student again - I'm going to enjoy this!