Nomikai Times
Now I’m getting a bit more settled in at work and getting stuck into coding. It’s been a long time since I had a job, it will take a little bit to get used to full-time work again; but it’s been fun so far. Tomorrow night work is having a 飲み会(nomikai)!
A 飲み会 is usually held when employees leave or join the company. We are all going to a nearby restaurant for dinner and, I presume, some drinks. It should be fun, and there will be lots of opportunity to practice speaking in Japanese.
Most of the employees in the company are native Japanese, maybe 30% are not. There are a few English people and some from other various countries too. The general chatter around the office is pretty much exclusively in Japanese. Every morning we have a 5 minute stand-up meeting with our team to just say what we have been doing, and plan on doing, and ask any questions — and that’s all in Japanese. I’ve managed to somehow understand what has been going on, to my suprise.
I’m not sure if the technical nature of the discussions make it easier or harder, since alot of words are foreign, but the Japanese words used are frequently words not oft used in regular conversation. Despite that, the variations of how people speak makes it easy to understand some people, and extremely difficult to understand some others. It’s frustrating when you successfully parse what you are hearing, and break down the sentence structure and every word used, but lack the vocabulary to understand what was said.
Hopefully all this practice will allow me to improve my Japanese skill quickly. It was suprising to see how well all of the foreigners can speak Japanese. I’m curious to learn how much they have studied, or if they have just acquired alot through day-to-day use in a workplace.
It’s been a bit hard to get used to such a shift in working hours. I start at 9:30am, lunch at 12:30pm, and then work 2pm to 7pm. It’s a long day but the break in the middle is nice, enough time to even come home for lunch, since it’s only a few kilometres by bicycle. I don’t think it’ll be quite so nice to ride that far in the middle of summer.
The afternoons are fairly flexible in terms of schedule, which is nice. A couple of times I’ve went out for a coffee break with a few people, it’s good to get to know some of the people there, and having a break makes the last few hours a bit more productive I think.
飲み会あったら今寝る時だ.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:56 am
its been ages since you wrote anything in here, I check it all the time, come on mate , start writing LOL