Transition And Restart

With final exams looming closer Yukio firmly pushed the scandal aside . Besides, apart from their English teacher most of the school staff had been surprisingly quiet about Urufu"s and Kuri"s rumoured night-time activities .

Now he sat in the inner room of the Stockholm Haven café which had been fully converted into their new club-room just in time for the cessation of all club activities in preparation of their exams .

Noriko sat together with Kuri going through math problems with the famous model turned s.l.u.t . By their side Sango-chan and Kyoko ran through the same problems but at a distinctly higher pace and without Noriko"s help .

"And this one?" Ryu asked from Yukio"s right .

"Same . Look, if you replace the numbers with letters it"s a lot easier to detect the pattern," Urufu said .

"Pattern?" That was Nori-kun, and Yukio noted how another two club-members congregated around them to follow Urufu"s explanation .

"Now this is just hysterically funny," Yukio thought . Urufu the flunky teaching math . "But he"s not really a flunky is he? Didn"t he have a college exam from engineering?"

"Yes, by token subst.i.tution you"ll be able to immediately identify equalities on both sides and remove them . Clears the real problem from excess data . See the pattern now?" Urufu said and crossed out almost a third of the information on the whiteboard .

Yukio watched him leave the white-board and walk over to the one where another group were struggling with English . Despite bombing that topic on his midterms virtually every club-member knew his English knowledge was superior to what any teacher at school could muster .

"And I think you have a better grasp of j.a.panese history than I do by now . What kind of study monster are you?"

Truth be told the only thing that kept Urufu from popping up on the wall was his written j.a.panese . By now Yukio recognised the difference when Urufu spoke about or listened to the material they had to study compared to when he was forced to rely on his reading skills .

"And you"re closing that gap as well . It"s scary how much better you are at reading and writing now . "

Kuri was the same . Even though she paled in comparison to Urufu, her j.a.panese had improved by huge strides since summer . That realisation made Yukio a bit uncomfortable . He hadn"t known how important the preferred language was for grading other subjects .

"Would I look like an idiot if I had to go to school abroad? Or even Noriko?" Yukio pushed the last thought away . Noriko failing exams was ludicrous . She was one of the best freshmen at Himekaizen after all, with results that probably placed Todai within reach of her aspirations .

In the background he heard Urufu"s strangely melodic explanation when he gave examples in j.a.panese for the English text they were a.n.a.lysing . Whenever he read a sentence aloud for the group to hear the correct p.r.o.nunciation Kuri interrupted him with a laugh and read it twice . As far as Yukio understood she delivered one version in some kind of British English and then in American English .

Urufu grimaced but never protested . Instead he told his group they should listen to Kuri because her spoken English far surpa.s.sed his .

"How good is she?" Yukio shouted when he tired of Urufu belittling himself .

Everyone by the whiteboard turned, and Yukio saw Kuri glance at Urufu rather than the one to blame for the interruption .

"Depends," Urufu said . "As for p.r.o.nunciation she bulldozes right over me . There"s no comparison . "

"Depends?" Kuri said to test the waters .

"Well, I"d guess your vocabulary is between half to two thirds of mine . What"s your take?"

"Spoken, close to ten thousand words," Kuri suggested and grinned .

"d.a.m.n! You"re just as good as I suspected . "

"And you? Native level is around fifteen thousand . "

"Native college level, yeah . I"m above that average . "

Kuri"s eyebrows shot up . "What kind of vocabulary do you have?"

"The tests couldn"t measure above sixteen thousand, so I don"t really know . "

Kuri palmed her face . "He killed the test . Why am I not surprised?"

"What tests?" Sango-chan asked .

Both Kuri and Yukio shot Urufu warning glares .

"There were some… ah . . . " Then Urufu must have caught up with the looks he got from the friends who knew about his first life . "Ah, there are proficiency tests, and I took a few before moving here," he finished .

"You took a few before moving here . Well that"s one way of expressing it . "

"You took a few tests at college level?"

"You"re not out of the woods yet . Think, think!"

It was painfully visible how Urufu tried to come up with a plausible explanation, but in the end he lit up in a bright grin . "I like programming, and most of the literature is in English, so I needed to learn it to read the books . "

That had to suffice, and from what Urufu had said earlier it partially explained his knowledge of math .

"But you failed your midterms," came a less than helpful comment from Nori-kun .

Urufu"s face clouded over . "I didn"t in Sweden," he said in a subdued voice .

"Huh?" That was Nori-kun again .

"Guys," Kuri said . "Here in j.a.pan we"re graded on how well we can express our English knowledge in j.a.panese, but neither Ulf nor I are j.a.panese . When we translate we usually translate from English to Swedish in our heads . "

"And that"s a lie," Yukio thought . "You both told me you don"t translate at all any longer . " Then it struck him why Urufu had lived through such problems with his j.a.panese, and a moment later Yukio understood how Urufu"s spoken j.a.panese had developed so insanely fast the last months . "You"ve stopped translating j.a.panese as well!"

With that line of thought something clicked inside his head . Suddenly Urufu"s explanation of learning models made sense . "Learn the rules, break the rules, write the rules" Urufu used to say when he tried to describe what he called a.n.a.lytic-synthetic learning or reverse triple loop learning .