Accidental Cleaning

I seem to get most of my housework done when procrastinating for big tests or when I have a lot of homework to do. Today, I got home and decided that I really needed to clean the bathroom, I guess. It was in need of a scrubbing, but I'm not certain what made me just start cleaning it all of a sudden. Worrisome.

Tomorrow, I have a kanji test for my kanji class, as opposed to the まとめ test, which I was complaining about before. Naturally, I'm studying for it today. Why study beforehand when you can cram? Graaaah.

I'll be omitting readings for this post because I'm tired and should be studying.

I have a kanji test tomorrow that will only be 20 questions, but for which I need to learn 100 different characters composing 104 different words. The small difference between those numbers is a coincidence as far as I know, as the 104 words use 189 kanji between them and about 220 送り仮名 between them. On the bright side, I already know or am familiar with quite a few of them. If I were doing that pace just with characters I didn't know, I'dve learned half the kanji in the language this semester. While my kanji skills have certainly improved, I'm much closer to being able read about a quarter of the 常用 characters, at best.

Test Weirdness

So my test today with the pile of kanji and sentence patterns and whatnot was today. They totally didn't test us on what I thought they were going to, and in fact tested us for being able write a bunch of characters that we thought were reading-only characters.
When I turned in my test I confirmed this with the teacher, who agreed that it was strange. She decided that they wouldn't count, but if you were able to write them anyway, you get a bonus point per word. So 0-4 points, depending on how much you over-studied. At most, that's nearly an eight-point difference, so I'm glad I mentioned it.

They tested us on a couple of random things that I completely forgot they had explained - pure luck I remembered them anyway, I guess.

The sentence pattern ones weren't so bad, though I'm not sure if my "Sometimes you get tasty kuriimu-pan, sometimes you get not so tasty kuriimu-pan" sentence will do well.
In the end, I knew all the kanji we were actually supposed to know, and all the ones that came out on the test, and I can only think of one other place that I messed up, so if it were anything else, I'd think a low A would be very possible. It's Japanese, though, so I expect a high C at best.

Statistically Kanji-ing...

For the test one Wednesday, we have to know 172 new words comprised of 271 different characters and a total of 344. Here are the top four kanji by frequency:

Character | Count | Chinese readings | Japanese readings | English meanings
的　7　テキ　まと　bull's eye, mark, target, object, adjective ending
迷　5　メイ　まよ(う)　astray, be perplexed, in doubt, lost, err, illusion
地　5　チ／ジ　ground, earth
動　4　ドウ　うご(く)／うご(かす)　move, motion, change, confusion, shift, shake

漢字、大嫌い！

I was watching xxxHolic and I ran across this clip. It should help to give you some idea of why I hate kanji so, so much.

I apologize for the tiny subtitles, but I'm too lazy to try and fix them. Stupid MKV format is a pain to work with.

2000 Kanji, but Only Two Here

As an example of the importance of kanji:
I was talking to one of my friends today and asked where she lived. She wrote back in hiragana and roman letters "ibaraki".
Searching for this on Google Maps gave me a town somewhere East of Tokyo. Given that my friend said her hometown is about an hour away, I figured that probably wasn't it. I changed the search a little, but all I could find was an Ibaraki near Tokyo.

I asked her about it, so she sent me the kanji, and Google Maps found it exactly, and was ready with directions by the time I realized I'd asked for them.
いばらき - ibaraki
茨城 - ibaraki
茨木 - ibaraki