Presentation (Divtesting)

I was just awake enought to get this up last night, and I honestly don't know what I changed that made it work after two hours. I think Blogger might have just had pity on me.

I woke up on Tuesday at 6AM cooked a super-duper protein breakfast, and worked on my presentation and went over some last random notes for Japanese for Certified Tests (JCT), in which class I had a test. As expected, it took about 15, maybe 20, minutes. No clue how I did, but if you wanted a guess, I'd say 80%. Ish.

After that, I headed up to the school's Japanese Room. I kid you not, we have a room called the 和室 - "Japan (-style)" "room" and it's where the tea ceremony class takes place. I have no interest in tea ceremony itself, but the girls (of my little squad 'o gaijin anyway) were wearing kimono and this would probably be my last chance to spam pictures of them.

Once I was allowed in, I was sat between the head and sub-head - I don't know their official titles, but between Michiharu TANAKA and Mariko UCHIDA. Pictures. Tea. Sweets. Pictures.

Tanaka is the one at the right who looks like he needs to go to the bathroom. He was probably just about to change to a different sitting position than seiza (which should translate to "death to the foreigners", but doesn't, as far as I know). When I asked if it had defeated him, he replied "I think I must be an alien..."

So after ingesting about two handfuls of pure sugar, I had ten minutes in class and a further 30 minutes of sitting around while we talked in class, etc. IE, just enough time to come down from the sugar and be nice and shaky.

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Good points

1- Researched extensively and summed everything up neatly
2- Hard-to-understand words were clarified, so it was easy to understand
3- Clearly introduced topic at the beginning
4- Looked at the listeners while speaking and used clear pronunciation
5- Speed and loudness of speech was just right, so it was easy to listen to
6- You had fun with your topic, and that came through in the way you held on.

よかった点

・くわしく調べて、きちんとまとめて発表できた。
・わかりにくいことばは、もう一度違う表現で説明しなおしていて、わかりやすかった。
・はじめに何について話すかはっきり伝えていた。
・聞き手を見ながら、はっきりした発音で発表できた。
・スピードも大きさもちょうどよい声で、聞きやすかった。
・自分が内容を楽しみながら、そして、その楽しさをみんなに伝えようとがんばっていた。

Not-quite-there points

7- Sentence-to-sentence connecting words were almost nonexistant.
8- Because of that, there ended up being a lot of "because"
9- You used a lot of "you know?". Instead, it would be good if you used others, such as "... don't you think?", "... isn't that so?", "... or at least, that's what I think.", "... you may be able to look at it like this." There are a variety.
10- Sometimes, you stopped in the middle of sentences, and just kind of lined of words, which had kind of a weird feeling.
11- There were some words where your pronunciation was hard to understand. Especially long words with lots of kanji. I totally couldn't understand "converters"

もう少しの点

・文と文をつなぐ言葉（接続詞など）があまりなかった。
・そのため、「から」が多くなってしまっていた。
・「でしょ？」も多くなっていた。かわりに、他のいろいろな
言葉を使ってみるとよい。（と思いませんか、ではないでしょ
うか、だと私は思うんですがどうでしょうか、という見方もあ
るかもしれません等、いろいろあります。）
・時々、文が途中で終わってしまった。語だけが並んでいる感じで、少し変だった。
・少し発音がわかりにくい言葉があった。特に漢字の長いことば。
（「てんかんしゃ」は、私は全然意味がわかりませんでした。どういう意味のことばでしょうか？）

Thanks for taking so many pictures.
I bet you can make a good compilation with them. Have fun.

Well, be careful not to eat much cream bread!? LOL

写真をたくさん撮ってくださって、ありがとうございました。
いい文集ができることでしょうね。楽しみです。

では、クリームパンの食べすぎには気をつけて！？（笑）

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So that's what my teacher thought. I have a pack of notes of what the other students thought as well, but I haven't looked at it yet.

Kilk at left, being cheesy. Me at right... WTF? I don't know.

After the presentation, we hustled the class outside for a group portrait, which we took a couple of just to be sure, which was fortunate, as the first three of the four we took didn't turn out well once I checked them.

Then, I spent an hour and a half helping Uchida-sensei piece together a Word document that had quite possibly the worst formatting I've ever seen in a word document - maybe second worst, thinking about it. Someone I live with has done much worse things in Word, if I think about it, which I'd rather not...
Ahem.

Then, we went shopping for ingredients for the food we were preparing for the farewell party, which I need to be at in about half an hour. It's a potluck and I'm being lame and bringing fried rice, but... It's what I can cook that isn't gyouza.

Test of Doom

We had a test today in Basic Japanese that was pretty much a dastardly test all the way around.

First off, we had a three-page test. Not so bad there except that they printed it on double-size pages so they would have more room to mark errors. Kind of them, right?

Once that was finished, we were to write a 作文 sakubun ("composition") about a saying from our native language. We were allowed to write this beforehand and simply had to copy it onto the test, and we were further allowed to use our dictionaries and pretty much anything except the fellow students.

Here it is:

私の選んだことわざは「Rome wasn’t built in a day」ということわざである。　これから、その英語の言葉の意味を説明する。	The saying that I chose is "Rome wasn't built in a day". Now, I'll explain the meaning of those English words.
まず、「Rome」はローマ、または有名な古代の都市である。そのローマは雄大なところで、このことわざでは、都市じゃなくて、何かいいものか価値があるものを表す。次の「wasn’t」とは「じゃない」の過去受け身形で、「建つ」と意味する「built」とつながると意味は「建たれなかった」になっている。	First, "Rome" is "Rome", the famous ancient city. That Rome is a grand place, so in this saying it means not "city", but something good or something that has value. The next "wasn't" is the past passive form of "not" and when combined with the word that means "to build" "built"(1), the meaning becomes "wasn't built".
残っている言葉はべつべつでさほど意味がないのに、分けられるので、そうしようと思う。四つ目の「in」と言うのは「ある間うちに」のことである。次の不定冠詞の「a」を「日」のようの「day」と合わせると意味は「一日」になる。	The remaining words don't have that much meaning on their own, but we can break them up, so let's do so. The fourth word, "in", means "in a certain period"(2). The next word, the indefinite article "a", when connected to the word like "day", "day"(3), changes the meaning to "one day".
もし前の全部をつながって直訳したら、「ローマは一日の間に建たれなかった」になる。それでも、本当の意味は「価値があることが時々遅くできても大丈夫だ」あるいは「いいもの作るのは難しいよ」とだいぶに似ていると思う。	If you take all the previous pieces, connect them, and translate them literally, you'd get "Rome wasn't built in a day". In spite of that, I think the true meaning is similar to "It's okay if things that have value take a while to finish" or "The creation of good things is difficult".
日本語でこのことわざの意味を持っていることわざ、確かあると思っても、探してみたのに、等価のことわざをみつけることできなかった。多分、「頑張って下さい」と言ったら、十分に近い意味があると思う。	Even though I think in Japanese that there is definitely a saying that carries this saying's meaning, I looked and was unable to find it. Probably, if you just said "Keep trying!" it would be close... enough.

I'm not a big fan of tables and Blogger handles them particularly poorly, but this makes it look like I wrote more than I did, so you get a table.
1) Keep in mind that these were translated from Japanese, so where it says "built means built"
2) Recursive definitions suck, but this is another part where the fact that it's a translation sort of changes things. It'll make sense if you look at the paragraph that's from.
3) See (2).

On top of that, we had a stand-up presentation that was supposed to last for 5-10 minutes. I did mine and recorded myself to time the length and I think it was about 2 minutes, and only that long because I screwed up a couple of times. I have not mastered the art of writing these frustratingly long compositions and speeches that everybody else seems to be able to do. I think it's a combination of a lack of Japanese proficiency and my lack of oratory proficiency.

Only since I started this blog have I gained the ability to talk about length about nothing in particular. I've considered doing something similar in Japanese, but there would be no readers and it would be a lot of work. It would be great practice, but unless I can convince someone (Japanese) that they want to proofread crappy posts everyday for free, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Rice and Water... Disaster?

I went to make another batch of rice last night only to discover a couple of flies flying around in the bag. To me, that says there's probably something in there that I don't really want to know about, much less eat, so I grabbed it by the top, twisted it shut, and tossed it in the trash. Unfortunately, I was not smart enough to get a reserve bag of rice, which I fully intend to do soon. I understand the Japanese disaster recovery system blows, and it sometimes takes a long time to get basic services back. Having enough rice to eat for a week or two set aside seems like a good way to at least combat that somewhat. Rice in an airtight bag should last quite a while, I think.

I have 10 liters of water store in bottles that are completely full and under negative pressure to inhibit bacterial growth. It's not enough (about two and a half gallons), but it's something I only recently started building up with bottles as I use them. It's potable water to last me a few days if I don't wash my dishes and whatnot. I regularly use the same bowl for weeks, so that's not really an issue, though going without showering or clean clothes would kind of suck. I'm slowly adding to it, but I'm going to need to move some of it outside soon so it doesn't take up too much floorspace.

I've heard that you should expect to use five gallons of water per day per person, but that seems awfully high to me. In addition, it's simply unreasonable to expect to be able to store that much water. For reference, the big jugs on water coolers are usually five-gallon (19 liters) containers. Imagine having seven of those in your living room and you can see why I think that's a little unreasonable.