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.

Example Sentences

I had a big test today, and I passed a couple of example sentences to a friend to check. They're apparently okay. I don't have time to translate them right now, but here they are.
[Edit: Okay, that wasn't entirely true. It was actually that I couldn't translate them while talking to my mom on the phone.. Close enough, though, right?]

そのクリームパンはまさにおいしかった
そのクリームパンは非常においしかった
そのクリームパンはいかにもおいしかった
These first three mean "That custard bread was really delicious." I haven't found anybody who can tell me how the meaning is different between masa ni, hijou ni, and ikanimo, except that ikanimo can be used in a similar fashion to tashika ni.

端的に言ってもいいよ
"It's okay for you say it directly."

さて、この新しいソフトについて、どうですか？
Well then, what do you think of this new software?"

ディジタル一眼レフ、すなわち大型のカメラのほうのセンサーが大きいのだ
Digital single-lens reflex, aka "large cameras", have bigger sensors.

それにもかかわらず、写真家が下手なら、まだダメな写真ばかりを取れる
"In spit of that, if the photographer has no skill, you'll still get pictures that are no good."

ＤＳＬＲもしくはヂジカメラ、どちらでも禁止だ
"DSLRs and digicams are prohibited."
Though there's a typo in this one. When I went to write di, I simply typed D and I (ヂ dzi), rather than deli, which is how you have to input the ディ (di) in "digital" when you write it in Japanese. It sounds really random and complex and kind of stupid, but there's a system to it.
The reason for having to type deli to get di is because we're 1) mapping 46 characters onto 26 letters and crossing our fingers and 2) because di in Japanese is a dipthong, but not the traditional kind, and so it's been kind of forked into the system as a whole fairly recently.

Winter Break!

Today is Monday here. It was my last day of classes before winter break starts. Why they put the first day of break on a Tuesday and the last on a Thursday, I can only wonder. On top of that, my Basic Japanese class had a section test today. I was considering skipping and just taking it when break ends, but I figured I'd rather suck it up and take a low score than worrying the whole break whether I had studied enough.

On top of the section test, we had an essay that was supposed to be a page. That's not really bad, but I thought I only had about 1/3 of a page written. As it turned out, my essay came out to one and a half pages when I wrote it out by hand and added a conclusion. Here's my essay in a nutshell:
- I wonder how クリームパン (cream bread) came to be...
- History
- History
- Some extra history
- Something about あんパン
- Mention ジャンパン
- I love クリームパン!

But that's over with and winter break is starting. Yay!

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.

More Slow Days

Nothing particularly of note has happened in a while. Been studying and learning lots of words and kanji, but news of that doesn't make for the most interesting blog posts. Yes, I still hate kanji.

We have kanji vocab quizzes every day in Basic Japanese, ranging from 15 to 42 words per quiz, averaging about 25. That's not so bad, but studying up ten of those, plus ten sentence patterns with one to four sub-patterns each, miscellaneous stuff we've done in class, a presentation, and a short paper in Japanese... I'm not looking forward to our next collective test.

I studied for the last one for four hours and scored a 78% on the test and 84% on the presentation and paper. Best score in the class was 93% and the worst was 70%, which says to me that they targeted the test's difficulty pretty damned well.

Thinking about going to Kiyomizudera with a friend and checking it out during momiji (leaf-changing time). That's supposedly when it looks the best.

Just ate a huge lunch - tofu will not burn easily, by the way: even if you drop it in boiling oil, it takes a good 20 minutes - and am feelin' that "just ate a huge lunch" need to take a nap. Class in an hour, though, makes that not the best of ideas. Probably just watch some anime or something.

Or fall asleep on my laptop.

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.

Test

Test of doooom.

Grades and The Test

The proficiency test yesterday wasn't so bad, except, of course, the kanji. Kanji are an evil doom-plague on the face of the earth and must be destroyed. Evil, evil, hate hate.
"Just say 'No' to Kanji" is my new slogan I think. Maybe "Only you can prevent kanji."

I shaved beforehand because what little beardness I had was really itchy and I didn't want to cope with that. I'm officially never growing a beard, by the way. At right, you can see me looking somewhat Amish. I guess.

In addition, I got my grades back yesterday - finally - and I think I did alright. I got either a B or an A average, depending on whether you go by this university's standard or by my home university's standards. I honestly don't know how these will transfer.
I have some hope they'll transfer as the nearly all As, but I'm not quite positive enough to expect that.
Still, worst case is that I end up with a B average for this last semester, and that's not bad.

Odd Test Problems

The proficiency test is tomorrow and Bryden and I just realized we know neither where it is or when it is. Hopefully, that's not part of the test. That'd be way too cliche.

Exam day - Bigger post

So the exam went decently. I can’t say that I did well, but I was able to answer more than I couldn’t. As I said before, my poor knowledge of kanji hurt me the most, though many of the kanji I didn’t recognize were ones I had never even seen before as far as I can tell. For ones such as those, I simply remind myself that their program goes far beyond my current level of comprehension. I’m not exactly certain where I really want to be placed, but my ego certainly wants me to be placed in level three or four (out of five), preferably four. On the other hand, a lower level means more time for culture stuff and existing outside of just school. It’s a hard call, you know? I suspect I’ll get placed in two or three. Really, I just don’t want to be told that my Japanese up to now is only Elementary.

Regardless, I’m doing my best. Or pretty close. I studied up on kanji for four to five hours beforehand. That’s more than I ever studied any one of Okada’s tests, though not by much.

Our “interview and OPI” is tomorrow. Not entirely certain what that entails, but mine is at 11, so I’ll at least get to kill time with Sara beforehand. I should probably drill some vocabulary beforehand or something. I don’t know, really. In a way, I’ve been practicing for this for the past week. I’ve been much more outgoing than I would normally be; asking for directions fairly often, conversing with random people on the street, discussing products to various levels of detail with various shopkeepers.

And working on my developing pastry fetish. Oh, my sweet クリームパン.

Exam day

I don't feel like I did too horribly, but I don't think I could answer but about half the questions. My kanji weakness was mostly at fault here, and I found very few vocabulary that I couldn't understand.
Ramen shop for the win.

カラーボックス: The Construction

I imagine in my mind this post's title being read in a deep, masculine voice something like Killstick: The Reckoning, Shopping Mall: Zombie Fragfest IV, or Oh God It's the Flood: You're Screwed. That in mind, here's a picture of a cardboard box:

So I went down to Jusco (Wal-Mart, but spelled with a J because it's Japanese. Or something) and got a scrubby, some suction hooks, and a カラーボックス ("karaa bokksu"). I'm not entirely certain what it is. It cost $9.50 and is, I think, a shelf. Like, an Ikea shelf. JDIC says it means "color box", but it doesn't even return anything on Sanseido or ALC. Go figure.
Anyway, I'm going to try and put it together. I fully expect at least one explosion, and possibly a lemur.

Taking it out of the box, I'm a little impressed with it. For ten bucks, I get chipboard? I'm used to Wal-Mart's polyboard crap. The thing's theoretically rated to hold 5kg (11lbs) per shelf, but I bet I could stand on the thing when it's completed.
The downside to this is that the screws squeak really loudly on the last couple of turns, in addition to being arm-wrenchingly difficult to put in. I'm putting some cooking oil on them in the hopes that it will make this a bit easier.
It didn't.
All was going to smoothly until I realized that I put the top board in one of the middle spots. Fortunately, I realized this right as I finished putting in the second screw holding it in place instead of later, when I would've had to take out 12 screws.
Okay, eight screws down, and I've got the little crappy paper things in the back. I was going to leave them out in the spirit of my カラーボックス not taking itself too seriously, but then I realized that they are probably an integral part of its stability. Oh, and that I need to buy a real screwdriver. Multi-tools are great as a backup, and they get the job done, but... There are 16 more screws now that I wish I didn't have to use a multi-tool on.
Aaaand it's 2:30. Wanna guess what I've done with my day?

Forgot to get soap.

Google Mapped

If you were to click on this link [removed for privacy reasons], you might see roughly the path I take to get to school. Or you might just see the area around where I live. I'm about to test this.
Edit: It looks like it does what I want it to. You'll notice that the path clocks in at just under 4,000 feet, which means I'm less than a mile's walking distance from the school. Psh, and they say it's ten minutes by bike.
As it turns out, there's a department store very close by that's really more of a shopping mall. It's convenient, in any case, 'cause they have food and most things that you might wish to buy. Joshin's, the 電気屋 is much farther away, though I have not yet found it on Google Maps.