Don’t you hate it when you finish an exam, hand in the paper, then get that crushing feeling you threw away some easy marks on stupid errors? Well over the last two days I sat three exams, and after all three I realized to my horror I’d made some incredibly stupid, obvious mistakes. I thought I’d run through them here, partly to get them off my chest and partly so future generations of Japanese students won’t make the same mistake. That’s not to say I’m going to post the exam online or anything. You future Sheffield Japanese students have to work too!

The first paper was the Listening Exam. To my knowledge I only made one mistake here. The question required us to write down what the speaker said, then finish the sentence. It started “私はおきて、歯をみがって、” (watashi wa okite, ha omigatte,) which means “I wake up, brush my teeth,” so a correct answer would have been something like “then eat breakfast” or something. The problem is I failed to realise that “ha o” were two words, and wasted a lot of time wondering what on earth a “hao” is. Curses. Thankfully that was the only dumb mistake I made as far as I could tell.

The second exam was the big, mean Midterm Exam, designed to test all parts of the course, and carries 10% of our final grade with it. The annoying mistake was simple - we were given the translation for はしります, to run, but in the test it appeared as はしらないで、which means “without running”. Sadly I only read the translation and somehow managed to gloss over the conjugation, leaving me with a rather bizarre “I left the restaurant with running”. Oh dear.

The final exam was today, and was the Kanji Exam. Two rediculously stupid mistakes here. The first was adding the reading for 八日, which is よっか. I wrote that. It was right. Then with about 10 seconds to go I thought it would be an awesome idea to change my correct answer to はつか, which means the 20th. I’ll never know why I did that and I will never do it again. Gah. The final mistake was writing the Kanji symbols for “ふるいもの” (furuimono) , which means “old things”. I forgot what ふるい (furui) meant. At first I thought it meant cold, even though I knew the word for that was さむい (samui), and ended up writing 長い物 (nagaimono), which means “long things”. The sentence ended up as “I like long things“. What will the lecturer think of me?!

So there you have it. I have no idea when I will get my results back, and I shall post them here when the time is right. I also have some rather exciting news reguarding the Japan society and their events thoughout the year, but I’ll leave you in suspense as it’s about time I knocked out a review of the book I was forced to read for my “understanding Japan” module.

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