So Thursday saw me and sixty odd other brave students face the Japanese Language Exam. I’ll run through each part of it here then go onto other stuff. If you’re interested in learning Japanese at university one day this might be very useful for you, as I would imagine most universities’ exams are somewhat similar.

1. Japanese Writing, Reading, Translation & Comprehension
Not the official name of the exam but the one that makes the most sense in my opinion. The first section had eight Japanese sentences that we were to translate into English. It had a few hard ones (”I don’t like doing the things people like to do” was particularly fiendish) but hopefully it was OK. Right from the off these questions were very difficult which probably caused quite a few people, myself included, to start to mourn over the lack of throwaway easy marks. Following that there was translation from English into Japanese, then a large Japanese story from which we had comprehension questions, then finally an original composition question which was “How have your eating habits changed since you started university?”

2. Kanji
My favourite of the whole lot because I obsessed over learning all the combinations for weeks. We were presented with either 16 or 20 (I can’t remember) combinations and were asked to give their English meaning and their Japanese reading. I remmeber 病院 (Hospital びょういん）, 部屋 (A Room へや*) and 不便な (Inconvinient ふべんな). After that we had to copy out sentences that were written in Japanese, inserting as many Kanji as we could. * Irregular Reading

3. Listening
Then the horror that was the listening exam. I have absoloutly no idea how well I did on this because it’s just impossible to know before the results come on.

After all of this I had 24 hours before the worst exam of all;

4. Understanding Japan
Do I have to talk about this one? We had three hours to just regurgitate all of the knowledge we had memorized from various books onto the page. The only problem being I was so worried about getting enough content in that I didn’t really bother with essay structure. Oops.

Nevermind, though. I should have a rough idea of my results in a week or two’s time, and they are officially released in March. But rather than just worry about them, I thought I’d talk about Semester 2! I believe we have around 10 weeks of lectures, and during this I am aware that we will cover another 250 Kanji, the ば form and a variety of other brain burning grammar structures. Our original compositions will start again, however rather than post them like I did last year, this time I may just post clippings from them.

No photos this week, I’ve been too busy studying / taking exams / drinking.

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