Japan Is Doomed

Another boring “about me” update, I’m afraid. In around 35 hours, I will sit down for three hours to take my Japanese language exam. It consists of two English to Japanese translation exercises and one Japanese to English one. Those should take two hours. The final hour is dedicated to writing an entire composition similar to the ones I used to post here once a week. It’s quite a demand and I’m pretty worried.

That said, I have worked hard in revision - especially learning Kanji and Kanji combinations. Even some really bizarre ones like 文部科学省 (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), 耳鼻科 (Otorhinology) and 内科 (Internal Medicine).  Grammar wise I feel I am strong although it’s quite hard sometimes to know exactly which grammar structure to use when. The exams are intentionally made with sentences that are beyond our Japanese abilities, forcing us to adapt our knowledge on-the-fly. It sounds unfair but it’s what foreigners do in Japan on a daily basis. I just wish I didn’t have to do it. :(

On Friday I sit the infamous “Understanding Japan” exam. This is a general exam, again for three hours, about various aspects of Japanese society and history. Hot topics include the post-war reformation of the country, business practices, minorities in Japan and Tokugawa history. I find it all very interesting, but because the exam is so crazy general it’s hard to feel confident about what I know.

Of course, I’ll do a quick update after the exams to let you know how I did, and maybe a big one with the results whenever they arrive. Unless I fail. In which case this website will become mikeisdoomed.com or something.

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.

I forgot to take my nice camera again. I’m so sorry it won’t happen again will happen lots of times in the future.

Anyway, yesterday saw the annual “World Food Festival” invade a few of the university buildings, and all the societies representing various nations got together in a whirl of cooking oil and cardboard stalls to sell their delicious cultural wares.

Once I had entered the hall, it became apparent that overwhelming customers into buying food was the order of the day. Basically, the stalls were all so cramped together that everyone had to take fight their way along a set path, which wound it’s way in front of every stall in the room.

The Japan Society, for whom I am now a committee member and thus wield terrible powers for, were out in force selling Sushi, Yakisoba and Karaage. They seemed to be doing rather well, but I was on a tight budget so I decided to try some food I’d never sampled before. Or at least, I planned to. As I was making my way around the hall, I was leapt on by a member of the Chinese society, who sold me a fortune cookie for 50p. Cheap, you may think, except the thing had no fortune in it. I’m not a huge believer in luck or fate, but that can’t be good, right?

Having absolutely no fortune saddened me, as I was hoping for a good omen relating to my upcoming midterm examinations (tomorrow!). Disheartened but not yet defeated, I fought my way further around the hall.

It was then that I discovered the festival continued into another room. This room contained, amongst other stalls, the Korean society stall. They were serving Kimchi, which is a traditional dish consisting of spicy vegetables. It also happens to be the most delicious food ever, and for 99p it was a steal.

So there you have it. Sadly I didn’t have much time to spend at the festival as I had to run home and study lots of difficult words for Monday’s exam, but I would heartily advise anyone to go to the festival, if only to purchase food from the Japan Society stall and fund my global domination attempt.

I wanted to write about what I’ve been studying at university. I know this has the potential to be a very boring post, but I’ll try to inject it with my usual balance of borderline funny jokes and insane ramblings. If you really can’t bear to read it, just rub your face against the screen - you’ll soon feel like I do after two hours of grammar conjugation.

My university has an incredibly intensive Japanese course - it’s famous for it’s drop out rate and general amount of stress put on it’s students. We currently have around sixty people taking the class, and the lecturers are expecting around thirty of us to graduate into the second year. They are expecting only around twenty of us to complete the entire course. It’s kind of strange making all these new friends, knowing that only one in three of them will be around four years from now. The reasons people drop out vary, but the usual reason is “it’s far too hard” or “it’s far too fast”, and it really is. We cover two or three new grammar points in an hour, and get just one hour to practice them in a classroom enviroment. After that, we’re on our own. If you don’t practice or understand it - tough luck.

This “tough love” approach is kind of daunting, and I know quite a few of my colleagues are somewhat put off by it. Personally, without sounding like a sadist, I am finding myself benefitting from this regime. Yes, it’s not much fun sitting in the library going over worksheets time and time again, but at least I’m doing it, consistently, for hours at a time every day. Something tells me if they were “coaxing us into” the language, I wouldn’t be nearly as motivated.

Anyway - the nightmare that is Japanese. The first rule is that we absoloutly had to know the two basic scripts of Japanese. We all took tests in both of them and thankfully, I passed. From the get go, everything written on the worksheets or by the students should not be in English, aside from personal notes. It’s quite difficult, but it has improved the speed and accuracy of my composition, which is a nice side effect. Sadly, it’s also turned me into a nervous wreck. Can’t win them all…

Personally, I’m struggling at the moment with the Katakana (foreign words) spelling. Things like Chocolate - is it チョコーレト, or is it ヨコッレト ? It’s really annoying that, even after a year living in Japan, I can make mistakes just as much as everyone else. I was looking over some notes I made during my gap year and I was horrified to find I’ve forgotten half of it. Scary stuff. (It’s チョコレート, by the way…)

In reguards to the speaking, I think I am keeping my head above water, although that may be on the grace of what I learned during my gap year. We are currently doing an アンケート (questionnaire), and my partner and I decided to do ours about alcohol. Our three questions went something like this;

1. きりんビールをのみますか.
Do you drink Kirin beer?

2. あなたはたいていどこでビールをかいますか.
Where do you normally buy beer?

3. わたしはごぜんん六時から九時までヴォッカをのみます.あなたは何時から何時までアルコールをのみますか.
I drink Vodka from 6am to 8am. What time do you normally drink alcohol?

The teachers were impressed at our questions although they did express distress at our drinking habits. Suprisingly, not one of the students we surveyed drinks Vodka at 6am. Those fools don’t know how to live!

Anyway, that’s what we’ve done so far in a nutshell. This week we’re doing yet more grammar, and then the whole vicious learn-repeat-study-consider suicide-learn-repeat cycle starts again. Wish me luck.