I’d like to take this moment to say sorry for not being more fanatic about posting pictures about the things I see. Of course, my #1 reason is that I simply didn’t have a camera until this spring, and I haven’t really gone and done anything spectacular since I got it, but I know some of you guys want to see lots of pictures of Japan now that I’m here, and I kind of didn’t go through with that very well so far. I’m still here for 8 more months and I have a feeling I might go nuts on “tourist stuff” once I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but now that I have a camera, I’m going to try to visit places and take lots of pictures. I mean, I’ll definitely want to see them again 60 years from now when I in my senile dementia wonder what on earth I was up to in the early 21st century.

That out of the way, I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures from Gion 2009. Actually I didn’t take a lot of pictures, not nearly as many as I took 2008 [1] [2] — in fact, I didn’t even go to the big climax deal in the morning on the 17th this year — but I did take some and the camera is a lot better this time around. The pictures are available in a set on flickr, here.

More exciting is the fact my camera can make movies, and I made one of the float you see in the first couple of pictures. It’s embedded below.

That’s all for now! Excuse me as I go perish in the sultry heat.

Well, the weather was yet again nice. Though even if I get the same results I did when I took JLPT level 2 (aka 2Q) last December (I got 69.75%) I would still fail since JLPT level 1 (aka 1Q) requires 70%, not 60%.

It was nice though. It went better than expected, in particular the reading comprehension part. The listening comprehension part was a climax of sorts on my latest “trend” of simply not getting anything. It was idiotically easy there for awhile, but unfortunately I somehow lost that streak a few weeks ago. Today’s listening comprehension part was probably the worst one I’ve seen yet.

The rest was more or less as it always is, so it was just a matter of recognizing the example sentences and matching them to the appropriate word. I’ve wanted to say this for a long time, but the JLPT exams are in all honesty rather idiotic. People who “properly study for them” simply memorize the examples and answer based on what they memorized. That has nothing to do with one’s level of proficiency. Especially not when the answers are all limited to 1, 2, 3, 4.

In any case, I finally have the exam behind me. I can now focus on taking things a little easier for awhile (I seriously got strange in the head there for awhile), after which I will slowly but steadily pick up the rather heavy rock that I dropped awhile back (called “kanji studying”) and bring it to the goal line once and for all. It won’t even be hard, it will just take lots of hours. I can take the exam again in December, knowing all the grammar I need to know, and getting my kanji proficiency up to where it should be.

Beyond that it’s just a matter of feeding my brain with vocabulary. Reading more than I have done so far, watching TV more often, etc. I’ve learned (the hard way) that vocabulary is simply a matter of keeping your brain occupied with words. Doesn’t really matter which words as long as they’re not all words that you know. Repeating or “studying” vocab is mostly a waste of time. As a friend of mine said, you can sit and try to learn some set of words for the longest time, and then you just ignore them and suddenly a month or two later (during which you haven’t seen or heard said words even once) you just know them. You know their “essence”, beyond their meaning in whatever happens to be your language of studying (mine being English).

Then again, today’s exam was at a level where if I passed, I won’t be surprised, and if I didn’t pass I won’t be surprised, but if I pass or fail with a big margin I will be. I feel quite surely that I’m “at or around 70%”. I’ll get back to you regarding that once September rolls around. Unless I get like 50%, in which case I might just say “I failed. Leave me alone!”