Actually, I knew I’d failed all along. I’m actually surprised I got that high.

Next time Kalle will get the opportunity to (with any chance of success) try this test: approximately 2015.

Yes, I do indeed feel like a fucking loser. Now back to your regularly scheduled (albeit seldomly updated) blog.

This time I actually did my homework. I won’t fail this time around.

It’s the first time I go by myself to the test center. I was surrounded by friends the first two times, and I’m not entirely sure what impact this will have on my focus and such. Not to be mean to my friends or anything, but I have a feeling I will just end up being more concentrated over it, but it may also be that I lose some energy due to not being mutually “pumped”. We’ll find out soon enough (Sunday, two days from now).

After that I only really have ‘get rid of a ton of shit’ and ‘get on the plane(s) home to Sweden’ left, really.

In any case, check if out if you’re curious. I’ll continue writing here as well, obviously, so there’s no need to take a crash course in Japanese in order to continue enjoying my deep, philosophical enlightenment. I wrote that with a straight face, by the way.

Those of you who do understand Japanese, I’ll gladly take any comments you have on errors in the language, but please don’t get too nitpicky on me. I’ll lose my will to write if I get 15-page essays about everything I did wrong every time I post a new entry if you do.

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!”

My preparations this time around were, frankly, lacking. I’ve been concentrating mostly on what school’s been handing me, and not so much on “my own self studies of the things beyond”, which was a major part of my life for the last year. One thing I did learn though was that preparing for the exam is all about knowing the exam — that is, knowing how it is layed out, and how well you do timewise on each part, and what kind of questions are being thrown at you, etc. I posted the results and my thoughts on each of the times that I took the test here on this blog, and while I won’t go so far as to link to the individual posts for your comparison (I doubt you’re that intrigued), I must say that my results took leap-like steps upward for every time I took one of the previous years’ exams.

This time around it’s all quite different. For one, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail. Secondly, I haven’t prepared myself quite as well as I had — with the increase in level of difficulty, I doubt you can, in the time I have spent since I wrapped up the level 2 stuff. Last time around I did my first exam-at-home months ahead of time, and let about a month pass in between each try. The exams I took were also the real thing — 2004, 05, and 06 respectively, of the actual JLPT that people took in those respective years. This time however, I couldn’t find the book that had more than just one test in it, and most of the books I found said “level 1-2!”. Why would I want a book for level 2? I got that one already.

Anyway, so I ended up buying a book with two “pretend exams” in it, which also had commentary in the end which pointed out common mistakes people tend to do on the questions. It’s actually more useful than I thought (as you might’ve guessed by now, I took one of the two tests from that book).

In fact, I took it today. The exam is next Sunday (5th of July), and it took me this long to do this. There are several reasons for this, not all of them about my laziness. For one I’m now attending a “JLPT strategy class” (don’t know a good translation for 対策 other than that…) in which they are throwing TONS of old, real JLPT exam content at us. Thus, in hindsight, buying a real exam would have been pretty bad in the end since I’d be guaranteed to have the contents of that exam thrown at me in school, possibly before I even took it. But I digress…

Mostly it was just about the fact it ISN’T the real thing. “Even if I pass, it doesn’t mean that I would pass the real thing, since it’s not even the same guys who’ve made it. Even if I fail, it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s not the same guys who’ve made it.” So yeah, I procrastinated. But today I finally decided to do it anyway.

Results:
- kanji/vocab: 72.2% (72 points)
- listening: 71.9% (71 points — what the fuck? I usually score 100% on listening normally)
- reading comprehension & grammar: 64.3% (I knew I’d screw this one up, but I didn’t screw it up as badly as I thought I would)

Total: 271 points out of 400 points, which puts me at 67.8% and I need 70% to pass. *rip my eyes out* Yeah, that’s great.

I don’t know what was up with listening. I screwed up completely. I was totally expecting 80+% on that one, and in fact I’m counting on getting that amount on the real exam. If I had, I would’ve passed with exactly 70%. Heh. I guess I’m going to be taking this again in December, eh?

So…

Wee! I apparently passed at 1 point below 70%. Thank god this wasn’t the level 1 test since that one requires you to succeed at 70% of the questions (70% is 280, I got 279…!). Luckily this was level 2, so 60% was the requirement.

Crossing my fingers for you others who took the JLPT that same day! Let me know how it went!

During the winter vacation, we were all given a little notebook with problems for us to solve during our vacation — that’s to be expected from the school I’m attending as they’re quite strict in general. One of the problems was to “write a speech”. We’d done that in the past, but those were restricted to 1 minute only, so there wasn’t a lot of room to get elaborate or advanced or indepth. This one had no such restrictions, which resulted in me not doing the homework at all. Too much freedom confuses me.

When I got back to school after the vacation I was pleased to note that those around me, every single one, had not finished the winter vacation homework. I was not alone. Praise be $deity. The teachers, however, took this in a stride and repeatedly stated for the next following days that we should write the speech and hand that in – if only the speech. So ultimately, I sat down and started writing a speech entitled “少子化” (“Shoushika”), which translates to something like “The low childbirth ratio in some countries which is resulting in a population growing older and older, and few children”. I don’t think there’s a one-word-word for it in English, but feel free to correct me if there is. In any regard, I wrote about this, as I had some thoughts on the subject of my own (namely, briefly, “why the fuck would you want people to have children when we’re on a planet that is already overpopulated galore?” and the surrounding circumstances around why one would want that, and why one shouldn’t want that). Luckily for me, everyone else had written about their first time seeing snow, or how they loved sushi, so I ended up being picked out of my class together with one other guy, whose speech also had “content” (nothing against first-snow-experiences, but it doesn’t make for a very good speech, if you ask me).

Thenceforth, I and my fellow class-mate were now placed with the task of brushing up our speeches, with the assistance of the teachers, after which we were supposed to hold said speeches before the entire school of two-hundred something odd people, including some professor from the Kyoto University, and a few other select teachers and like-minded folks.

In short, it’s one of those occasions where your normal average Joe will get a tiny bit anxious, at the least, and spaz completely out of control, at the worst. I, on the other hand, have this bad habit of simply not feeling anything in particular about getting up in front of a crowd of several hundred people. Which was, partially, my doom this time around.

In any regard, I started tweaking my speech, but wasn’t sure what should go where, and one of the teachers at school did some heavy revising for me, which I am grateful for. It however resulted in me sitting down, finally, to try to memorize a speech which I hadn’t really written myself. Misunderstand me incorrectly though – I did write the content, and the teachers were all emphasizing that the content would be as I had imagined it, but the problem was that what I originally thought about as I sat down writing, and what came out in the end, was something else.

The name of the speech in fact changed as well, to “地球人” (“Chikyuujin” — “earthling”), and its, well, main point was that we, as people of this earth, should stop thinking of ourselves as “whatever-an/-ese/-e” (e.g. American, Japanese, Swede) and start thinking of ourselves as “earthlings”. In short order, some heavy revision had taken place, but it was still “my piece”. Well. It was two days before the speech contest, when I finally sat down to learn the speech by heart.

I had trouble. Sentences which looked similar tended to jump in at the wrong places. Sentences which ended a certain way tended to end in ways they shouldn’t. Sentences simply refused to appear in my head, at the cue of the sentence lined up before them. I tried to learn in my usual way when it comes to speeches — I start at the very bottom, work sentence-by-sentence up until the last paragraph is covered, by reading the speech from where I am and until the end. If I fail to reach the end due to not remembering etc, I wash, rinse, repeat, until it sits. I do this for every paragraph, until I’ve reached the top paragraph of the speech. At that point I start doing the same but for the paragraphs. I read the last paragraph in full. If I succeed, I start reading the last two paragraphs, then the last three, until I am basically reading the entire speech from start to finish without failing a single syllable.

Unfortunately as you might’ve guessed, this proved harder than I had anticipated. By the time it was 1 am in the morning on that day, I hadn’t gotten through the “line-by-line” deal yet. I hadn’t touched the biggest paragraph of the speech yet, and, well, the speech was in two days. I slept. Fitfully.

The next day comes around. I go to school and am requested to hold the speech in front of everyone in class, as a prep for the next day. I fail completely. I reassure myself that “tomorrow it’s everything or nothing,” and the pride I take in my ability to pull things off when I need to… is about to fuck me over.

I get home, and as I return I call my neighbor and ask him for the favor of working as audience as I struggle with the speech. He agrees, so I swing by, give him the speech, and start stumbling my way through it. It goes bad at first, then I actually pull the entire speech off, well, once, but there always seems to be some part where I stumble, or some part where I pause for several seconds to reconsider what sentence comes next. After awhile he decides that I know the speech, which I’m (wisely) a bit hesitant to agree with, but since another neighbor has her birthday this day (Thursday), we go to her place to eat cake. We eat cake, I grab a beer, then I head back to my apartment, study the speech some more, and I feel that, hum, this might work out after all. The speech seems to “be there” in its entirety — no, I know it is there, I just need to lure it out of my head, and fast enough that there are no interruptions. I slept. Unceremoniously.

Everything or nothing. There were 7 people before me holding their speeches. According to the schedule, after the 8th person — me — there would be a short break before the last half of the speeches were held. As I am about to get up, however, waiting for my cue from the announcers, they unexpectedly inform the audience that the break comes now instead. So I walk outside, stare at the sky, and think about nothing in particular for the following 10 minutes. I have this fixed idea about not practicing something “on the day”, unless I absolutely must. I never study for tests the morning of said test. Nor did I this day try to run through the speech in my head. I had confidence in my “everything or nothing” approach, because it has always worked out in my favor. Always.

It was finally my time to hold my speech. Those who’d spoken until that point had been okay — some moreso than others. Some speeches were very interesting while others were rather dull; some people had basically read from the paper, while others had stood there barely glancing down at their speech notes once. I, well, I had no speech notes. I had my speech but that wasn’t really gonna help me if I forgot. I convinced myself that the best thing I could do was to simply leave the speech in my pocket, leave my jacket on my chair, and walk up there with no aid — everything or nothing; everything or nothing.

The start went well enough. I looked at the audience, I got the words out. Then screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I know I need to say something. My brain is absolutely blank. I pick up from some part. I start fumbling with the words. Sentences end the wrong way. I start correcting myself. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I laugh and shake my head, right there, in front of everyone. I hear a teacher whisper one word and I pick it up, because it’s in my speech, to this day unsure if it was the right word at the right place, nor am I sure which teacher whispered that word, but I grabbed it and took it forward, for a while. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I look down to the side at the teachers and go “Eh… nandattake?” (“Uh… what was the next part again?”) and the audience laughs.

That first pause, that first screech, that first time of so many times when my brain simply shut down, I had given up. I knew then and there that I had failed. I had chosen “everything or nothing” and for the first time in so many times where I have made that choice — taken that stance — I chose, and got nothing. Now, a few mere days later, I feel all right about what happened. I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t because that affair was such an important, vital lesson to me. I know now that I can’t pick “everything or nothing”, because I must not let myself win or fail through rolling dice and hoping to get a 6. I must win through effort and through ambition, and from my preparations for this speech, there was a sore lack of both of those.

I not only learn a language at my school.

In any case, despite my fumbling, despite my screwing my whole speech up, that keyword, “地球人” (“chikyuujin” — “earthling”), was used by almost every one of the judges in their final comments after the contest winners were elected (no, I didn’t win! big surprise there!). A teacher giggled and commented on it to me and I realized that although my speech had been an utter failure, my message had still reached someone, and so it wasn’t all for nothing after all.

I’m still considering what to do next year, since I’ll still be here. I might simply refuse to participate, or I might give it my all and try to win that contest next year, through ambition, through endeavor, through effort, rather than through the roll of a die.

In a couple of months I will have been here for an entire year. I haven’t done nearly all the things I wish I’d have done by now, but I still have plenty of time left to play around with, and now that I’ve decided to take it a little easier with my studies from here on, I will have time to do the things I haven’t had time for until now.

I wish everyone a happy new year.

Then again, I’m comparing the outcome of “the real thing” to the exams I’ve taken at home, and I can only say there’s quite a big difference, even though I put in the effort to make it as similar as possible (time restraints etc. were all the same).

What had me worried before the exam was whether I’d end up not actually hearing the listening part, speaker-wise, but that wasn’t a problem at all. I may still pass, but that’d take some major luck. If I fail, I’ll be disappointed but not “you’re shitting me” surprised.

I bought two onigiris and one triangle-sandwich, two bars of chocolate and a bottle of tea on my way there, and realized that I should’ve bought more food and less chocolate.

There is a supposed 50 (I think?) minute break between the 2nd and 3rd parts but for some odd reason, we had to listen to the 12th problem one more time and so we only got something like 25 minutes of lunch-break. I wanted to eat more but I didn’t have anything with me and going to a store was out of the question (everyone else goes to the store on the lunch break so the lines are too long).

In any case, that’s it for 2Q, on to 1Q. I decided from the beginning that I’d take this one once and then move on, no matter how it went. With a bit of luck I might pass after all, so that’s what I’m hoping for. Will know “in the middle of February”.

In the morning, knowing me, I will get very little studies in and will simply doodle about doing nothing special, then dinner with the girlfriend in the evening, and then to bed early since I get up early. I will hopefully be tired enough from waking up earlier than usual on Saturday that I’ll fall asleep despite nervousness etc. Yeah, I’m pretty nervous about this in the end. I have this one shot and I paid money and all that so I don’t know how I will react to this all ultimately. I don’t think I’ve ever prepared for something for as long and as intensively as I have for this exam, so I guess it’s no wonder I’m antsy.

Anyway, wish me luck. I won’t actually know whether I pass or fail until February (…!) but I bet I’ll have a feeling whether it went well or not. The others of you out there — Thomas, Mark, Shiho, and all the damn Swedes zerg-rushing Kyoto, new and old friends alike, good luck on Sunday!