Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_say

Note in particular the line that in parentheses starts with “also misspelled as”.

kthxbyem8s

From Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

“Goodbye The Silver Lining. Our culture is formed by the sharing of ideas. Throughout history, for millennia, every piece of art, music, literature and entertainment has been the result of a worldwide collaboration. It’s been an astonishing act of creative evolution, the most vibrant and extraordinary gene pool of imagination and inspiration, from which all were free to draw and create. It has been exceptional, and in the last 50 to 100 years it has come to an end.

The tragedy of the abuse and misuse of intellectual property and copyright cannot be counted. After centuries of sharing, we have allowed a “MINE!” tag to be affixed to every thought, string of notes, doodle on a page, or merest whim. We have committed a grotesque cultural suicide. And the extent to which this has reached should be a parody. We have now allowed ourselves to be in the situation where art museums ban sketching – something that should surely make anyone whose understanding of art history goes beyond yesterday scream in fear. And it exists in our world of gaming in a similarly berserk form. And so it is that Activision has closed down work on not-for-profit fan creation The Silver Lining.“

Very similar to what I said recently, but worded a thousand times better.

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!”

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that I took (and passed) the level 2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT for short) last December, and as of 2009, they are now holding the exam for levels 1-2 twice a year, instead of just once. So I’m now foolishly going to take the level 1 test next Sunday.

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 tell me, do you have occult blood? I’d never heard of this before and at first thought it was a classic case of Engrish. Then I looked it up and it actually exists…

occult blood n.
Blood that is present in amounts too small to be seen and can be detected only by chemical analysis or microscopic examination.
(dictionary.com)

Who would’ve thought that I’d learn new English words (or in this case, expressions, since it’s several words) in Japan.