279 points, i.e. 69.75% i.e. fail. By 1 point = 0.25%.

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.

Now that the JLPT is out of the way, I can finally start focusing on preparations for leaving this little isle and going back home. There’s so much shit I need to get done (moving between countries is never easy, even if it is “moving home”), and so little time to do it. No rest for the wicked.

Good thing I can send things via boat from Japan (which you can’t from Sweden, for some reason). Takes months for the stuff to get to the destination but costs nearly nothing.

Well, folks, it’s time for my third participation in the JLPT. The score in this epic Kalle-versus-Japan match is currently one-one, and it’s finally time to settle the game once and for all.

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.

But it’s not quite yet time for me to go back home to Sweden. However, the return date has been moved forward a few months — I am now planning on going back in the end of December, instead of the end of March. So suddenly I am at the “only a couple of months (4) left” milestone. Feels weird. Up until now I’ve felt like I had all the time in the world. Since I probably flunked the JLPT back in July, it also means I’m going to have to put some effort into my studies now. Oh well.

For those of you interested in that sort of thing (read: any of my Japanese speaking friends), I’ve now set up a blog in Japanese here. I understand the folly of my ways, but I feel that there’s so much I want to write in Japanese that I can’t likely write here, without afflicting the question-mark explosion of Doom upon those of my friends who don’t have Japanese language settings on their computers. And a majority of those that do probably don’t care for the squigglies too much either.

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.

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.

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?

And it also happens to be the number of days in one year except in leap years, which have 366 days. It also happens to be the number of days I’ve now been in Japan.

Woosh… A year, huh. It feels exactly like I expected it to … went way too fast, did lots of stuff, but not by far all the things I wanted to do within that first year. I guess the whole economical crisis thing going on put a halter to things.

A lot of things, but I guess if I were to give Apr 5 2008-Apr 5 2009 a label, it’d be “Kanji Hell”. I spent way, way, way too much time studying kanjis. It became an obsession there at some point. Unfortunately for me, my vocab studies suffered for it, so now that I’m done with the kanjis that I had put up as a goal for myself (namely all the Jouyou kanjis), I will be focusing on vocab. Believe me when I say that I have a lot of vocabs that lay neglected.

Anyway, I’m still in Japan, unharmed but frazzled. 今年もヨロシクね！

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to study Japanese. I’m to this day not sure why, but together with my good friend Kenneth (who shortly thereafter jumped ship, whereas I continued forward) began to delve into the mysterious land of the weirdly-shaped squigglies.

During this time, I also got in contact for the first time with my girlfriend. I had decided at some point that the best way to learn is to simply start talking to Japanese people, so I looked around and signed up for this “find friends” web site, saying I was looking for people all over Japan who could tell me about their city. You see, I was planning on going to Japan to study, but I had no idea about where in Japan I wanted to go — I knew I did not want to go to Tokyo, but that was about it.

So shortly thereafter, I got dozens of emails from Japanese people. Or should I say, Japanese girls. The guys seem to have reservations about talking to other guys, for some reason. Even today, 3 years later, I still don’t know what’s up with that, though I have my (qualified) guesses.

Regardless, one of those dozens of people happened to be my girlfriend. We got off on a pretty rough start, to be honest. We more or less got into an argument right after the “hello”, and it kind of continued like that the nextcoming months, with us having our little bouts here and there. Despite these little bouts, the one person I continued talking to for any lengthier period of time was my girlfriend. The others peetered out into nothingness, whereas the relationship between me and her kept growing stronger. I had no feelings beyond friendship toward her at all, at that point.

She came to Sweden for the first time in April 2007, a little over a year after we first started talking (in February 2006), and spent a week touring Stockholm with me. It was during this time that we got together, and the time we could spend to dwell on our newfounded relationship in person, was fleeting. She returned to Japan and neither of us shed a tear. It was when I got back to my apartment that I really felt that something was missing, but it was fleeting. She’d only been there for a week after all.

The months that came, I made a lot of important decisions. In the end, I hadn’t really been inspired by any of the prefectures in Japan, so I decided to send out emails to a buttload of schools that seemed promising. I sent out about 40 emails and got replies ranging from:

“helo

thank u for emial !!!!!!!^.^”

(and nothing else written beyond that, no application forms, etc) to emails that looked like anything a professional native would whip up. One of the latter was from a school here in Kyoto, which I ended up choosing due to the friendliness and helpfulness of the principal.

My girlfriend and I decided that she should come spend a month in Sweden in August (2007), and so we were together for a second time. To be objective about the time is impossible, because it just wasn’t normal. We were living a sort of dream, with no problems, no responsibilities, and all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted — I was having a summer vacation at my school, and had enough money to survive without taking on a job.

At least that was how it was before her return-date came closer. In the end, we found ourselves once more doing the farewell thing, and this time as well, no shedding of tears on her sake, and none on mine. Not that we weren’t sad, mind you. It’s just that, at least in my case, if I started I know it’d just make things worse, and I think she had the same idea. Watching her back as she walked through security, I realized I wouldn’t see her for another 8 months. Presuming my plans to go to Japan actually worked out right.

I will soon have been in Japan for a whole year (April 5th, to be precise), and during this time we have both gone through a lot of things together, some good, some bad, some disastrous, but we’ve somehow managed to get through to the other side, if a bit roughed up. Each time a hardship has come our way, we’ve overcome it and grown stronger, both individually — especially I — but also as a couple. It’s a normal thing, I guess, but I marvel at it sometimes.

Last Sunday (the 1st of March), my girlfriend and I walked around Kyoto and looked at temples, ate lunch at an Italian restaurant, dinner at an exclusive restaurant in Hotel Granvia near Kyoto Station, overlooking the city lights. Afterwards before we went to her parents’ place that night, I asked her if she would marry me, and she said ‘yes.’ And no tears were shed. And the smile on her face was exactly right, somehow.

I got the results for the JLPT test I took last year in December finally, today. I went from being completely sure I’d failed miserably, to thinking that maybe I didn’t fail after all, and then to simply not having a clue and giving up on any forecasts on the subject.

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!