Hmmm, the Olympics appear to be over, removing my main excuse for not blogging. I have some catching up to do. I thought I’d start with something from just a few days ago, since it’s fresh in my mind.
One of my professional development goals/suggestions from my boss for this year was that I consider taking a course (Asia-related, obviously) here at the university. While I am quite aware that Chinese would be the most useful thing for me to take, I find tones to take a ridiculous amount of effort, somewhat to hear, but especially to produce accurately, and thus I did not take more than one semester of said language the last time I had that opportunity. What I really want to take is Japanese, with the hope that I would be able to take a continuous series of classes taught in a consistent manner out of the same set of textbooks in a coherent progression. Wouldn’t that be novel?
(Background for anyone who does know me: My past Japanese learning was a year in high school (senior year), a year in college with a different textbook, one other classmate, and a private tutor (sophomore year), and the first half of Beloit’s summer language institute right before I went to live in Japan for a year, where I mostly ended up speaking English, because it was my job. So basically, I can introduce myself, read both syllabaries, count, and ask directions really well, because I’ve taken intro 3 times.)
Anyway, to start this journey toward actually making progress in Japanese, I had to take the placement test. It consisted of multiple choice grammar/vocabulary questions (fill in this blank in the sentence with the appropriate word/phrase,) reading comprehension, listening comprehension, a short composition, and an oral interview. I should note that I did all of maybe 45 minutes of review for this, because I was more interested in knowing where I’d place based on my actual ability as it actively stands, and I haven’t spoken any Japanese on a regular basis in about 5 years.
I thought I did okay-ish on the fill in the blank, probably pretty well on the listening, but I couldn’t even attempt the reading, because I know so few kanji. The oral interview was mostly just fun, because even though my brain kept trying to fill in the blanks of forgotten Japanese with helpful Spanish, the interviewer was nice, and we were able to communicate, which still feels like a cheerful victory in Japanese, instead of a frustratingly less than perfect failure.
I got my results by email the next day: 35 out of 100, with a note that I seemed to have a lot of weaknesses in grammar. At first, I (perfectionist) felt let down and defensive, but then I realized, hey, I scored better than 33%! On a test of something I last had a class in 6 years ago, which is meant to place people in classes ranging from beginner to extremely advanced. I did awesome! I placed exactly where I left off at Beloit, which means I haven’t actually forgotten very much.
Of course, that also means that I placed, as always, between levels, so I can start taking second semester, first year courses in the spring. In the meantime, I’m supposed to review my textbook from Beloit, since they use the same one here.
