Presentation (Divtesting)

I was just awake enought to get this up last night, and I honestly don't know what I changed that made it work after two hours. I think Blogger might have just had pity on me.

I woke up on Tuesday at 6AM cooked a super-duper protein breakfast, and worked on my presentation and went over some last random notes for Japanese for Certified Tests (JCT), in which class I had a test. As expected, it took about 15, maybe 20, minutes. No clue how I did, but if you wanted a guess, I'd say 80%. Ish.

After that, I headed up to the school's Japanese Room. I kid you not, we have a room called the 和室 - "Japan (-style)" "room" and it's where the tea ceremony class takes place. I have no interest in tea ceremony itself, but the girls (of my little squad 'o gaijin anyway) were wearing kimono and this would probably be my last chance to spam pictures of them.

Once I was allowed in, I was sat between the head and sub-head - I don't know their official titles, but between Michiharu TANAKA and Mariko UCHIDA. Pictures. Tea. Sweets. Pictures.

Tanaka is the one at the right who looks like he needs to go to the bathroom. He was probably just about to change to a different sitting position than seiza (which should translate to "death to the foreigners", but doesn't, as far as I know). When I asked if it had defeated him, he replied "I think I must be an alien..."

So after ingesting about two handfuls of pure sugar, I had ten minutes in class and a further 30 minutes of sitting around while we talked in class, etc. IE, just enough time to come down from the sugar and be nice and shaky.

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Good points

1- Researched extensively and summed everything up neatly
2- Hard-to-understand words were clarified, so it was easy to understand
3- Clearly introduced topic at the beginning
4- Looked at the listeners while speaking and used clear pronunciation
5- Speed and loudness of speech was just right, so it was easy to listen to
6- You had fun with your topic, and that came through in the way you held on.

よかった点

・くわしく調べて、きちんとまとめて発表できた。
・わかりにくいことばは、もう一度違う表現で説明しなおしていて、わかりやすかった。
・はじめに何について話すかはっきり伝えていた。
・聞き手を見ながら、はっきりした発音で発表できた。
・スピードも大きさもちょうどよい声で、聞きやすかった。
・自分が内容を楽しみながら、そして、その楽しさをみんなに伝えようとがんばっていた。

Not-quite-there points

7- Sentence-to-sentence connecting words were almost nonexistant.
8- Because of that, there ended up being a lot of "because"
9- You used a lot of "you know?". Instead, it would be good if you used others, such as "... don't you think?", "... isn't that so?", "... or at least, that's what I think.", "... you may be able to look at it like this." There are a variety.
10- Sometimes, you stopped in the middle of sentences, and just kind of lined of words, which had kind of a weird feeling.
11- There were some words where your pronunciation was hard to understand. Especially long words with lots of kanji. I totally couldn't understand "converters"

もう少しの点

・文と文をつなぐ言葉（接続詞など）があまりなかった。
・そのため、「から」が多くなってしまっていた。
・「でしょ？」も多くなっていた。かわりに、他のいろいろな
言葉を使ってみるとよい。（と思いませんか、ではないでしょ
うか、だと私は思うんですがどうでしょうか、という見方もあ
るかもしれません等、いろいろあります。）
・時々、文が途中で終わってしまった。語だけが並んでいる感じで、少し変だった。
・少し発音がわかりにくい言葉があった。特に漢字の長いことば。
（「てんかんしゃ」は、私は全然意味がわかりませんでした。どういう意味のことばでしょうか？）

Thanks for taking so many pictures.
I bet you can make a good compilation with them. Have fun.

Well, be careful not to eat much cream bread!? LOL

写真をたくさん撮ってくださって、ありがとうございました。
いい文集ができることでしょうね。楽しみです。

では、クリームパンの食べすぎには気をつけて！？（笑）

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So that's what my teacher thought. I have a pack of notes of what the other students thought as well, but I haven't looked at it yet.

Kilk at left, being cheesy. Me at right... WTF? I don't know.

After the presentation, we hustled the class outside for a group portrait, which we took a couple of just to be sure, which was fortunate, as the first three of the four we took didn't turn out well once I checked them.

Then, I spent an hour and a half helping Uchida-sensei piece together a Word document that had quite possibly the worst formatting I've ever seen in a word document - maybe second worst, thinking about it. Someone I live with has done much worse things in Word, if I think about it, which I'd rather not...
Ahem.

Then, we went shopping for ingredients for the food we were preparing for the farewell party, which I need to be at in about half an hour. It's a potluck and I'm being lame and bringing fried rice, but... It's what I can cook that isn't gyouza.