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.

ごちそう！

Yesterday, instead of a second period of basic Japanese, we went out to a mall nearby and the teacher treated the whole class to dinner. I had 玉子焼き and some kind of あんこ soup. I'm in a bit of a rush, so I don't have time to explain those, but I wanted to note it.

Unnamed Teacher

Somehow, I don't know the names of most of my teachers. Being able to simply call them sensei is really convenient, and I very rarely am in a situation where there are more one or two sensei around, so it's usually not a problem. It's a little awkward when I go to the teacher prep rooms, but not really a problem outside of that.Well, and when I want to say whose picture this is. So this is my teacher on Tuesday for my afternoon classes. She has a name, I think, but I really haven't ever used it, so I don't know what it is.

Calligraphy Ninjing

[I have more pictures than things to actually say about them, but it's not enough to put in a separate gallery, so I'm just going to interject comments or info about the pictures wherever happens to be convenient.

By the way:

If you're in any of these pictures, I can get you higher-quality versions with no trouble at all, so drop me a line if you want 'em.]

I snuck my camera into the calligraphy class today during some free time I had today and I got some pictures.

(To the left is Cristina (Italian) and to the right is Alessia (also Italian). Or at least, I think that's who they are. I also get the two of them mixed up.
Far right is Valentina (also also Italian), my partner in level four.)

After this class is a tea ceremony class, and a bunch of the students wear kimono to it, purportedly because it makes the teacher happy.

(Far left is Yanavy (French), our French-/German-/British-English-speaking language ninja. I have recordings of her accent, which is probably the cutest of the students I know, but there are something like 32 different death threats if I ever show them to anybody, so they're just going to ferment on my hard drive.
Right is Cassie (American, by the window) and Magi (Canadian, closer, light purple kimono).
You can see Sara (Australian) and a guy from level two whose name I don't know in the middle picture.)

(This last picture is of two of the three Koreans in our level four class, Park Sou Jong and Park Min Ji. I honestly have no clue how to romanize their names, so I hope they will forgive me if they see this. Sou Jong is the one with the hat.)

The two characters they were writing that day were 山 yama/san/zan ("mountain") and 寺 tera/dera/ji ("temple"), pronounced together as any combination of the above, or even other random readings I don't know, like 山's yano reading, which is only used for names. That said, if you're rendering it as a normal word, it's pronounced yamadera, meaning "mountain temple".

I believe I may have mentioned that kanji and I are not on the best of terms.

More Slow Days

Nothing particularly of note has happened in a while. Been studying and learning lots of words and kanji, but news of that doesn't make for the most interesting blog posts. Yes, I still hate kanji.

We have kanji vocab quizzes every day in Basic Japanese, ranging from 15 to 42 words per quiz, averaging about 25. That's not so bad, but studying up ten of those, plus ten sentence patterns with one to four sub-patterns each, miscellaneous stuff we've done in class, a presentation, and a short paper in Japanese... I'm not looking forward to our next collective test.

I studied for the last one for four hours and scored a 78% on the test and 84% on the presentation and paper. Best score in the class was 93% and the worst was 70%, which says to me that they targeted the test's difficulty pretty damned well.

Thinking about going to Kiyomizudera with a friend and checking it out during momiji (leaf-changing time). That's supposedly when it looks the best.

Just ate a huge lunch - tofu will not burn easily, by the way: even if you drop it in boiling oil, it takes a good 20 minutes - and am feelin' that "just ate a huge lunch" need to take a nap. Class in an hour, though, makes that not the best of ideas. Probably just watch some anime or something.

Or fall asleep on my laptop.

Test of Doom

We had a test today in Basic Japanese that was pretty much a dastardly test all the way around.

First off, we had a three-page test. Not so bad there except that they printed it on double-size pages so they would have more room to mark errors. Kind of them, right?

Once that was finished, we were to write a 作文 sakubun ("composition") about a saying from our native language. We were allowed to write this beforehand and simply had to copy it onto the test, and we were further allowed to use our dictionaries and pretty much anything except the fellow students.

Here it is:

私の選んだことわざは「Rome wasn’t built in a day」ということわざである。　これから、その英語の言葉の意味を説明する。	The saying that I chose is "Rome wasn't built in a day". Now, I'll explain the meaning of those English words.
まず、「Rome」はローマ、または有名な古代の都市である。そのローマは雄大なところで、このことわざでは、都市じゃなくて、何かいいものか価値があるものを表す。次の「wasn’t」とは「じゃない」の過去受け身形で、「建つ」と意味する「built」とつながると意味は「建たれなかった」になっている。	First, "Rome" is "Rome", the famous ancient city. That Rome is a grand place, so in this saying it means not "city", but something good or something that has value. The next "wasn't" is the past passive form of "not" and when combined with the word that means "to build" "built"(1), the meaning becomes "wasn't built".
残っている言葉はべつべつでさほど意味がないのに、分けられるので、そうしようと思う。四つ目の「in」と言うのは「ある間うちに」のことである。次の不定冠詞の「a」を「日」のようの「day」と合わせると意味は「一日」になる。	The remaining words don't have that much meaning on their own, but we can break them up, so let's do so. The fourth word, "in", means "in a certain period"(2). The next word, the indefinite article "a", when connected to the word like "day", "day"(3), changes the meaning to "one day".
もし前の全部をつながって直訳したら、「ローマは一日の間に建たれなかった」になる。それでも、本当の意味は「価値があることが時々遅くできても大丈夫だ」あるいは「いいもの作るのは難しいよ」とだいぶに似ていると思う。	If you take all the previous pieces, connect them, and translate them literally, you'd get "Rome wasn't built in a day". In spite of that, I think the true meaning is similar to "It's okay if things that have value take a while to finish" or "The creation of good things is difficult".
日本語でこのことわざの意味を持っていることわざ、確かあると思っても、探してみたのに、等価のことわざをみつけることできなかった。多分、「頑張って下さい」と言ったら、十分に近い意味があると思う。	Even though I think in Japanese that there is definitely a saying that carries this saying's meaning, I looked and was unable to find it. Probably, if you just said "Keep trying!" it would be close... enough.

I'm not a big fan of tables and Blogger handles them particularly poorly, but this makes it look like I wrote more than I did, so you get a table.
1) Keep in mind that these were translated from Japanese, so where it says "built means built"
2) Recursive definitions suck, but this is another part where the fact that it's a translation sort of changes things. It'll make sense if you look at the paragraph that's from.
3) See (2).

On top of that, we had a stand-up presentation that was supposed to last for 5-10 minutes. I did mine and recorded myself to time the length and I think it was about 2 minutes, and only that long because I screwed up a couple of times. I have not mastered the art of writing these frustratingly long compositions and speeches that everybody else seems to be able to do. I think it's a combination of a lack of Japanese proficiency and my lack of oratory proficiency.

Only since I started this blog have I gained the ability to talk about length about nothing in particular. I've considered doing something similar in Japanese, but there would be no readers and it would be a lot of work. It would be great practice, but unless I can convince someone (Japanese) that they want to proofread crappy posts everyday for free, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Test

Test of doooom.

People Pictures

We had presentations today and I thought I would take some pictures. You can see that, as usual, my 50mm lens just makes everything good. That combined with some rather blunt digital darkroom business and you get these. Nothing amazing, but I think these are pretty decent. More importantly, these aren't just the good ones, but some of them. Only two pictures out of this set of 20 or so didn't come out well, both due to subject motion, something completely outside of my control.

At least, until I buy a Tazer. But that's neither here nor there, given Japanese weapon laws.

At left is Sara, my class's token Australian. She, of course, has a really cool accent. She also is very studious and very rarely comes to class unprepared.

At right you can see Kilik (right) and the teacher I call 元気先生 genki-sensei because I don't know his name. He's our only male teacher and always seems really excited, which is kind of cool. He's really supportive and his explanations generally make sense, though I have some difficulty with his accent.
You can see here that he's wearing a dress shirt with a tie and whatnot, but what you can't see is the slippers he's wearing. So I took the second shot (inside right) which is one of the couple different pairs of slippers he wears to class. I'm not sure what the story is behind them, but I think it has something to do with the uncomfortability of dress shoes. Maybe.

The guy on the left is "Mun-jii-san" called with the title for an old man because he's, like, 27 or something. He's the 2nd oldest of the study-abroad students that I know.

He's pretty cool, and he's studied in some kind of martial art, though I can't tell which and he doesn't talk about it.

He's Korean, in case you're wondering.

I got two pictures of Kilik that I just couldn't help picking because I really like both of them. Sometimes, I really like my camera. Most of the time. I worry about it a little when it's rainy, but it lets me take pictures like these that just wouldn't look quite the same from a point and shoot, even if the composition were the exact same.

Kilik is from Peru and is the one that drew me looking like Bill Gates.

Hopefully these pictures will line up the way I want them to, or this will look a little weird.

Here are the other two Koreans in our class: Seu Jeung Park (left, standing) and "Minji" (left- sitting). Seu Jeung organizes most of the parties and reads almost as poorly as I do, while Minji never says a word unless called on, but can read pretty much everything. I've only heard her miss one kanji thus far semester.

The last two people I took pictures of - and whose pictures I will post now - are Valentina Mazzeo and Ai Nishizaki.

Valentina is very nice and is one of those people that is always smiling. She's studying Japanese and Chinese right now, but has very passable English and natively speaks Italian. She's very supportive and kind, and helpful to boot. One of the things I like most about her is that she's engaged, and she doesn't drink alcohol or smoke anything. Her only vice as far as I know, is coffee...

She never quite looks herself in pictures, somehow. I don't really get it.

Okay, last picture before I try to go to sleep some more!

Ai Nishizaki (left, with the mic) is a student from the class I work with. Her English is so-so, but I think she's a Chinese major. She's kinda cute, I think, and has a strange something in her voice that I haven't heard anywhere else before.

Just fell asleep sitting here, so it's time for bed.
...
Zzzz...

Ninja

We went on an official trip today and I took a bunch of pictures. As much as I want to post some, I have a presentation to get ready for tomorrow. I'll see about getting some of the pictures up after work and before the party.

I'm also trying to get pictures from other people who took them, and I'm going to try and get them all on a DVD.

Played with my flash a lot while we were working on pottery, and I'm looking forward to seeing how some of those came out.

Most of One of Those Days...

Today was just one of those days where nothing goes right... for the most part. I was doing fine until lunch. After some messy eating, I found out that I had a kanji test in Basic Japanese. Level 4 kanji tests are usually 20 new kanji for writing and about 30 new kanji for reading. Not something I'm able to pull off in twenty minutes right before class. That said, I managed to get 11/15, and two of those points were due to my own inattentiveness and the rule I keep forgetting about with 送り仮名 (the syllabary characters after words with kanji). As a bonus, I also didn't have time to find out what any of the words meant, which killed me later in class, as today - coincidentally? - was the first time we actually did anything relating to the meanings of words on the tests. I swear the teachers are psychic or something. Maybe they're ninja. Psychic ninja?

Unfortunately, I also forgot to do the eight-page packet we were assigned over the weekend. Oh, and research someplace in Japan to want to go. Oh, and read the assigned parts of the book. Oh, and... actually, I think that's it. Normally, forgetting to do your homework wouldn't be such a painful experience, but when class drags out for three hours, it's at least three times as agonizing.

Very Good Guesses?

I don't know what it is that allows them to do it, but Japanese teachers are always prepared. It doesn't matter what you're going to talk about or what random question you might ask, they will have printed off twenty copies of stuff related to it and hand it out.

I need to start writing down when this kind of stuff happens, as I don't have many good examples. But I have got one from Friday...

After class, I noticed one of my teachers in the teacher prep room and he's just kind of sipping his coffee and reading book. So I knock and whatnot, and I go in and ask him a completely inane, out-of-nowhere grammar question. He thinks about it for a second, flips through a couple of the files that he brought with him to class and pulls out a 20-page packet about what I wanted to know about.

I don't know if the Japanese teacher training program also acts as a psychic test bed or what, but they are good.

Kilik... Strikes Back?

Kilik and I were assigned each other for a little interview thing, and we were supposed to draw the other person or take their picture. I, of course, wanted to take pictures, but everybody else wanted to draw, so we did. My drawing of Kilik is a circle with two lines for eyes and a dot of a mouth. It's like a stick-figure face.

Well, Kilik is an art major, and I spent as long posing as I did answering questions, but I'm glad to have a drawing of me by someone as good as he is. He knocked this out in about two minutes in class on a piece of scratch paper the teacher gave us, and a lot of detail was lost when it was copied, as well as some when I used my "scanner" (ie, my camera) to digitize it. Them's the breaks.

Eh, I like it anyway, even if it makes me look like Bill Gates.

Class-Work

So when we're picking classes, they hand us a schedule that has all of the available classes listed in the day/time slots that they are in. Classes are an hour and a half long, so there are four slots in the day (plus one hour of lunch) and five days during which there are classes, so we effectively have 20 time slots at our disposal. 10 of these are taken up with "Foundational Japanese" the required lecture class.

Of those, I have five slots remaining. I'm taking a lot fewer classes than I had meant to, but it's 24 hours of classtime a week. To top that off, I have nine hours of club activities spread over the week, plus the time to get to them and prepare and whatnot. I'm currently only working three hours a week, but I'm in the process of getting some more work.

Foundational Japanese

If you took Okada's class, imagine something entirely unlike that, for three hours each day, and you're getting the right idea.
Even this school's most basic classes are in Japanese, from what I understand, and we do a wide variety of things each day, and that variety changes everyday.

Today, we had the guy I call 元気先生 genki-sensei because he's really excited about half the time, and he's kind of loud. Also, he wears bright green slippers in class with his white shirt, tie, and slacks. He's our only male teacher in level four, as well. We did quite a bit of listening stuff, read a newspaper review of some movies, and did generally 一級 stuff that was way over all of our heads, but is good practice. It's really painful to do this kind of stuff on your own, because when you run into grammar you don't know, you have to hope you can find an explanation in a book or on the web. Having someone there to ask is really nice.

We have different teachers for that class every day, and my level has reading/writing kanji tests every other day. It's only 15-30 compounds, so twenty minutes of studying is usually enough to get a decent score.

All of this is a lot simpler than what normal students have to deal with, but is like this because it's a "Special Course in Japanese" as described by the school. We're welcome to sign up for normal classes if we so desire, but that makes things slightly more complicated. I'm signed up for two slots of normal classes that I didn't include in the calculations earlier, so tack another three hours a week onto that, if you like.

I didn't think about it before, but we're kind of getting screwed on credits. I mean, one credit usually means 1 week-hour of classtime, right? Each class we take should be 1.5 credits (1.5 hours), and then multiplied by 1.5 when we transfer because Japan uses a Semester schedule. I should end up transferring these back to Central for... a little over 50 quarter credits. I figure I have another .75 (1x1.5x1.5=2.25-1.5=.75) credits per base credit coming to me in a fair world.

Alas.

Calligraphy Brushes and Combinations

I went to a calligraphy class today* and talked to the teacher for a while afterward since he let everyone out early. We talked about various paper sizes, various weights of paper, and the different things you call some quantities of paper. I was kind of surprised he didn't have any business cards on him.

Apparently, he gets a paper the size of the classroom and uses a brush that could very well be a broom to write out a massive... thing. I don't know what he does with these things. I mean, we're not talking a small classroom, in case you're wondering. Figure... 30' x 40' or so. It's about $200 worth of paper. Yes, he stands on it to write and, yes, he has to walk around to write individual strokes.

He had some of his brushes with him, and he let me take a picture of them. Well, about 20 pictures, actually. Today's pictures were an exercise in photography and photo manipulation more than anything else, because I'm sure most of you know roughly how I feel about calligraphy.

First up is an overhead view of all of them. The one on the right is made from horse hair, though I don't know if it's tail or mane or of there are very fluffy horses, or if they pick their ears, or what.
The next one to left is made from sheep hair, and the next one from tanuki, which is something like a hybrid between a dog and a raccoon. I was going to link the Wikipedia article, but I can't access any of the Wikipedia servers right now, strangely enough. Anyway, there's quite a bit of folklore about them, apparently, and then there's the actual animal.
So what I did to this picture is fairly limited. I corrected the horrible distortion using my 18-55mm at its wide end creates, and I think I changed the colors slightly.

This one was just gratuitous and really didn't need to be included, but I had two similar shots, so I thought I would see about combining them. I've carefully exported this at the same low resoluation as everything else, so it's hard to see the weird misalignment. Apparently, I can't kep the camera perfectly still while handheld. Imagine that! It's one with the flash on, and one with it off and a longer exposure.
Anyway, don't do this, and if you do, be steadier than I am. Or use a tripod, like someone smart would.

Last is a dramatic (in as much as a pile of inanimate hair can be dramatic) shot of the brushes. I took a few pictures, doing my best to keep it lined up by using two scene elements and my viewfinder. I focused each one on a different brush, and then I picked the two that had the most of them in focus and combined them by hand.

The next version of Photoshop will do this for you automatically. And it only costs $800! You can even trigger this kind of stuff from inside of Lightroom, if you've spent a further $300 on that. It's probably worth it for people who do this kind of stuff a lot, but this is the first time I've done it and I don't see myself doing it a lot in the future.

Anyway, I like this picture the best.
...

DRAMA!

An Embarrassing Class MIstake

So I went to my first day of Spanish class tonight. When I got there, there was an American-sounding woman speaking English and confused why I was there, in her class she was to teach English to. She was also confused about why a bunch of people were taking the class twice.

As it turns out, she was in the wrong room.

So a few minutes later, the real teacher comes, and is confused why I'm there in her class she was to teach Spanish to. I later discovered that the class I was in was a special class for people who had failed some other kind of Spanish class.

So as it turns out, I can't take the class.

Fortunately, we still haven't registered for classes, so it's not a really big deal. I can't take any other languages, though, because they're all second-semester ones, and I don't want to try and catch up on a semester of people studying German for six hours a day. Or Russian. Or French. Maybe Esperanto or something cool, but not French.

I do want to take a foreign language class in Japanese, though, because I want to be more comfortable talking about language in Japanese. Many Japanese people are confused when I use even simple grammatic terms, such as "noun", "verb", or "adjective". I know that there are plenty of people in the States who couldn't tell me what an adjective is, but it's not something I'd expect from 2nd- and 3rd-year college students, let alone those studying language.

Another Proof

I just wrote this this morning, and I didn't proofread it at all, but here's a presentation stuffed into a paper.
The thing is, I accidentally convinced the teacher that we shouldn't give presentations, and she said we could just turn in a paper on the subject. Here's mine (Japanese, PDF), though I think it might be too late to be graded, I sent it to her a little bit ago.

Crass Algument

I was pretty much just spacing out in Basic Japanese today, largely because the prof was going on about Gion matsuri. Gion matsuri is a festival to protect Kyoto from evil spirits and takes place once a year. It lasts about a week and a half.
We're required to go to it on Thursday, and there are no study-abroad classes that day.

So, I was spacing out, abusing my dictionary, and suddenly K and Y (names changed to protect those involved?) started arguing.
Y:"Why are you laughing at me?"
K:"I'm not laughing at you."
Y:"I said [his accent is nearly indecipherable when he's in a good mood, so I lost what he was saying here]"
K:"And if I want to laugh - "
Teacher: "Stop, stop."
They both ignore the teacher and keep arguing, with the teacher doing his best to stop the argument without raising his voice. Y gets upset at being interrupted, and the teacher points out that it's his classroom, and if he says to stop, they ought to stop. Anyway, the three of them go back and forth for a bit, then the teacher starts lecturing to the class about asking questions that are on-topic and not arguing with everything that anybody tries to say.
With about a half hour of class left, B and H both start packing up their stuff with. H is from Afghanistan, and people always think he's Y, so I sort of understand. B is tired to being lectured at instead of being taught Japanese. H leaves, but the teacher convinces B to come back, and promises they'll get back on track.
W has no idea what's going on, and neither does A. They both thought they were following what was going on, but it would seem they weren't.

By now, the readers are completely lost and wondering if the FBI, DHS, or the SPCA* will come save them from this alphabet soup, only to realize the irony of such a dream, and to wonder how the SPCA got involved.

*Society for the Creation of Creative Acronyms

Grades

With the end of my first semester drawing near, I'm a little concerned about grades. I got a 35/60 (58%) on a grammar test we got back today. To be fair, the Sara's very studious and she only got 42/60 (70%). The class did, as a whole, poorly enough that we're essentially going to retake the test in lieu of the test she was intending to give next week.
I haven't been doing well on tests in that class, though I got some pretty good marks on the first few quizzes, this is one of the classes where I hope my attendance will save me, since I think I've only missed one day, and that was one sanctioned by the head of my program. By "sanctioned", I mean he gave us taxi money to go to a festival, in addition to canceling class.

As for my other classes...

• Basic Japanese is... I dunno. I got some poor grades at the beginning, but I think I've been average 16-18 out of 20 (80-90%) on the tests since then. I've done less than stellar on a couple of the tests, but I also got a 91/100 on the last test and I got an 87% on another.
  
• I've missed a couple of classes of ICP, but all but one were things that teacher wanted us to go to. In addition, though, I got a 65% on our first essay, and still haven't turned in the second. The third is due at some later date.
• Kanji... No clue. Seriously, my grades have wavered in this class a lot. It's one of the two classes I'm most worried about. A C would be good enough here.
• JCT is... also not so good. Again, a C would be good enough, but for that to happen, attendance will need to be a large part of the grade.
  I did pretty poorly on the kanji tests at the beginning because I was disorganized and couldn't keep the test types and content straight, and I had issues with that even on the last one. I've taken to asking this teacher, when I first see her that day, whether or not there is a test.
• The rest I'm not so worried about, because they're largely based on attendance.

I'm being somewhat purposefully vague here. I'm not entirely comfortable listing out which classes I'm taking.

Now, as negative as this post seems in general, I've heard from other students that I'll probably be surprised when I look at my grades are, to the extent that I might think to myself "Where did they get these?" I don't know if that's the case, but I sure wouldn't mind that, as long as it's in my favor.

Translation Errors

If you've ever wondered where errors in translation come from in seemingly simple sentences, I found I great example today to illustrate it. Even if you've never wondered, I still found a great example today. Is that not dedication?

ashita	tenki	ni	naru
あした	天気	に	なる
tomorrow	weather	(to)	become

The most often implied subject is the speaker, so someone might translate あした天気になる as "Tomorrow, I will become the weather." Obviously, unless you're talking to someone very, very special, this sentence is simply wrong. Guesses at the true meaning?

Well?

"The weather will good tomorrow." See? Much better. But remember that Japanese doesn't have future tense, so if you're looking for it, give up. It's implied by the fact that we're using the nonpast and a time noun that's in the future.