Jean Of mArc

Dear Everyone,

I’m sorry that I haven’t been keeping up on the posts. To be honest, I just plain forget about the blog a lot the time, or don’t think about it when there’s a good opportunity to do so. Anyway, there’s my apology, on with the post!

As the title of this post states, I have a test coming up this weekend all the way up north in Sapporo city. It is the JLPT test that I mentioned way back in fall on this very same website! Don’t believe me? Well check it out for yourself!

So, many people have been asking me if I feel ready for this test, and the honest answer is: I think so, but I’m not sure. I’ve been spending countless hours studying from various books for the past 4 months in preparation. I’ve learned over 2,000 words, numerous grammatical structures, about 1,000 kanji characters (or combinations thereof), and read countless examples.

However, there is a problem: in the practice tests that I’ve been going through, there are always a number of words that are NOT listed on the vocabulary list, or some new way of wording things that I’ve never seen before. So my thoughts are: if the material on the test only uses what I’m SUPPOSED to know (according to the standards), I should be fine. Not perfect, but fine. But if there are too many things on the test that they never even told me I needed to know, then things probably won’t turn out so well. There’s no way I can memorize the whole dictionary just in case I run into some words I’m not familiar with. And if you don’t know what a word is, sometimes it is possible to figure it out based on context, but sometimes you are just at a lost. So hopefully what I know will do. Also, my listening comprehension is kind of low, because the input is so much faster with a voice than it is on paper. Not only that, but you can’t go back and re-read something that was spoken. So, we’ll see how it goes.

The reason I chose the title for this post was because when I finished my last exam at Acadia, I was so excited, telling everyone that I just finished my “last test ever!!!” Guess that was a bit premature. At least this one has no barring on graduating from a school or anything.

It’s hard to believe how long I’ve been here: when I came it was hot and humid, and the students’ summer vacation was just starting! Now it is December and we are beginning to see winter. I’m already done 1/3 of my first year here! It went pretty fast!

In December, I am used to seeing Christmas decorations all around, stores get more packed, and Christmas music is always playing anywhere in public. I was not expecting this in Japan, since Christmas is not really important to most Japanese people; New Year’s is the big deal here. However, just as in Canada, there are Christmas decorations everywhere here, and Christmas music is always playing… but the stores aren’t any more packed than usual. I was told that in Japan, Christmas Day is a day where young couples celebrate their love by going to Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, I didn’t make that up.

On the topic, yesterday was my first full-day school visit to another school besides the one I teach at. This is a school for disabled children. Because of that nature, each child has their own care-taker, and classes are only between 2 to 8 students. It was tons of fun: we played games with them, and sang songs with them. This DOES have to do with Christmas, because we sang “Silent Night”, and they got me to dress up like Santa Clause, complete with beard and red clothes, and come in to give gifts to the students. The pants were way too wide for me, so I had to fight to keep them on. After I left and came back as my regular self again, the kids were telling me that I had just missed seeing Santa!

Anyhow, that’s all I feel like writing right now, so that’s all I’m going to write! But some day soon, I will put up a more amusing post… as soon as this darn test is over with!