Ok so today I had my first Japanese listening test, and to be honest – I was freaking out.

Mentioned a million times before: I test well.  I’m good at exams, comfortable, never nervous, and it’s what I do best at.  However this was different.  I was freaking out!!! I felt severely underprepared.  The thing that was letting me down was definitely my vocab – which is terrible! I have SOOO much trouble remembering/recalling different vocab.  Obviously this would be a problem. Even if i know what they said – i wouldn’t know what they meant.  It’s the thing i have the most trouble with!

I’m quite good at the actual listening part – I find understanding Japanese a bit easier than I first anticipated.  I can even hear words i didn’t know, and search them for google with absolutely correct spelling – so i think i may have a bit of an ear for it.  But again – USELESS without knowledge of vocab!

So I figured I’d brush up on adjectives and “things around town”.  As we did have a study sheet and these were the 2 main things that I was REALLY rusty on.  Oh and dates, not so much months, but days (eg. the 1st of the month is a word i’ve already forgotten… *googling*… “tsuitachi“, then counting onwards, “futsuka“, “mikka“… etc. etc.).

That’s me… Yeah… The Asian guy…

Come test time i was nervous as hell.  Haven’t felt that way in a very long time.  But we got into it, and it was surprisingly easy!  I think i did really well.  We had a section on phone numbers – something I’m not great on only because I’m slow with numbers and our practice material is spoken in Chuck-Norris-Speed.  However Mayumi-Sensei said them very slowly lol So it was not problem at all.

However, walking away from the test, I don’t feel as good about it as I should.  I’m sure my marks will reflect some positive figures, but I don’t think I’ve really learned as much as I should have.  There were a bunch of sentences there that I felt I should have understood – but i lucked out because those sentences weren’t questioned.  So it feels like I kinda cheated the system a bit by only knowing exactly what they had on the test, and nothing more.

I guess more study is required!

iX09 - What the hell is it!?!?

NO idea until yesterday (or maybe the day before, can’t remember).  If you check out my last post, some random named “Erin” made a comment about being selected to be in some International Exchange Blog competition or something.  So after visiting the website she suggested it seems i’m on a list of 100 International Exchange blogs, and basically friends, family, fans (*lol*) can go to that site and vote for me and the winner gets some sort of prize.

After shooting them an email I now know that the prize is actually donations to a Unicef Charity called “Schools for Africa”.  So technically I, personally, don’t win anything.  Now I am by no means a charitable person – due to the fact that I think I really don’t have much to offer (and don’t try to convince me otherwise).  And I’m quite happy to announce that publicly, in the middle of a competition where the prize of a charitable nature.  BUT! I do understand that charities are a wonderful cause, and If i really can contribute by blogging and simply mentioning the “Schools for Africa” charity here on my blog whilst actively take part in this competition to help raise awareness of their cause then why not?

So yeah, if you like my blog – Vote away!  Polls close on the 7th of June – so be quick!

Ciao for Now!