A test

I have kind of failed at blogging. I had aspirations once, secretly - of course, some people knew, that I would like to become a travel writer. I even had a travel writing book given to me so I could learn more about it. I felt more and more that perhaps I could do it when people told me they used to read my blog every week. Some people even dedicated whole afternoons to catching up on it. I felt a bit of pressure between my secret aspirations, people that actually read it and then what I was reading in the book. So, I slowed down a bit. I think the biggest reason being I got too busy. But, I want to keep writing it, even daily. I want to write about things that are kind of funny that happen to me daily, or things that I think about, anything, really, I want to write about it from now on. So, I will and in between, hopefully, I can get some stories out about my weekend holiday trips to you as well. I apologize because it's not going to be chronological and that is why I never included my everyday life in my blog because it wouldn't have been chronological. So I guess expect the future posts to be something like this. sara's random funny story of the day. sara's long weekend to somewhere from 3 months ago. sara's book she just read. sara's future plans. Sara's short weekend to somewhere 2 weeks ago, sara's past thought combined with present occurrences. Don't expect any type of organization from here on out. It's just going to be....

....starting now...

I'm freaking out a bit. I've signed up to take the JLPT - the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I am taking it on Sunday, December 1st. That's less than one week away. I shouldn't be nervous because I study Japanese daily. I study while teaching English, I study at the grocery store, I study with friends, I study at the train station, on the train, reading the passing signs as they whiz by the train. When I'm not studying by simply living in Japan, I am studying out of a book, about 5-7 hours a week. And, I have a nice tutor who I meet for about two hours a week, where she helps me read Japanese more fluently and we practice speaking skills. We work on my pronunciation, she always corrects my casual form of Japanese into polite , "speak like a princess" Japanese. She is correcting all the mistakes I've grown into a habit saying when I teach myself. You can see that my life is constant studying. However, I'm still nervous for this test. Why? I haven't studied for "the test." I have "the test" studying materials here. I have old exams to practice off of, to get the ideas of what the test will be like. To do several examples of a possible question. These tests provide the basic set up of what all tests will be like. Yet, I haven't opened it once. Not once.

Now, if I were back in college; I would have been studying my ass off, for about a week in advance. Maybe a week before, 2 hours a day....all the way until the night before the exam, 8 hours a day plus pulling an overnighter before taking the exam. This is how prepared I was for taking exams back then. I knew the types of questions inside and out, I knew the test format inside and out....and it was all up to me to just take it and pass it. I haven't done that here. I used to do that with 5 tests being lined up to take. Each test receiving the same amount of proper studying time as the others. I only have one test here. I still haven't done it. What am I thinking?

I guess I am hoping that because I actually, fully understand it - minus the test set up and the types of questions that will be asked - I am hoping that just by knowing the language well, that the test set up and questions will not throw me for a loop by being unprepared for that. I am feeling pretty confident that I know the grammar. I am a little worried I don't know the kanji (Chinese characters). I'm taking level 4, which means it's the easiest level. I think I could do level 3 - vocabulary and grammar wise, however, I could never pass the kanji section, ever. Never, ever. For level 4 - you need only 100 kanji. For level 3 - you need 350 kanji. I can probably recognize 115 kanji. Here's a crash course in kanji - 木 this one to the left is tree　　山 this one to the left is mountain　　目 this one to the left is eye　　肉 this one to the left is meat　　私this one to the left is i or my　　人　this one to the left is person or people　車 this one to the left is car. Crash Course 2 - they don't have the same pronunciation 　水　this kanji to the left means water. it is pronounced mizu. But if you combine it like in the next example, it's pronunciation becomes sui. So, one has to know when to change it's sound when being combined with other kanji as well. By the way, this sui pronunciation goes together as suiyoubi which translates as Wednesday.　水曜日　　- So, the more you learn, the easier it gets. But, I still pretty much suck at it. I only started studying them since February, so I haven't even bothered studying for a full year yet. And since I've moved, I barely study it at all. I used to study only kanji with my tutor prior to moving. But, we can't meet anymore because now we live too far apart from one another. With my new tutor, there isn't must structured kanji studying. So, I'm not nearly as good at it as I should be. After writing this, I decided I am going to buy myself a kanji studying book because I would get much better at it if I had the book she used to teach me with.

Alright, that's it for now. will probably write again soon. I also am not going to be so anal about my word usage, sentence structure or capitalizatoin. I will try to make this a bit casual and not so professional as how I was trying to make it before. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.