Shock Horror/Amazement!

Two things that I just forgot!

One of which I have been meaning to write of for an age!

Last week was the end of Richard Gere's reign supreme in J-land. That was it! And out he went to be succeded by a man who apparently intends to reform the Uni system, and whilst I'm naturally all against the notion of politicians interfering in the running of educational institutions . . .VSU and all that. Japanese Uni students are almost entirely without drive or focus, taking their clubs activities more seriously than their studies, and thus seem in need of a bit of a shake up. The way the entire system is geared is a complete farce . . . even if you don't like your course once you've chosen it, no matter how uninformedly you did so, you'd have to lose a leg to get out again.

So it's Sayonara to Koizumi.

Number 2: I just saw my results from last semester - and so it's official that when I'm not suffering for sleep deprivation and an inability to stop crying or leave my room I'm brilliant! I got AAs for all of my Intermediate Japanese classes (one of which I got a C for last year because I didn't turn up to class for about two weeks and do my presentation) and for Advanced Japanese that consisted of studying mainly with Koreans and Chinese students who'd been in Japan for a number of years and were students doing the entire degrees at Shudo, I got an A and B!!! And they were sooooo hard!

AA for Linguistics which was to be expected though I don't think I did anything except turn up to classes every two weeks and hold sway in the class having debates with the teacher or else writing drawn out letters to Sarah of RWH fame.

Only got an A for the crazy class with Chris the Pol. I fail to see how I could have done more though . . . we three girls paid attention most of the time, all wrote the extra and unrequired essay and even accompanied Chris to a festival whilst the boys refused to participate. Though we weren't required to wear big nappies in order to do so . . . maybe that had something to do with it.

Other than that I got two Cs for rather unimportant classes . . . both difficult in different ways. One seemed to have no subject content and would lull you to sleep in the early afternoon of the long slog that was Monday. It featured an exam which required you write about cultural assimilation and disassociation themes in Japanese . . . yeah right! I couldn't remember a whole lot of specific terms that we needed to know and everyone else had stuck into the memory of their dictionaries except me - I bombed it evidentally even though I worked really hard in class to participate this wasn't enough to salvage my grade . . . waste of time class anyway - no regrets.

The other was the World Cultures and Languages - you try reading academic texts in another language in a couple of weeks and then write an essay about it. Especially difficult because of kanji. If it were English, French or some such language that was your second language then I'm convinced it'd be easier to read them but the kanji thing makes it so much harder because you have to spend hours searching for the readings just so you can read the word!! It's not just a matter of simply looking up a word you don't know . . . I'm sure I wrote about the hellishness of it at the time! Well, I worked hard on the first essay but when exams were done and the second report's due date came around I did my best but it was the literally non-existent piece that I handed up at the end of the day so I'm not surprised that I didn't do any better.

Well . . . I'm super happy because the bits that really matter were great and the bits that don't I need not even concern myself with!!

Now I just have to find some way to convince the Japanese Proficiency Test people to accept a late application to take the exam in December or my plans for the future are going to be in even more of a whirl . . . . . Ahhhhhhh frenzy!