Up-date: We passed! Somehow and with little in it…success!

In the first weekend of December, Dan and I decided to give ourselves a little festive treat, and take a Japanese proficiency exam. We went in at the beginner, and lowest, level of N5 of the JLPT test (Japanese government accredited).

So we enjoyed (in no way) months of hard work, study, and conversations along the lines of…

L: “So you can use か as a question particle and comparison depending on the context?”
D: “はい！You can also use it to (eyes glaze over on L) and (faint buzzing in L’s brain) and (L takes her last breath). Understand?”
L: “Yeah, no, I don’t get it. I’ll study that next week…maybe…”

And then the test was upon us. We felt O.K going into it. We felt hopeful our hard work and numerous practice of example mocks would pay off.

And how did it go? It was AWFUL. Really, quite a terrible way to spend a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon. The weather was beautiful, warm and inviting. The exam room was dingy, unfriendly, and full of the constant buzz of florescent lighting. And then the exam started…

So we don’t actually have the results yet, but I for one feel pretty confident I know my results (I was WRONG!) In Harry Potter speak, it would be a T…, for troll. The whole test was a nightmare / joke from a Japanese TV show I don’t understand, and now never will, from start to finish…my first section unraveled after and extremely unhelpful JLPT official gentleman decided to come into the exam room ⅔ of the way through and start bossing our assessors around in Japanese. Nothing could make me lose the ability to focus on Japanese vocabulary more than a man in front of my desk frantically whispering in said language.

Not wanting it to have been a total fail Sunday, on the way home, feeling a little miserable, we took to canned Highballs (that’s whiskey friends, whiskey). In no way do I advocate drowning one’s sorrows in alcohol on a Sunday evening, but this week, it really helped! So by 7 pm, and a little drunk, we felt mildly better…

Results out in February…I will wait with baited breath. Haha!