This is Only a Test

Sorry, folks, no blog to speak of now.  There are plenty of issues going down (nothing quite as substantive as the last few posts), but at the moment we at Gaijin HQ are driving ourselves crazy preparing for the JLPT.  In short, the JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

...In slightly less short: Jenn and I are taking the JLPT Level 3 test for the second time this December.  Basically, this is the test that gets you a piece of paper that says you can speak (and read) Japanese.  While the uses of this piece of paper beyond Japan may be obscure and unforeseen, one of our goals in coming to Japan was to actually learn Japanese, something that goes a bit quicker with some motivation.

For those of you out there who aren't abreast with the minutiae of our language acquisition, our Japanese has finally, after many, many months of study, progressed from "basically nonexistant" to "bad."  We have Japanese friends, we can make some conversation, we can make a few jokes (ask Jenn, hers are pretty awesome), we can order in most restaurants and even order pizza over the phone...but amazing as all that may seem sometimes, my vocabulary is still routinely dwarfed by 4-year-olds.  It's not an easy language, is what I'm trying to say.

To this end, we enrolled to take the JLPT last July to give ourselves a concrete goal and a way of measuring our progress.  After flailing through a smattering of Japanese textbooks, we finally procured the services of a really awesome tutor, whom Jenn sees three times a week and I see once a week (the life of a kindergarten teacher is a busy one).  She's an awesome foreign language teacher, and this is coming from someone who sees a lot of really sucky foreign language teachers, someone who knows that it's considerably harder to teach English than it is to speak English.  After a good hard 5 months of drilling vocabulary and grammar and a million such things, we went in and soundly failed the test.

With another few months' work of preparation behind us, we are going into the test again on December 4th.  Which is why I have so much studying to do, which is why I don't have time to write...a...blog.

Hm.

Well, as long as I'm here, how about a couple pictures?

A sign posted above the toilet in a restaurant/bar that we frequent.  Translated: "Rather than speed, control."  An important message for us all (well, all us men, anyway).

AAAAAAH!  THE DEAD HAVE RISEN!  This is probably one of the more fun crafts we've had in Free School.  Happy Day of the Dead, everyone!  You'll hear from us again sometime after the JLPT, probably!