Day 3, Japan Orientation Paralysis

Orientation Paralysis
So after a long day of orientation, the prospect of free time feels mildly paralyzing. It'll wear of in a moment, but after a day of placement tests, forms, and sticking to a schedule, all of a sudden you feel like a puppet with its strings cut and fall to the floor.


Placement Test
Today we took the Placement test to determine which Japanese class we would be put into. I went into it pretty stress free, because while I would like to get into JL 201, I'm not going to be heartbroken if I end up having to relearn hiragana in 101. The test was pretty difficult, but I figured they go up to 500 level classes, so it has to be.

The first section was listening, we got some pretty basic dirrections, but the more specific dirrections were in Japanese. This threw off a lot of kids who were either really nervous, or didn't know Japanese at all. Probably a few people that didn't make the connection that we would hear a conversation, and then get asked a question, all in Japanese. I was pretty proad of myself to know at least what the question was asking, but I was nowhere quick enough to get the answer to the question. They were pretty tricky too, a lot of the questions were of the category of "what sport does Dan like?" and the conversation would talk about the sports that he played, and the sports his sister played, and the sports his friend liked, and the sports he didn't like. Multiple choice helped a lot. I felt confident on maybe 2 out of my 8 answers

The second section was multiple choice grammar. Which I really dove into. We had an hours to complete a section of grammar and a section of kanji. After the listening I was glad to see sentence structures that I knew every word of. I felt pretty good through about half the questions of the first section when I checked my watch and it slapped me in the face and said, "Fifteen minutes slowpoke, goodluck finishing hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha" So I got maybe 3/4 of the grammar section done and didn't even bother with the kanji.

The third section was reading comprehension and essay. . . hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Yeah I'm nowhere near that level just yet. It was like those SAT questions, but all in Japanese. I understood some basic principles but when the kanji dont have furigana (little translations in hiragana above them) I'm pretty stumped.
My essay wasn't bad though. They pretty much said, "the topic is Study Abroad, go to town." I tried to be a little too fancy for my own good, and kept writing myself into corners, where in order to explain myself I needed to use phrases that I just didn't know in Japanese. Basically I tried to say how I liked writing and wanted to write books, and that my experiance in Japan would help give me inspiration and life experiance nessecary for an author.

It came out more like "Good books want good people and good places, there are good people and good places in Japan therefore I like study abroad" creative? yes. basicallly what I wanted to say? yes. eloquent? hell no. understandible? maybe? not sure.


You Cant fight City Hall
After the placement test we went to get our papers validated by the Japanese government. There is a government building (I assume City Hall) about 5 minutes away. Which was actually really uneventful. We had a chaperone Mike, help us all out a lot. He's American and a employee of the university, he's got excellent organization skills but is constantly a little frantic. Not much of a story there except that a government employee knew enough english for my name to confuse him.

Mackenzie Bradford Cameron. Each part of my name is interchangeable, in fact I know a Cameron Mack at Ithaca. On top of the fact that in Japan you put your family name first. So he'd assumed I'd gotten it backwards on a specific sheet, but he caught on pretty quick after he saw my passport.

Some people would consider it an inconveniance, but I find it pretty cool, because it actually lends itself to minor cloaking in terms of paperwork if I decide to do anything south of legal (in America or Japan). Not enough to get away with anything thats for sure, but it would be a very very slight advantage.



Tommarrow is academic orientation, and then after that is mostly free. We'll see what mischief I can get myself into when I'm off the leash.

-Cameron