fusion

Final Day of Placement Tests

Based on my score of yesterday’s tests, I got placed into the upper level tests today to determine which class I’ll be placed in to. Last semester I was in I class, which was designated as the intermediate level. This semester, having been designated into today’s test, I’m sure to be in one of the M classes ― advanced level. Although, I certainly don’t feel I’m at that level.

The testing period was four hours. The first five pages were multiple choice and fill in the blank. Sentences in Japanese were prepared where we had to choose the best form of a verb or choose the most correct word in a blank. These pages weren’t too bad, just more tedious than anything else. We weren’t allowed to use our dictionaries.

The remainder of the test was reading comprehension, maybe another dozen pages or so with most of the stories being at least one page long. The stories got progressively harder as they went along in terms of vocabulary used, grammer patterns, subject matter, and ― of course ― the absence of furigana. The final story was about the philosophy of climbing mountains and all that entails ― PITA that was to try and understand. After finishing the reading comprehension, we had to write a short paper on anything we’d like related to Japan or ourselves and Japan. With less then fifteen minutes left and unable to think of anything to write about to fill a page, I wrote about how Japanese-style bathrooms are so different from Western-style ones and how it annoys me. (In Japan, the “bathroom” is a room containing the tub and sink. In there, you shower in the room and then take a bath. The entire room is plastic and thus OK for water. There is a different room for the toilet. In the US, naturally, we shower, shit and bathe in the same room ― different receptacles usually.)

This test was hard! I haven’t yet run into anybody today that took it and said otherwise. At the end of the four hours I was done for the day. Tomorrow we find out our class assignments and once we go to them, we take a kanji placement test x_x