Almost 2 weeks ago, the first Monday after I arrived, I did all my paperwork, including signing up for Japanese classes. I didn’t hear anything about the Japanese classes and was thinking it was probably about time that I did, so I sent an email yesterday asking what was up. I was told that the placement exam was the day before, and asked if I had attended. I responded I didn’t know it was on and therefore hadn’t attended. The office administrator’s reply’s opening just about summed up my own reaction.
Dear Daniel-san,
Oh, my God.
She helped me out though, and asked the Japanese Language Center if they could accommodate me that day. They said they could, so I left Akihabara and dashed to Hongo for the exam. It was already 5pm when I arrived and the exam and interview took 2 hours all together. I felt really bad for the teachers and administrators in the office: they all had to stay longer to accommodate my mixup. I’m still not sure exactly where it went wrong, but it must have been me missing some part of an email because the administrators in Todai are always totally on top of things. I don’t know how they manage to deal with so many students at the same time and still stay polite, friendly, and in control of everything.
The exam was interesting. I got pretty much full marks on the basic and intermediate parts of the exam, but could hardly answer a single question on the advanced part. In fact, I don’t think I could answer a single one at all. During the interview I was given a few paragraphs of advanced Japan to read, during which I frequently had to stop and ask for the readings of kanji I had never seen. I didn’t know what any of the words with those kanji meant either. However, in the intermediate level Japanese there was only one word I didn’t know, but I could read all of the kanji, including the kanji for the word whose meaning I didn’t know.
This placed me exactly between two classes. I would know almost everything in the intermediate class, and almost nothing in the advanced class. However, this semester I’m a research student and I don’t have any minimum number of credits to get or any exams to worry about failing or passing, and I have a lot of time (compared to what I’ll have once I can start a formal masters course), so I asked if I could try the advanced class, based on the recommendation of one of the teachers. Even if I’m in a situation where I can’t keep up with the class, I’ll at least be getting nice big collections of grammar and vocabulary that I don’t know. Here goes nothing!
