Japanese Midterm Exam

So well, another week has passed again with nothing but study. This week was the japanese course midterm exam, so I was terribly busy these days. Since I’m quite stupid myself, I have to study twice as hard as everyone else or else I won’t make it. Japanese learning is quite difficult since I can’t even read long paragraphs, because there’s a hell lot of kanjis （漢字）, I can barely read kids tales, and not even as fast as a 5 year old japanese kid.

They say that, in order to properly read the newspaper, you need to learn at least 2000 kanjis (that amount is just freaking insane). I can read and write up to 150 to 200 of those at the moment and still can’t understand even the shortest articles. And also, since most kanjis have more than one way to be read, that makes it quite hard to learn words.

Conversation (会話) is really problematic for me at this moment, I can understand most of what people say at least, but when is time to talk back is a real pain, since it takes much more time to remember all the words and stuff.

So well, regarding the exam, it was a hell lot much easier than what I thought it would be, so that’s good, but I think I screwed completely on the conversation part. As I’ve already told you before, I’m still no good at talking in japanese (in fact, I think I’m no good at talking at all regardless of the language), so I understood almost everything, but to give the answers back was a real pain.

Anyways, I realized how bad I was at japanese, so in order to improve a little, I decided to try to read something else. So well, afterwards I bought a Weekly Jump (a manga book), there’s furigana (振り仮名) over the kanjis so It’s quite easy to read, and since there’s all the pictures and stuff at least is somehow easier to understand what they are talking about. I was reading Bleach (again), Eyeshield 21, D.Gray Man, Naruto and One Piece, so it was easy to follow the story at least, since I’ve known those for quite a while already.

I’m quite happy since, I could at least understand most of the stories. The only drawback, is that it usually uses words that I most certainly won’t use like てめえ and このやろ which, is quite understandable, since most stories are about people trying to kill each other.

Also, I’m trying to keep some kind of journal in japanese, in order to to improve my writing skills. Maybe even one day I’ll be able to write this whole thing in japanese, who knows.

Well, afterwards, I went with Ben, Akira, Baska, Thiago, Luke, Lukas and Eli to an all-you-can-eat (食べ放題) and all-you-can-drink (飲み放題) italian restaurant in Shibuya (渋谷区). I think I have already told you before, but pasta here in Japan means most likely spaghetti only.

The food was great. We had some salads, tons of spaghetti, a whole variety of pizzas, and we even had dessert. It was somewhat more expensive than usual of course, but it was great I think, I couldn’t even have breakfast the next day.

Well, since we had the exam on Thursday, they let us take some rest on Friday, so well, after sleeping almost the whole day (I really needed it), I prepared my lunch and then went to the campus again with Hui in order to study for our entrance exam.

We spent a whole lot of time studying for it and could only solve like half of a problem, which is quite bad. We are going to study again tomorrow, I sure hope we are able to solve more problems then.