English Banditry

So last time, I related the tale of the challenges involved in getting a seat in this crazy country, one which might just have more students of Japanese language than Japan has population. I got lucky with that and was able to make a last minute adjustment to take the test in Jinan, Shandong. That's a swift 9 hour over-night train ride away. Get on the train. Flop on the bed. Wake up and suddenly you are there. The problem is that China grants admission to testing rooms based on a form called a 准考证 Zhunkaozheng, and they won't mail it to you, you have to show up in person with photo ID to claim it. The deadline for doing so meant I had to travel north four days in advance of the test.

I enter the Zhunkaozheng claiming room to bewildered expressions. Yes, just as I thought, I'm the only whitey out of more than 80,000 seats in this country. It seems other people don't come to CHINA to learn JAPANESE. I have to go to another office to register to have the results mailed to me as I'm not spending 18 hours and 800 kuai to claim it in person. The funny lady looks bewilderedly at the name written below the address and says, "No one knows what this [crap] means. Is this a name or something? You have to have a Chinese name. Write your Chinese name here." Yes, one needs a Chinese name to take an internationally conducted Japanese exam.

The fervor of it all way immense. If you want to be a part of something big, come take your JLPT test in China. For the past several weeks I didn't go a day without seeing someone doing some last reviews of JLPT prep books on the subway on the way to work. Now in the final stretch, studying around the clock myself, I entered a 24-hour McDonalds (to get a hot chocolate!) not even near the testing university and saw entire aisles of seats claimed by students zombie eye-edly scanning up and down the pages of their well-worn JLPT prep books. On the final night one unfortunate fellow (seems to have been a Japanese guy helping his Chinese girl with a few tough grammar points) made his native status a bit too obvious to surrounding parties and got totally ambushed. "Hey excusay-muah? Just a quick question..." A book shoved in his face I saw it took him more than 15 minutes to escape their merciless onslaught.

Test day arrived swiftly. The party of proctors (is three really necessary in one small room?) didn't want to let me in the room because they were convinced I should be taking a Chinese language exam instead somewhere else in a room with a bunch of non-Chinese. You'd think with three proctors they could force people to follow the rules, like the first one printed on the very first line on the cover of the test book "Don't open and start until instructed to do so". I turned and admired the girl behind me as she seemed full of entrepreneurial spirit and about ready to open her own 711 with the assortment of coffee, chocolate bars, and white rabbit candies arranged across the top of her desk. So much for only being allow pencils and erasers. I heard the sound of everyone flipping to the third page of the vocabulary section as the head proctor finally gave the word "go" and I flipped to the first page. It's not that I refuse to culturally assimilate in China, it's just that I'm trying to meet the international standard for this test, not the cheating Chinese one.

The extra minutes the room of cheaters stole on the vocab section didn't make an oodle of difference, I had no problem finish the section with surplus time. The listening section requires one to bubble in the correct one out of four options in the first wrong and the incorrect three out of four on the row after. An obvious Chinese test pro next to me began bubbling in all four in the odd rows, seeing as it is faster to erase one correct one later than to bubble in three wrong ones. Many others followed her lead and began bubbling away before the recording began. If only they used the headphones equipped on every desk I might have had a prayer on listening. Instead, they used a blaring boombox and crap cassette. Adjusting the volume and making sure everything worked the proctor played random segments of the tape allowing us an unfair "preview" off all the questions we're just supposed to be able to hear once. It didn't help, my hearing sucks. I guessed on every question for 35 minutes and got rather depressed. My brain's foreign language auditory processing unit just sucks in dealing with blaring noises and classroom echoes.

Passing out the reading and grammar section the proctors didn't even give the word "go" because I was the only person in the room who hadn't started immediately upon receiving the test book. Finally I made eye contact with the head proctor and she nodded for me to go. The dirty bastards got a full two minute head start on me, and this is a section where 30 seconds can make a difference of a few percentage points. Remember the test is "normalized" internationally in part based on the performance of the cheating Chinese (who comprise 40% of test takers). For the full 70 minutes the three proctors clickity-click made laps around the room eyeing everyone and consequently made me nervous as hell. There is nothing more intolerable to me than having someone watch me take a test or do a math problem. Ugh. Sit your ass down, woman!

So now I get to wait until March for the results.

One's perception of progress is relative to what he believes is possible. I had thought, however, that there must be some sort of lower limit to it. Apparently not, and ... I can't stop laughing:

Several months ago, for example, I visited the local Japanese conversation group. The Japanese woman who runs the group decided to test my greeting skills: instead of "Konnichi-wa" she asked, "Joe-san, o-genki desu-ka?" (Roughly: "Are you healthy/well?") My mind clicked away for a second while I pulled up one of the early Pimsleur lessons, then instead of saying "huh?" or giving the more frequent response, "Hai, genki desu" ("Yes, I am well") I was able to reply, "Hai, okagesama de" ("Yes, thanks") in my best Japanese enunciation. She wasn't expecting to hear that response, and the look on her face was priceless. I'm no Japanese expert, but I was one that evening.

...

I got to sit with the advanced group and practice saying, "Sumimasen, wakarimasen" ("Sorry, I don't understand") for the rest of the evening. [Source]

In other news, last night I dreamed that I finally made my escape from the hell-hole of English Banditry to greener pastures (Japan?). When I got there, EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE ISLAND NATION HAD BEEN TRANSFORMED INTO AN ENGLISH BANDIT. I ran around frantically crying out in search of a speaker of Japanese. When I finally saw that all was hopeless, I broke down and wept. Yes, I didn't cry, I wept -- profound tears of sorrow.

For anyone not familiar with Ken Tanaka, let me introduce to you one of the most original and genuinely pleasant discoveries I have made on Youtube in quite some time:

How to speak fluent Japanese without saying a word PART 2

KEN TANAKA MEETS JONATHAN SMITH PT 1　外に出て両親をさがす田中

The rest of his wicked cool stuff.

Well this blows. I thought I'd be safe registering for the JLPT 日本語能力試験 in Shanghai if I did it within the first week (out of three) of which registration is open. It's a shameful testament to my understanding of China's culture (or population? a little of both to be sure). TEST PSYCHOS! So I register (to be eligible to pick a testing location) on the website, but it's not liking my lack of Chinese name and the space between my first and middle name. So I had to waste the morning faxing them and on the phone getting that straightened out...

And with all that effort... I neglected to do any web searches and find out the pure insanity of this country. The essential literature:

Secret Techniques to getting into the JLPT level 2 test. It has lucid beautiful details about the best and fastest web browsers to use, recommended locations with the fastest connections to the internet, auto page refresh techniques, and reference details about page refreshing hotkeys, etc.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE! From this I see there are nearly 25,000 seats in Shanghai alone for Levels 1 and 2. EVERY SEAT IN THIS ENTIRE GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY WAS TAKEN IN 21 MINUTES! Twenty-one MINUTES!!!

I'm not just a week too late --- by 21 minute interval standards, I'm a lifetime too late.

My last inkling of hope is that every day at noon a few seats from idiots that screwed up on paying their 350 RMB testing fee will be released. . .  I'm not liking these odds.

I'm blowing off some steam here -- once you have your items all in there, day to day reps are relatively uneventful. But try to import anything, and just like back in 2000 when I found Supermemo -- there is hell to pay.

Anyway, if you want to get a word list into Supermemo CE or Supermemo 2006, especially if it has Chinese or Japanese words, then you have come to the right place. I will go through my nightmarish afternoon step by step to save you the suffering. I have been using the AJATT Japanese method for about a month now, and entering sentences on my main Supermemo 2006 under Vista has been surprisingly pleasant. Vista and Supermemo 2006 love each other, and things just work better than they did on XP. Anyway, as cool as that's been, I'm getting frustrated with having spare time and not being able to do something with it. If I add too many items, the next day I might not finish my reps. That's bad because it will destroy morale like no tomorrow -- as every long-time SRS user knows. So I thought what about using Supermemo CE and not being so strict and caring if my reps get finished, but just casually getting some individual words imprinted so when they do come up in sentences I punch into my main Supermemo, they will be digested by my brain more easily? I mistakenly thought I could do a few Google searches, get either a premade Supermemo Q&A list or at least a text file which I could transform, and be on my merry way. I was wrong, DEAD WRONG! It was a classic Supermemo import afternoon.