Back to Writings
A three month wait really pisses me off, and they could make this easier by just letting America grade the tests. America seriously isn't that incompotent, but oh well. I don't need to see the scores now to know how I did. As I said earlier to Christy: "I friggin' annhilated the test to hell!"
It's not like one really needs a piece of paper to say that they speak a language, but for free tuition to college, I'll chop down the mightiest oak in the forest with a nail file and process the wood into paper myself. I guess this test just made things convenient, huh? The first section was Kanji. I finished 15 minutes earlier ahead of everyone else, and the proctors were throwing the most evil glares I've ever seen my way. I think they were trying to melt me with heat vision. It was especially worse since one of the proctors was hot, otherwise I would have tried to maintain eye contact and been like "wtf?" but Yagi can testify to how I get when there actually is someone who can make me swoon.
The second section was listening. What a joke that was... You have four or five pictures in front of you on the test booklet and listen to a conversation going on between two people on cassette. You then have to pick the picture that applies based on the conversation. The second part to the listening was more or less the same, only instead of pictures, you have to choose ALL the ones that wrong, and then select the one that's correct. I'm not exactly sure how that section would be graded, but it was easy as hell.
The final section wasn't hard, but it was very inconsistent and time consuming: Reading and Grammar. the final question probably takes 5 minutes in itself, because you have to read a newspaper article and then select ways to correctly summarize it. The section before that was synonyms and antonyms. You need to replace the underlined word in the sentence while conveying the same meaning. Allow me to interject here that the Japanese are some pretty tricky people. There were quite a few times I found myself shaking my head and saying to myself "ohhh, very clever" to some of their answers in this section. I remember one specific question that wanted the synonym for "review". it's fukushuu, but they threw in the kanji to spell "review" and then the kanji for "revenge", which has the EXACT same pronunciation. It actually made me laugh. I could just picture my teachers coming into class going "okay, time for revenge!"
Anyway, the test was a piece of cake. Probably the hardest part was actually getting to it. while we were driving on I-94 enroute to Chicago for the test, Some guy in a lexus in front of Nathaniel was slowing down or speeding up irrgularly, and whenever Nathaniel would try to cut him off, the guy would speed up and make it impossible. Nathaniel really isn't one for roadrage, but you gotta admit that this would be kind of annoying for anyone. He loses his temper, gives the guy the finger, and speeds up to 83 mph...just in time to be clocked by a cop. The conversation between Than and the cop is really easy to summarize:
Nathaniel: Good afternoon, Offic--
Copper: (think a Kentuckian accent) Do you know how fast you were going, son?
Nathaniel: No, I--
Cop: 83 mph, son. We have tons of drunk drivers out here everyday goin' dat fast and causin' problems. We don't need you out here doin' that.
Nathaniel: I'm sorry, I'm just taking my cousin to a test and we're in a--
Cop: I'm givin' you a ticket. (he just walks away after that)
So not only did this cop have a loose grasp of the English language, but he also wouldn't even let Than finish a sentence.