A bunch of tests and a Zoo

Mind-clearing incoming. This week we’ve had three tests; listening, speaking and reading tests. I think I’ve done pretty well on them all, they’re basically to assess your level of Japanese and to check that you’re moving at the right pace and such. During the tests we’ve all been “judged” by the teachers in how good we are and about 3 or 4 in my class I think have been offered to move to another class that is further ahead. I was asked to move to a different class as well but I said no. Some reasons why: I haven’t really studied any Japanese in Sweden, so the Japanese I know now is from what I’ve learned here. Moving to the other class would mean skipping about 4 chapters in the book and studying them on my own. I don’t really see any reason to why it would be better to study them on my own and then just be 4 chapters ahead, 4 chapters is very little progress. The second problem I have is that the other class wouldn’t move at a faster pace, they’d just be those 4 chapters ahead. Sure I could save about a month by studying that one month concentrated at home and maybe save another month during the next class upgrade or something and then when I get home I’d have studied the equivalent of a year and two or three months instead of just a year. I think I’d know those extra three months significantly less well at the end of everything though. It’s not as though I can’t continue to study at home, so I don’t really think this would make any significant difference. What I actually DO want is to study at an overall faster pace. It’s probably just because there’s been sooo many tests lately that we’ve barely managed to learn anything new that I feel it’s moving kind of slow right now. But yeah, I wouldn’t really mind a little faster pace, I’m not exactly working my ass off at home every day.

Tomorrow we are free from school, in a way. The entire school is going to the Zoo, so that might be fun, or it might be terribly boring, we’ll see. Next week we have monday and thursday off because they’re holidays over here, that is pretty kick-ass, I’ve been wanting some real slacking-time. Not sure what I’m gonna do with it yet though. Kind of interested in running some sort of puzzle-competition at school, but I’m not sure about the format yet.

Aaanyway, over at my Japanese blog I’ve half-decided to upload a picture every day with some one sentence or something since I can’t figure out what to do with it really. I’m usually too tired to sit down and write up something serious (it’s still quite an effort to write a long piece of text in Japanese), so that’s why I want to just like.. do something at least. And if there’s pictures it might be interesting for those who don’t know Japanese as well! The link again is http://nikkichou.com.

Mind-clearing over.