Settlers Bonanza
On Saturday night seven of us got together to play a bunch of games of settlers. In the previous four to six weeks of gaming, I had won only a single game, so my hopes were quite low, especially when it came to facing Dion and Brian, who win a lot. In the first game I felt like I was struggling to keep up, and when I mentioned that on my turn, someone was like "but you have the longest road!" and I was like, "Really? Oh yeah!" and flipping over a victory point I said, "Then I guess I win." Which shocked me about as much as anyone else. I wasn't even thinking about that as part of a strategy for winning. Talk about tunnel-vision. You'd think I'd learn, but in the second game I played, I once again forgot I had longest road, and won suddenly and to my own surprise in exactly the same way again. In the final of the three I played, the desert was in the middle, and it was a four player game.
It was a very long game, and good placement and not getting screwed in the initial placement helped. But the fact that Battur was being a total jerk to Jon took away all the hatred from me, which was nice. It was close, because Battur's cold plotting almost enabled a win for him, and Joe was so so close to winning, but then I got like three rolls of the dice I needed and no thief, and was just able to win. I think the last one was a two and a half to three hour long game. Shocking. More shocking though was the fact that I won. Three times. In the same night! I'm STILL flabbergasted. I gotta say, though, credit's gotta go to God, because the rolls of the dice went amazingly my way in all three games. I really couldn't have asked for better. You know what it says, "The lot is cast into the lap, but it's every decision is from the Lord." So thanks God!
Surprisingly well, I think
Is how I intend to answer the people who ask me how I did on the J-test today.
What is the J-test?
It's meant to be a practical test of your Japanese, an alternative to the government run JapaneseLanguageProficiencyTest, which is the more respected test, though it may not really show how communicative your japanese really is. The j-test is also cheaper and more frequent. four times a year versus once a year.
There are only two tests, and different from a pass or a fail, you get graded based on your ability to answer questions, and how well you answer (given that some of the questions have more than one right answer).
I had a late night friday at open mic, then an early morning saturday for PTA day, then out for dinner with Tsubaki, the rocker guy from my local Lawson's (think 7-11) and his friend. Then it was Ingrid's birthday party, and i had to show my face, how could I not? but I left at 11-ish and was home and in bed before one. Up this morning at 7:30 and I was actuall alright. I didn't feel drowsy in the test and the 2 hours weren't really a problem.
I even anwered most of the questions. There were some things I just really didn't know, but those were far fewer than I expected. I think the test will show that I am at the level I think I am. There's a lot of stuff I still dont know in the language, but I am far from lost when it comes to japanese. I feel like I was able to do my best and wasn't overwhelmed, so I am happy with how I did.
And for those of you who don't live in Tokushima, Ingrid is the owner of a little bar in the clud district that is frequented by more foreigners than probably any other bar in town. She seems to know everyone, and everyone seems to know her. Her birthday party was a swanky-ish formal dress affair at a largish club (by tokushima standards). LOTS of people were there. I was glad I turned up for my two little hours, and a little sorry that I couldn't have stayed longer. Oh yeah, and there was food which included chicken wings and tacos. Now, that was to my mind weird food for an event that asked for formal clothing, but when you consider how rare chicken wings and tacos are in Japan, or at least our corner of it, I guess that makes it swanky-ish food after all.
This Week's Entertainment
ハリーポッターと炎のゴブレット
The Japanese language version of
Harry Potter and the Goblet of FireThe kanji there is read ho-no-o, with the last O being an O and not a U.
It's like 1000+ pages altogether in this Japanese edition. Moreover, because the copy I have is a school library copy, like the one above it's split into two halves. I guess that way more people can be reading it all at once. Or it weighs less in your bag. Given that a lot of Japanese language books are printed very small, maybe there is just a national preference against physically large novels. Anyhow, I am currently about 150 pages into it, and it feels like easy reading. The fact that there are loads of furigana and I have an electronic dictionary certainly doesn't hurt. It feels like reading shonen manga. I figure I average about 10 pages an hour, but I must speed up when there's a lot of dialogue, because I don't think I've spent 15 hours reading it since monday. Then again, it's certainly been no less than ten.
It's just as entertaining in the Japanese, and there are places where they can do jokes in the Japanese that aren't doable in english, such as with セールス魔ン (salesman with the first kanji for magic 魔法 "mahou" replacing the 'ma'). They keep some of the words the same, like Omunokuraaz (omnoculars) but the kanji they put beside those gives the meaning. I could try to claim that this is helping my Japanese ability, but really it's just entertainment. It'll help me to build up confidence for reading a whole real book in Japanese. And by 'real' I mean one with very few furigana.
If this goes well, I'll attempt book 5 in Japanese as well, which i have not read in English yet. What got me in the mood to do this was watching the first two harry potter movies (which I had never seen before). I rented the first one out of a desire for some light watching, and it was awflul, I hope to never see it again. But it got me in the mood and I watched the second one two. Likewise terrible. Cris Columbus is a hack director, and should be banned from movie making. He knows nothing about how to pace a movie, and nothing about how to maximise his shots. Very very very cliche methods, poor movie-making. Anyway, watching that crap made me want to read the oh-so-well written stories again, but at the same time not really. On monday one of the students was reading the first half of The Order of the Phoenix at lunch and the other half was at the back of the class. I picked it up and tried the first few pages to see how it was. It looked doable.
After classes were out, and after the cleaning time, I prowled up to scope out the school library and see what they had. The only one in there was Goblet of Fire, which is coincidentally the only harry potter book which I have read only once. Nice. As I was paging through it and a BlackJack manga, two students happened past, and stopped to see what i was doing. They were curious, because having been here two years, I have almost never been in the library. (Which is strange for me if you know me).
We chatted for a while, and when at the end i asked how to take the book out, it turned out that one of the two boys there was the volunteer librarian, and he filled it out for me. I wrote my name on the card in kanji 瀬戸良真秀 which was fun. One of the two isn't really the book reading type, nor the type to be all that interested in imaginary stuff, but it was fun talking. They were both second year students, and they don't know enough to talk in English about the stuff we were talking about, so it was nice for me to try out my Japanese abilities.
I think they have ceased to be impressed with my Japanese. Only last year's grads and the grads from the year before that (JH grads, that is) really remember how minimal my Japanese was when I first came.
It will be good for this years ninensei (second years) when I have to change a year from August. They are an unusually clever class when it comes to English, and when I change out they will have just learned their past participle (have been, have done, etc) and will be ready to make a big jump with the arrival of a new ALT who speaks (I hope) only minimal Japanese.
Speaking of which, I wonder what it will take for me to make my next jump in Japanese ability? More effort than magic, I suppose.
