I did my entrance test this morning. I was a bit worried about forgetting how to write kanji, but it turns out that I didn’t have to do that at all. Just like the JLPT, it was multiple choice. All the sections were pretty easy and didn’t use any kanji, just hiragana and katakana. Then the last section was really hard, with lots of kanji and difficult grammar. Just as with my exams in university, I was the first one out and was brought upstairs for my interview. First I went into a classroom with this really tall, very pretty teacher and she went through the questionnaire I’d filled out (name, years spent studying, reasons for studying Japanese, objectives over the term, etc) while one of my favourite Ghibli films played on a TV. I couldn’t hear it well so when she left the room for a minute I adjusted my watch for Sony (code: 7) and brought it up a little bit. I got to watch the first few minutes of the film and she had to drag me away from it for the interview. The interview was great fun. There were two teachers there, Honda-sensei and a lady whose name I can’t remember. While he asked questions, she took notes. We started with how long I’d been studying and what about Japanese I found difficult, then got to more abstract things like talking about recent news (I chose Katie French), comparisons of nationalities to animals (he suggested Japanese are like ants, as they’re small and work hard all the time), parenting (what should we make our children do? Learn music, eat good food, get a job, etc). When asked “living alone for the first time in a foreign country, is there anything that seems difficult to do?”, presumably talking about difficulties talking on the phone, reading papers, and so on, I answered “getting a girlfriend” and got a nice laugh out of them both. I was asked if I watched any TV recently and mentioned the TV programme I wrote about in my blog recently. Honda-sensei hadn’t seen it but the other teacher had and started laughing when I was telling Honda-sensei about where I saw it and what it was.
They were very pleasant people and I’d be delighted if I had Honda-sensei as a teacher. They told me that they feel my level is above Minna no Nihongo 2, the textbook we’d been working on in class in university. We got about 5 chapters into the book (out of about 25) but I’ve studied the content of the other 15 from various places (internet, dictionaries, asking people to explain grammar, etc) and they seemed to want to start me on a more advanced book. It will be interesting to be slightly behind for once, but whatever they think is best for my Japanese in these short 11 weeks, I’ll go along with.
