denialworld.com

Mind you this post is somewhat long. It’s my first personal post. Well it’s the only place I can write, so… like it or not…

Last year I suggested to Q (my girlfriend) that we should take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 3 examination. I thought it’d be a challenge for us, especially skipping Level 4 altogether and going straight to Level 3. We’d learn Japanese for awhile, but stopped a year or two because of work, availability of classes, etc.

And so we registered, sometime around mid 2006.
It was probably one of the many decisions we ever regretted…

The exam is held every first Sunday of December. Hence we figured there was plenty of time to prepare. Boy were we in for a treat…

Work got to us. It was already October and we had nothing started. We thought of giving up because our schedules would be even more chock-a-block towards the end of the year. Apart from that, many of the reasons were because:

• we had nothing prepared.
• we had to master kanji, vocabulary, grammar, listening, reading, writing and at least 25 new chapters (all of which we have never learned before). This is not including the 25 previous chapters we thought we were “ok” with already.
• there was only 1 month’s + time left.
• we could only self-study.
• we had no one to refer to should we need advice.
• work was really killing us.

But still we persisted.
I remember having to work 14-15hrs each day, sometimes on weekends too.
To wake up after 7 in the morning, march through the traffic jam, off to work, do crap and take crap the whole day, up until 10-11PM at night, go home, bathe and sleep. Then the next day it’s 7 in the morning, back to square one again…

I also remember grabbing my notes and squeezing vocabulary into my head while I was in the toilet. Every extra time we had was no opportunity to waste. We could hardly breathe then…
The most outrageous thing was - just the night before the exam, we bought the 2005 past year paper at only about 10PM! We really thought it was a waste of money and our precious time. Little did we know that it was a tremendous help to us…

And so the day came… 3rd December 2006. 6AM with little sleep, I had to stock up on some Red Bull. It was a long trip to UPM, where the exams were held. When we reached there we saw alot of young students. What in the world are we doing here?! We were impressed to see alot of Malay students too. But they probably have the advantage because they learned Chinese (and possibly Japanese) all their life.

Q and I were separated into different examination halls. So we went our separate ways, and into the war zone. I recall having tremendous pain on my neck throughout the entire 3 hour ordeal. Q told me it was largely due to the stress. After sitting through all of that horror, we were never more relieved. But that was no reason to celebrate… we never knew how well we did until only the next March.

And so Christmas, New Year, and Chinese New Year came and past by…

Came February 2007, we realized we managed to keep JLPT out of our heads for 2 months. But having read news of people from other countries who have passed and failed, we started to get nervous.

Last week Q received a notification for a registered mail. We figured it’d be her JLPT results as it was time. So 2 days after that she got her results and called to let me know the good news. I was truly glad for her. But that put even more pressure on me, especially having to go through the weekend with no news whatsoever.

On Monday, my notification came. Guess the postal service at my area works slower! Obviously, it was for my results. So this morning I told my office that I’d be in late. And gosh was I late, damn post office made me wait forever! I was almost pulling my hair as I was a nervous wreck. When I saw the officer retrieving my results, I was half mad. My mail had been somewhat bent and folded. In my mind I was thinking, “my cert is in there, how can you do this?!” But I could not vent my anger, who knows maybe I’d failed… would there even be any cert inside? >_<

I rushed to the car once I got hold of it. Tearing the envelope, I slowly pulled the slips of paper inside. Yeshhhh, I passed! Boy, now I’m relieved…
But you can see how they treated my cert! I’m furious now haha~ Click on image for full size.

This is by no means a bragging post. People who have gone through JLPT would think this is no big deal anyway. I’m just really happy and thankful that we both passed, and this is just my way of expressing it. I’ll post a small animation of how thankful I am probably tomorrow…

Well that’s done now, what’s next? JLPT2? You must be mad…
As far as I know, JLPT3 -> JLPT2 is a huge learning curve. And one can unlikely get through it alone. What’s the point of it all anyway…