Caws Radio

It is 8:31AM, and I am in the library. At approximately 8:06AM I entered a room with two Japanese instructors for my little oral test/interrogation. The format was like this: Situation 1, the instructor has just gotten back from a trip, and we talk about the trip. Situation 2, there is a magazine on the table, and we talk about the magazine. The whole thing lasts about 5 minutes. Not so bad, right?

I will liken my performance to a game on the Super NES called Pilotwings. In this game, there are missions that involve maneuvering an airplane through a series of colored rings in the sky. This morning it was like I dropped the controller at the very beginning of the exercise and my airplane proceeded to fly in a straight line, gliding right past most of the rings and every once in a while clearing one with luck. Or maybe I could just explain it like this: the plain flies straight into the ground and explodes in a ball of fire.

Situation 1 was a complete disaster. She says "I went to Paris." I say "How was it?" She says "It was fun." Then silence, utter silence, as I try to think up something else to ask. When did you go? No, I don't know the word for 'when'. Do you have friends there? No, I don't know how to ask the location of the friends. Did you buy anything? No, I don't know the word for 'anything'. Finally I blurt out a butchering of "Do you understand French?" And she says "No, not at all." I say "Oh, really?" She says "That's right." Then more silence. It goes on like this; I fail to keep the conversation going, and every now and then she impatiently places a ring directly in front of my airplane by saying something like "I bought these pants"(to which I responded with a misusing of the word "expensive"). At least they know I am fluent in using the phrases "I'm sorry" and "excuse me".

Situation 2 wasn't so bad, except looking back I realize I neglected to use any of the sentence particles that we supposedly learned last week, so I probably sounded like a 3-year-old. But get this; last night I studied Japanese for 3 hours with a real Japanese person, and not even she knew how to properly use those sentence particles. So I am hoping that all the other students do as bad or worse than I did. That way the instructors will just give up on the lot of us and give everybody an 'A'.

Anyway, I hope this post was humorous. It's kind of hard for me to joke about it considering I'm pretty pissed-off and stressed-out over all of my fucking classes, but one must keep a sense of humor, all the way to the gallows.