Category: Learning

Passed JLPT N1!

With flying colors, I might add. I got the certificate in the mail. It’s like college apps all over again: big envelope means you passed, small envelope means you didn’t. The certificate itself is pretty soft and flimsy, though. I prefer hard paper.

But I digress. The pass mark for N1 was 100/180, if I recall correctly. Pretty low standards, if you ask me. I got 150/180, which is 83%. Not bad at all. The breakdown was 57/60 for grammar, 44/60 for reading and 49/60 for listening. I should have worked on my reading skills some more, I suppose. A pass is a pass though. All that traveling up and down and going back and forth paid off.

The real question though, is “what next?” Now I have my N1 certificate, what now? I don’t have an answer for that. I didn’t take it for any practical reasons. I just wanted to have that qualification “just in case”, and just so I could say I did. For now I have no intention of going to Japan or working for a Japanese company. In any case, any company worth its salt should be more concerned about my actual ability than about any piece of paper I possess. However you never know when that may change. I doubt the certificate will ever make or break any job application or school application I write, but it could sway things in my favor a bit. And it looks good on my resume, which never hurts.

In short, I’m going to pack the certificate away somewhere safe for now. Maybe in the future I’ll have a use for it, maybe I won’t. For now, I’m just happy I have it.

Two more radio programs

This time for Japanese. I scribbled them down on my noticeboard, but I forgot to note which programs they were. Knowing myself, they’re almost certainly music programs, most likely Japanese 60s, 70s and 80s classics, because that’s what I listen to the most. Anyway, they’re both on Sankakuyama FM, Wednesdays at 8pm GMT and Fridays at 9pm GMT. I used to really like Sankakuyama FM because they had a great mix of music and talk, and because their stream was fairly low quality it could stream on my slow connection without a hitch.

Unfortunately the other day I started listening and there was this right-wing guy on spouting all this racist crap about Koreans and Russians and how they think they’re better than everyone else, and that kind of pissed me off. I know Japan’s been having trouble with Russia lately, but to cast aspersion in all Russians because of that is the height of ignorance. So yeah, I’ve been souring on them a bit lately, but I still listen when that idiot isn’t on.

Cantonese is going well, I’m up to Lesson 23 of Teach Yourself Cantonese! And I finally learned to say “computer” and “fax machine” (actually I’d already learned them elsewhere, but let’s pretend I hadn’t), but not “internet” or “e-mail”. I’ve been going at a pretty good pace, but yesterday I wasn’t up to it and skipped a day of review. Yikes, 180+ items backed up in my SRS! I’m still catching up even now.

Interesting radio program

I haven’t found any good Cantonese TV programs I like, but I have found one radio program I follow quite regularly. It’s a radio drama they play on Thursdays at 6pm GMT on RTHK1, after which they play a lot of music. I haven’t figured out the overall story yet, but I find that I’m understanding more and more every week. I only caught the last few minutes of this weeks, but a lady running a stall called a young girl over and tried to sell her something. The young girl refused repeatedly and eventually ran off. And…that was the end of it. Well, at least I got that much, right? laughing Small victories, small victories.

Basic Love (2009 HK move)

I watched the first 20 minutes of a Cantonese movie called Basic Love today. I was bored and had nothing to do, so I went to a streaming site and tried a few movies at random. A few betrayed me, in that they said they were Hong Kong movies, but then when I started them up, the only audio option was Mandarin. Even for movies clearly made in Hong Kong, like Chow Yun-Fat’s “A Better Tomorrow”, which I really wanted to watch. That’s the power of 1.3 billion speakers vs 7 million, I guess. Cantonese is going have to fight hard to be heard from now on.

But I digress. So, I found a movie called “Basic Love”, about a love triangle between a guy, the girl he loves and the girl he doesn’t love who happens to be the other girl’s best friend. They try to have this “We’re all friends” thing going on when they are in high school, but of course it doesn’t work. About 10 minutes into the movie, girl-he-likes, named Ling, suddenly falls ill and is taken to hospital. Hmm…I thought.

A few minutes later they visited her and she wouldn’t say what was wrong. Even later, she refused to take her medicine, saying “No matter what I take, I won’t get well again!” Uh-oh, I thought. This isn’t one of the dozens of movies about love in the face of terminal illness, is it? I hastened to look it up on Google and alas, it was. Damn, I hate that kind of movie. All weepy and sappy and sentimental. And that was it for me.

I watched it with English subtitles, because I’m still not brave enough to go it solo. I found that with the subtitles, I could understand not just the basic sentences like “what’s wrong with you” and “what do you want”, but also slightly more complex ones as well. Without the subtitles I’m not sure how far I would have gotten. For now I’m content to keep studying and keep watching movies for enjoyment. The time will come, soon enough, to do away with the subs.

Teach Yourself Cantonese is a funny book

I’m up to lesson 18 of Teach Yourself Cantonese. It’s a funny old book, really. I’m 3/4th of my way through it and I still don’t know how to say basic stuff like “toilet”, “part-time job”, “cousin”, “elevator”, “internet” and “computer”. I do, however, know how to say “gamble”, “murder”, “rape” “deadbeat” and “plain-clothes policeman.” I don’t know what kind of life author Hugh Baker led in Hong Kong, but something tells me I shouldn’t mess with him…