Yesterday, I took the TTBJ test. Luckily, it only took an hour to complete. The TTBJ is much shorter than the JLPT, mainly because of the extreme time limits. The TTBJ only gives you 4-5 seconds to answer for Spot and Kanji questions and only 10 minutes per 30 questions for the Grammar sections (20 seconds per question). It seems to be intended to test automaticity rather than knowledge like the JLPT does.
The first three sections are the Spot questions. These give you a sentence with one kana replaced by a blank while a voice reads out the sentence, and you have to click on the missing kana. (All the TTBJ questions are multiple choice with four answers).
One challenge is that it is looking for a kana, not a word or even a syllable. This isn't too bad when the missing kana is just a syllable by itself, but sometimes it will just be part of a syllable. I remember one question where it was looking for the "せ" in せい. Maybe it is different for the Japanese with their whole "mora" thing, but us English speakers aren't used to thinking of a word like せい as consisting of multiple units, so it is very counterintuitive, and makes things more difficult. Obviously, it's not a major obstacle, but even a slight mental delay like this is killer when you only have a split second to answer the question.
Anyway, I did pretty well on the first Spot section, and was feeling kind of cocky afterwards. I got 23/30 (77%), but I feel like I got the hang of it over time. I missed four of the first five, meaning I got 22/25 (88%) if you exclude the first five questions.
Unfortunately, my confidence was utterly crushed on the second Spot section, where the voice was much faster and it was difficult to hear the answer. I felt like I just had to guess randomly on half the questions and only got 17/30 (57%).
As for the third Spot section, the voice was garbled and nearly impossible to understand, so I mostly didn't even bother. There were a couple questions where I did manage to hear the answer from the voice, but on most of them, I didn't even bother trying to listen and just did my best to guess what the missing kana was based on what was on either side of the blank. Unsurprisingly, I only managed 37%, only a little better than chance (25%).
Grammar has always been my weak point on the practice JLPTs (or with Japanese in general), so I wasn't expecting much here. I got 23/30 (77%) again on Grammar I, and that was despite rushing through the questions due to fear of time pressure. I might have been able to get a few more with better pacing.
Interestingly, the second Grammar section actually felt easier to me, despite the questions being more advanced. I'm not sure why. Despite pacing myself better this time, I only managed 16/30 (53%).
As for the third Grammar section, I was reduced to just guessing randomly on nearly every question. Fittingly, I ended up with 8/30, which is exactly what you'd get on average just by random guessing.
The Kanji section was also interesting. As with the Spot section, there was an extreme time limit on each question, so kanji knowledge alone only gets you so far. Usually, there isn't even enough time to try to read the whole sentence.
The kanji section was a mix. There were some questions where I felt like I understood it perfectly and knew the answer immediately. There were some where I recognized the word, but it was a challenge to read the answers and choose the correct one in time. There were also a bunch of questions where I just had to guess randomly, due to either not managing to hear the reading in the spoken voice or not intuitively recognizing the words in question.
The practice session at the start gave me up for a false sense of security. I got all five of the practice questions right, only to be blindsided by two questions I didn't know right off the bat on the actual test. Still, I managed 36/50 (72%), which is pretty damn good IMO, given how difficult the test format makes things.
As an example of the typical kind of question, I remember one where the sentence had something about money and the reading was "ka". I knew (or thought anyway) it was either 貸 or 借 given the context, but I had no time to think about which one it might be, or even read the sentence, so I just guessed the later.
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Satori Reader
SR had another note about the Japanese school system, and this one really surprised me.
School lunches in elementary schools are really interesting affairs. Kids don't bring packed lunches or go to a central cafeteria to eat. Instead, a delegation of kids from each classroom goes to a kitchen to pick up food for everyone and bring it back to their classroom. They're hauling back meals for 30-40 kids, so it can take perhaps five to eight kids to bring it all back.
Meanwhile, another group of kids sets up serving tables in the front of the classroom. When the food arrives, this second group of kids, wearing tiny white aprons and face masks, apportions out the food to everyone.
This kind of lunch service is called kyuushoku. Kids take turns in the different roles, and the typical tour of duty is perhaps one week out of each month. When it's your turn to be on kyuushoku duty, you are a kyuushoku touban, "a person on kyuushoku duty."
It varies by location and school, but kyuushoku can continue through middle school. By high school, things switch mostly to packed lunches.
Despite studying Japanese for two and a half years and watching lots of anime, I had never heard of this before. Going by anime, Japanese students always have homemade bento for lunch. I remember a scene in Erin's Challenge where they buy lunch at the cafeteria, and the cafeteria probably showed up at least once or twice in anime I've watched, though I can't remember specifics. Still, I'd never heard of the 給食 thing at all.
Admittedly, most anime deal with high schoolers, rather than elementary schoolers, but I did watch Card Captor Sakura and Erased, which are set in elementary school, and I don't recall ever seeing anything like that even then. In Kotaro Lives Alone, the students definitely do bring bento from home - it's a major plot point in one episode. Admittedly, Kotaro is four years old and goes to preschool rather than elementary school, but it seems rather odd that that they would have this practice specifically in elementary school, but not in preschool or middle school.
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クミコはお盆を持って、列に並んで順番を待った。
This sentence confused me, due to the mention of Obon. Obviously it made no sense in context for Kumiko to wait for Obon (as usual, I misread 持 as 待 to boot - amusingly, this sentence has both in the same sentence), but I had no idea what it could mean. Apparently, お盆 can also mean "tray" of all things. WTF?
In fact, the first comment on SR is complaining about the same thing. Someone responded explaining that the name of Obon (the festival) actually derives from the trays once used to make offerings, although modern Japanese people probably don't recognize any connection between the two meanings.
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Glass Mask
Glass Mask ep33 is probably the last episode I watched when I was younger. At any rate, this episode had the last specific event that I remembered from before (Maya's performance as Puck). It will be interesting to be going into the show blind again. Of course, I only remembered the vague outlines from before and forgot or misremembered a lot of stuff, so it was still interesting, but now I will have no idea what's going to happen.