Lots going on lately, so I haven’t had much free time, and the free time I do have has been spent napping or being lazy. I’ve been feeling pretty sick the past couple weeks, though its not really anything specific. Just a sort of constant nausea and fatigue. It’s not so much of a problem as it is an annoyance, in that it’s not interfering too much with my school work (though I’ve slept through a few classes lately). What it is interfering with is my leisure time, something to which I take great offense.
Last week was a rough week in terms of school work. I had a Japanese test on Monday, and a paper and presentation to do for my Chinese foreign policy class. The Japanese test was rough, as always and I ended up with a 61% on it. I was really annoyed about that though, as I studied for it and felt like I did pretty well on every section but the honorific language part, which I couldn’t answer any of. Honorific language shares a lot with a word it resembles, that being “horrific.” Basically, it’s a form of speech that you use when you want to show respect to the person you are addressing. It gives new forms and verbs for every verb you have already learned for honorific, modest, and humble speech. As far as I can tell, it’s useless, as none of the Japanese people I spoke to know any of it. To add insult to injury, we never practiced any of the words in context, just “Here’s the word, here’s its honorific counterpart.” On the test we needed to read a speech and convert the different verbs into the appropriate level of politeness. It’s annoying, but I guess I’m the only one complaining as everyone else in my class scored above 85%.
The paper and presentation were no less time consuming, though much less irritating. I had to do a chapter review of our textbook, and the chapter I got was titled “China’s role in the World Economy and International Governance,” which was many things, though interesting was not one of them. The presentation went well though, and I’m feeling glad to be done with it.
I’m going to upload some of the pictures I’ve taken over the last six months onto my facebook page, though I can’t be bothered to go through all of them and delete all the duds, so expect a large amount of them.