japanese placement exam.
Fall 2004.
I remember before we even officially started college, we had to go up to Oahu to take some placement exams. Well, I guess I didn’t have to take the math placement exam because I had gotten a good enough grade on my AP Calculus exam to automatically qualify for Calc at University, but I do remember having to take the Japanese one.
The whole experience was kind of weird, because I didn’t really know my way around UH at all, I remember hanging out with John the whole time and Oahu was a pretty wild and crazy world. It was a few weeks before college started, it included New Student Orientation which is actually a goldmine of memories in themselves, but alas.
I took Japanese for three years in high school, surely that would count for something, right? Well, apparently not, I remember being shuffled into some room in Moore Hall (I didn’t know it was Moore Hall at the time) and we had to fill out some form which was filled with a lot of Kanji and then listen to tapes of Japanese and answer questions—there were probably three questions I knew the answer to.
So I was placed in JPN 100, which isn’t quite 101, it’s for people who have had “some” experience with Japanese (i.e. they didn’t bother to teach us hiragana and katakana) but other than that it was basically starting from square one.
They were apparently very disappointed with me though, because somewhere on the form I had marked that my mother was a native speaker of Japanese. Still don’t know how I managed that one, but it was sort of embarrassing. I mean, back then I was a huge Japanophile but not to the point of pretending my mom was Japanese.
