Formalities

From what I’ve heard from Manchester uni classmates, I am not the only one filling in form after form after form. It feels as though TUFS just dumps a mountain of paper work on us and then waits to see if we do anything with it. Though they have dead line summaries, each one of them misses out little things that are mentioned in others. Sorting out all deadlines therefore occupied quite a lot of my time. The good part about it, though, is that most of it is in English. The bad part is that the Japanese only forms all deal with money. I will definitely need help by my tutor on these matters.

Yesterday was the entrance ceremony and orientation for foreign students at TUFS. I expected it to be an all day, tiring event but it turned out to be a half-day tiring event. The lack of oxygen in that room was the main problem, though. Anyway, we were informed of several interest groups at university, several different apartments we’ll be dealing with and, of course, many new forms and registrations to fill out.

Today, we had a language placement test first thing in the morning. The exam was multiple choice and split into 1 hour of grammar, and 30 minutes of kanji. I had a good feeling working my way through the first few sections, but then slowly started failing until I came to a complete halt, thus not being able to answer a single question in sections 7,8 and 10. (9 was a simple mini-essay-ish task) I’m guessing the test was designed to not waste the amateurs’ time trying to get at least some right. Results were published at 3pm the same day, so I now know that I belong into level 4 of 8, meaning intermediate Japanese proficiency. Whether I should be happy about this result or not will be revealed once classes start. For now, I’ll worry about filling out a couple of class registration forms.