February 16, 2006
The ways people talk
I'm glad to say I passed the third grade (not particularly impressive) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I barely squeaked past (even less impressive) the passing mark.
That being said, the listening portion was my forte. I quasi-owned it. Hot on the heels of that, I've realized that for a while I've been noticing the different speech patterns that my colleagues use. It's nice to know that even if you could listen to someone's speech without actually hearing their voice (you know, like someone else was repeating verbatim or something), you could still understand them by the way they talk.