Currently Wavering Somewhere Between 'Sweet!' and Abject Panic

[akujunkan]

It is a widely bewailed fact that knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary patterns necessary to pass level one of the Japanese Proficiency test are absolutely useless when attempting to read manga, novels, or interact with Japanese people in a variety of official and casual situations on a day-to-day basis.

They are, however, extremely useful when one is asked out of the blue to translate study called The Effect of Elementary School English Education on Korean High School Students’ English Abilities into Japanese by yesterday.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test: 1
Me: 0

Eep. This gon' be hard.

That will be all.

Comments

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Was there a post back when that outlined The New Job as opposed to The Old Job? You were a teaching assistant before, and now you're a, a . . . thingie. (I'm forgetting the term completely, yikes.) My vague impression has been that the 'thingie' positions are much rarer and take major language muscles. I'd once read through the blog of another 'thingie', and came away from it with no clue what his job entailed -- it seemed like everything -including- the kitchen sink work.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Well, The New Job (CIR) is officially a translation and interpretation job, but it appears that I'm going to spend the majority of my time teaching English in elementary schools. Other duties include: appearing on radio and television, translating, interpreting, holding monthly international cooking seminars, teaching adult English classes, and doing whatever else is deemed necessary. There're only about 500 CIRs in the country, compared to about 6,000 ALTs, so our duties are more varied (and vaguer) than those of The Old Job. Still, my coworkers are a dream, and I haven't regretted switching, even for a heartbeat!