It's a polyglot's life for me.

Or at least the basics. I sat down and took the Level 5 practice test for the ハングル能力検定試験 and aced it. What surprised me is that I did markedly better on the listening section, only missing a single question. This is really pretty cool when you consider that I study reading and writing, but have spent under three hours in my entire life listening to the CDs that come with my textbooks. This means that I'd never actually heard most of the words (and certainly all of the phrases and sentences) that appeared on the listening test. Yet my brain was able to make connections between the words I study silently on the page and the sounds coming out of the stereo. Cool stuff.

Then there was Korean class today. (In which I still don't hear much Korean because we usually spend about 75 minutes of it comparing cultures and 15 minutes actually studying the language.) The man in whose classroom it's held had to leave early on an errand, which changed the entire atmosphere and we spent about twice the time actually studying. The sensei asked us, quite out of the blue, to compose a sentence about our weekend. I'd finished mine within a few seconds. (To be fair, this is due to the fact that I know how to compose foreign language sentences on the fly, having studied one language or the other since freshman year in high school. It becomes an artform: got a subject? Check. Verb? Check. We're rolling! Hmm, how 'bout an adjective to spruce things up, maybe an independent clause over here while we're at it...)

People were still working on theirs, so I wrote a few more. Then Asano-san read her sentence. Which was about how she was going to spend her weekend taking her daughter to an English camp event I'm doing tomorrow, and it all went downhill. Asano-san is funny and smart, but is taking the class on a whim because she likes Korean dramas. I don't think she's ever learned a language before, because she doesn't really know how to approach it; the teacher spent close to 25 minutes getting her to correct her sentence.

And throughout this time they were referring to me as ジリアン-ssi, and then ジリアン-seonsengnim. Which freaks me the freak out because here are women probably two decades my senior using elevating titles with my name. A lot of people stick -san or -chan or sometimes even -sensei/sama onto their own online usernames, but if you really understand the sense in which those titles are used, it can make you very nervous to have them applied to yourself when you don't think your social position and/or skills merit them.

So that was incredibly awkward. But in happiness news, the sensei asked for my phone number and text at the end of the lesson. She's also going to try and help me get ahold of more study materials for the Kentei Shiken. Yay!

That will be all.