Ack.

[akujunkan]

Nine more days until my grad school apps are due. Even though I have taken care of everything it is possible for me to do, I still feel like I'm forgetting something. Or that everything will get lost in the mail. Or that I'm the least brilliant person who's ever applied and I'm going to spend the rest of my life in W-town. So, ack.

And in a totally unrelated question, sara_tanaquil, is there anything like the JLPT for Latin? I think I would be able to study more efficiently if I had something toward which to work. I took the National Latin Exam in high school, but I don't think you can take it if you aren't formally studying somewhere.

That will be all.

Comments

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

I really wish there was. (I think Japanese is almost unique in having such a system of internationally standardized tests in place.) There is, of course, the Latin AP (one focusing on Vergil, another focusing on Latin Literature, which is Catullus plus some other author), but that assumes you're in a college-bound high school course. There's also a Latin SAT II (what used to be called the ACT, I think), but I've had a lot of trouble even finding information about what's on that test.

If you're curious about what texts are covered on the AP, I have the standards lying around somewhere and could link you to them... you might even be able to find them online. That test basically assumes that you've read X number of (assigned) lines from the author, can remember more or less exactly how to translate what you've read, and can talk intelligently about the author and the work in an essay. Being able to translate a seen passage from memory is considered a good test of mastery, because it's pretty well impossible to do unless you've memorized enough grammar and vocabulary to retranslate on the fly.

I think it's a real shame that most languages don't have the standardized testing resources available that Japanese does. Say what you will about the arbitrary nature of standardized tests; at least they follow a standard that can be put into print and learned, and don't leave you to guess wildly and at random what might be expected of you.

P.S.

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

A few interesting items that turned up in a Google search...

http://www.amazon.com/SAT-Subject-Test-Latin-CD-ROM/dp/0738602531 (the Latin SAT subject test)

http://www.wm.edu/classicalstudies/languageplacement.php (a detailed breakdown of how one college, William & Mary, uses scores on the AP and SAT II to place students in its courses)

That's about all I could find. Gambare!

Re: P.S.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links. Kind of a bummer that there aren't any JLPT-style Latin exams. (I was rather hoping the arcane subject matter was working in its favor.) But with those links I'll probably be able to put something together to study toward.

Incidentally, I don't know that it's necessarily other languages that lack JLPT-style proficiency tests as it is cultures. I know there's a Korean proficiency test administered by the Korean government, and Japan has two Japanese-Korean proficiency tests of its own, as well as (at least) one Chinese-J test. At the risk of over-generalization, I'd say that it's Western Culture that doesn't provide standardized tests for most languages (TOEFL/TESL excepted). Because man, Asia is all about the rote learning/standardized testing.