JLPT N5

So I had my Japanese N5 test today in London, it was a little different to how I imagined it, in my head it was going to be much bigger and professional - In actuality it was in a lecture theatre with those little  fold out desktop things, several people had to move because their desk couldnt support the weight of their test paper.

The variety of people in there was impressive, there were plenty of guys around my age, some older people (going into their 50's even by the looks of it), a few very very young girls (small adorable girl in pink who looked about 10), and a few very obvious otaku.

They made us swear to not reveal any of the test information on the internet, slightly odd because im assuming they will be changing the test paper yearly anyway.

I made a stupid mistake of essentially learning the wrong shit, the android app on my phone which I was basing most of my revision from (pro I know) basically had the wrong list of what is in each JLPT category, and hence I was hit by a few Kanji that I didn't revise, and a few words which I have honestly never heard before in my life. (The app is 'Obenkyo', which is great for learning and revising kanji, but not for revising particular levels of kanji apparently).

The exam is divided into Vocabulary, Grammar and Listening.
To my surprise, the vocab one gave the most trouble, with plenty of tricky questions.
The grammar one thankfully doesn't actually contain that much grammar (although the grammar questions kicked my ass), half of this section are comprehension questions, which weren't too bad but you really had to haul ass in terms of reading speed, I didn't finish this paper in time and had to rando-select a few answers.
The Listening one I found easy enough, felt like free points to me, but perhaps this is because of the way ive been learning (via Rosetta Stone, Anime and Music), those who have been taught strictly through books (are there such people?) might have more trouble with this.

Overall, the test was pretty fuckin' hard. Like... way harder than I imagined, for the bottom tier examination which is supposed to infer basic command of the Japanese language.
I kind of took the test lightly, and if it kicks my ass, it'll be for this reason.

Im not even sure what % you need to pass, but I really hope I end up above it.



(Rubbish and obvious) Tips for others doing the JLPT:

- Your best bet for the style of questions really is on the JLPT site itself
- Ensure you know what you are expected to know (obvious perhaps? Make sure you are learning N5 Material and not simply JLPT 5 material)

Exams Over! (6/6) and the immediate future...

So i finished exams yesterday, last exam went... alright...
Enjoyed my first bit of freedom by basically going to a barbequeue straight after the exam (like... exam finished -> go to tesco to get BBQ food -> BBQ)

Being warwick university though, freedom doesnt last long...

The day after the final exam was the ol' Lab induction - starting at 9am.
We were given a little introduction to the facility and introduced to some of the staff.
It looks like im going to be able to play with alot of cool chemicals and stuff , we were shown where they store the ethanol, the chloraform and liquid nitrogen (we got to see some of it, it was all smoky and cool and shit)

I'll be spending the next 4 weeks in there, so I guess i better get used to it.

Exam update 5/6

Home Stretch!
The 2 exams today were.... Okay....ish.... I guess....
Both generally consisting of 1 alright question which I could answer fine, and then a 2nd question which I kind of cobbled an answer together for and hope that its right. This especially applies for 'modern approaches to human disease' exam, which asked for "evidence that glutamate is involved in brain damage in stroke" - and I just kind of rambled on about glutamate in general, stroke in general and brain damage in general, without actually talking about evidence (because I didnt know any) :|
Lets hope it'll be fine eh.

Last exam is on Thursday morning , then I wont know what the hell to do with myself.
Im considering going home for the weekend just because I havent been home in a few months now (last time i went back was for MVC3 release), I imagine there wont be much partying going on in general because its only us Bio students that will have actually finished exams, alot of other students will be beginning to start to take theirs.

Im also really seriously considering buying a 360 so i can mod it, it feels like for the price (£80?) its just so much more worth it than trying to run new games on my old PC. Of course a drawback with this is that i'll have to open it up and tinker around with shit and have absolutely no idea what i'll be doing - Ive modded a PSP and Wii myself but those are all firmware hack based and dont involve opening up an expensive piece of equipment (okay so i built my PC, but thats a piece of equipment meant to be opened up)
Not that anyone ever posts comments, but if anyone has any experience in modding 360's with LT+ stuff, let me know how easy it is. I would kind of like to Jtag but that shit requires solder and resistors and all sorts of stuff I dont trust myself with - even though I used to be a boss at Systems and Control back in school (which involved circuit boards, soldering and so on, probably one of the few actually useful classes I took)

Also, I feel like the post looks too empty without a picture or youtube link, so here you go.

Exams update 3/6

Halfway there.

The 2 exams today were brutal, Im not really sure how I did tbh, the question format is you pick 2 essay questions out of 4
For both exams, 1 Essay went well, and the other went kinda of meh at best.... Which i mean... at least one of them went well?

IDH (infectious diseases and health module) did the dickbag move of putting a ridiculous question and making it a compulsory one, now the twist here is that we're not allowed to complain because... Its the exact same compulsory question from the year before! Of which we got to see as a practice, the problem arises in that the question didnt make sense then, and didnt make sense in the exam today.
Everyone (myself included) sort of thought 'I dont understand this question, but it'll be okay hopefully because surely they wont ask the same question 2 years in a row' , and then they fucking did.

*sigh*

next 2 exams are on tuesday so I at least get a tiny break to revise for them.

I really want to play some games and have some fun right now, but my head is completely fucked. Mentally completely exhausted and I have a headache, If i could sleep right now, i would.

Exams update 1/6

First exam went pretty fucking badly, Its always the ones you're confident on that you get completely buttfucked by.

I have 2 exams tomorrow, not particularly confident about either of them. Fucksake.
Who puts 3 exams in 2 days anyway. Why couldnt you spread that shit out eh university?

This is how I feel right now.

Chapter 10 - The part where bad stuff happens (Exam timetables)

27th Apr - Oncology
28th Apr - Bacterial Pathogenicity + Infectious Diseases and Health
3rd May - Extreme Enviromental Biology + Modern Approaches to human Disease
5th May - Integrative Neuroscience

6 exams spread over 9 days.
90 Minutes each

Fuck. My. Life.

Wish me luck folks. Cant wait til they are over so I can get back to playing games and blogging and all the good shit in life.

nothing much to report...

Literally nothing happening in my life anymore

Revision is going bleh, past exam paper questions that i managed to find are bleh, gaming is bleh (decided to stop league of legends for a while, only playing the occasional Pop'n music and started final fantasy IV on psp)

ETA to first exam : 1 Week

Things i look forward to nowadays : Washing dishes, eating, anime, sleeping [ie. all the time spend which doesnt involve studying]

Revision update 30th march

Have successfully skimmed through all 6 of the modules im studying for, highlighing key points and making sure the material makes some level of sense.
Ive only actually learnt 2 of the modules, and those are both of the easy ones. The rest of the information I need to learn involves maybe 120 pages at standard font size.
Particularly bitchy is Integrative Neuroscience, which is just fucking ridiculous. Im not sure how im going to handle it when it comes to the exam :< The material barely makes any sense.

I dont think anyone else is in revision stages yet - Our exams this year are super early because we do our final year laboratory project afterwards - but if you are, good luck and dont burn yourself out! D:

Countdown : 4 weeks (28 days left)

Year 3, Term 2 End

So im done with University lectures forever, have been since last week.
On monday I had to do my final task this term, Give a 15 minute talk about 'Food entrained Circadian Clocks in the hypothalamus' and then spend 5 minutes answering questions from the audience...
The presentation went mostly okay i guess, I was so nervous at the start that I messed up the goddamn title, and I almost fell over because of jelly-legs, but once i got into it... went alright...
I think I did best on the questions, whilst some other people just couldnt answer any, I had a good 6 or so from the audience and 1 from the lecturer and was able to answer them all.

The only thing left now are the 6 exams and my Final year lab project (which involves around 4 weeks of 9-5 days starting sometime in may)
My exam period starts on the 27th of april and ends on the 5th of May, so they're around 6 weeks away I guess - which will hopefully give me plenty of time to revise and learn my material because right now i dont know fucking anything...

I still cant believe Ive spent almost 3 years here, Hell im sure somewhere i still have blog posts about my first day of university, and now its practically over.
Life really does fly by...

2010 Biology exams 'The Good the bad and the ugly'

So I still havent finished exams yet as of writing this, and i'll be sure to update it accordingly if something under one of these categories occurs, but for now...

The exams 'Good , bad and the ugly'!

The good:
Cell Signalling lecturer 'Davey' gave the most blatent hints as to what the essay questions in this years exam was going to be, everyone wrote down what he said during the lectures, everyone powerrevised for those questions, praying that they would actually be there. Exam time, and lo and behold- there they were, both of them, in the exact same wording he said 'might' be in the exam. I have never written so much for one essay question ever, i think i wrote about 4 pages (including a diagram) on phosphorylation in signalling pathways - which will hopefully give me a decent mark...

The Bad:
I think it was 'Enviromental Health Microbiology', one of the questions worth 3 marks were 'name the reservoirs for the following diseases' (In English - disease is commonly found in...... ) and then went on to list a bunch of diseases (tuberculosis, salmonella... etc) , I.... had no idea, didn't revise it, didnt even see it in the lecture notes. I wrote 'cows' for tuberculosis and moved on. I usually come back to check that i've written something for every answer after i finish doing the questions but I ended up using up all of the time in the exam writing on the essay questions.
After they announced to stop writing, i noticed I had essentially left the front 2 pages of the answer booklet empty. I peeked up to see where the invigilators were, and without skipping a beat went down the list of 6 diseases and wrote 'birds' 'birds' 'birds' 'birds' (cows) 'birds'. Closed the booklet, handed it in. Why birds? I have no idea. Will i get any marks? well... one of them has to be birds surely.

The Ugly:
The first exam we had, the essay question came up (we get a choice of 2), one of them... I didnt really know in much depth at all - "discuss repeating regions" or something. The other one I sort of knew, but the question threw me off.... "Discuss phase variation, relate it to one pathogen"
Now... I had revised phase variation in a fair bit of detail, thinking it might come up, its basically when the organism is able to flip around abit of its DNA, letting it make a different protein (letting it do different shit [variation between phases] ), the example we had studied it in was 'Salmonella' - I looked at the exam question again, I don't know this, i thought to myself.
"or well.. i know what phase variation is, but we didnt study any pathogens that use it, I only that it happens in Salmon"
..........
That was my genuine thought process.
Thats right, I did not answer the essay question I knew the answer to because I thought I had learnt about something which occurs in Salmon instead of Salmonella.
Fuck. Sake.

Gauntlet

just a blog post to let you know im still here.

Have had 5 exams out of 12 so far, with my 6th one tomorrow and then 3 more on saturday ~.~

Have to say, its not looking great so far, the exams I have had have all been really hard :<

1 - Molecular biology - Hard / Bad
2 - Cell Signalling - Hard short questions, Easy essay question which will hopefully help me pass
3 - Neurobiology - Horrible, didnt know the essay question at all which is worth half the marks. FML
4 - Clinical Microbiology - Nice short questions, meh essay question (wasnt that bad but I couldnt remember alot of the stuff :<)
5 - Enviromental health microbiology - Hard short questions, okay essay question

Tomorrow: Immunology - I can already tell its going to be hard and horrible, at best it'll be 'meh' but i already know I wont be walking out of it smiling, its probably my worst subject.

Eg. This is a simplified version of what we're supposed to know. a SIMPLIFIED one =(

Fucking unsavoury to the core.

And then it'll be the next 3, the next 2 days is pretty much the gauntlet from Gladiators except replace the gladiators with Cena, Kane, Undertaker and the Big Show. And its for the grand final, and if i lose then I lose £18,000... (and if i win i still lose £18,000 but i get a nice piece of paper at the end)

The Lull

Just a heads up, my exams are starting this week (or.. tomorow rather) so don't expect many blog updates for a fortnight.

Will still be updating via twitter or facebook though so feel free to follow me there

http://twitter.com/mengplex

[and i imagine everyone who would want to find me on facebook already has me added, but if not - its pretty easy to find me....]

Exam layout..
10th - 1 exam
14th - 2 exams
16th - 2 exams
18th - 1 exam
19th - 3 exams :<
23rd - 1 exam
25th - 2 exams

Thursday Thursday Thursdaaaay~

Thursday , exam results day.
I woke up around 11:40 , we're allowed to go and collect our results at 12 , i figured if i woke up as late as possible i wouldnt have much time to worry about what my results are going to be.
I ended up waiting for 20 minutes outside my tutors room anyway.
Eventually got in , "uh yeah i think you did pretty well you got a uh.....2.1 overall ~ oh wait no no no sorry , sorry....."
Bastard read my result wrong.

Turns out i got a 2.2 overall , 55%Passed all of my modules but my two main modules and my coursework brought me down from a 2.1 which is a huge shame. (Proteins genes and genetics , which is a core module - i got a 47% on lol)The two exams which went the worst for me , turned out to be my highest marks , 64 and 65% respectively.
Huge relief to find out that i dont have to retake shit at least. Thank gawd.

Spent a an hour or so just chilling out and listening to music (doing yesterdays blog post etc) and then eventually luke burst into my room and was like "'we're making the slip and slide...."

"...in the corridor"

It was awesome , we also propped up a mattress against the wall so you could sprint down the length of the hall and then bounce off the mattress at the end.
The main problem however is that the surrounding carpet is actually made of blue sandpaper , carefully camoflagued to look like normal carpet. Also worth pointing out that the doorframe there is pretty much a fucking death trap. Also also worth pointing out that riding on it on your feet is practically suicide - everyone who tried got hurt.

Damage report:
Luke - Large bruise on forehead
Ian - Possibly crunched rib from slamming into wall too hard
Annie - Hurt her back trying to run on it and falling straight backwards
Me - Skin on right knee is missing , both ankles fucked from smacking the doorframe.

Cant remember what i did after that , but eventually we headed to Varsity which is the university pub sorta thing , thursday night is £1 drinks night - i also had some alcohol from the previous night (drinking games) which didnt get used so i brougth that along , about a litre of green stuff - i dont even know what it was but it was green and tasted green.
Getting to the door of the pub the bouncer was like 'you cant take that in.'
So i slotted it , rather fast i might add. Big mistake since i had only recently finished a giant 'clear out your freezer' meal consisting of about 10 chicken nuggets and a small lorry of wedges.
Cant remember a huge amount of what happened after that  , mostly insignificant stuff. I did sample the shots though , which all came in litte test tube thingies which i thought was pretty cool.
Had 2 Cola ones (which tasted like cola cube thingies :D ) , white chocolate , Strawberries and cream , Sour apple , Blueberry and i think another one which i cant remember , also drank about 3 or 4 pints of purple before stumbling back to cryfield and crashing onto my bed.

Had the worst fucking headache trying to get to sleep, all i could imagine was pieces of my mind (as in glass shards of it) and they were all different colours and shiny and id try to put them back together but whenever i would touch them it would be a sharp pain in my head. Bad stuff.
Woke up at 11:30 , making for a rough 12 hours of sleep last night :X

ps. oh yeah  , i also abused the hell out of the university file sharing network at some point and downloaded around 150gb of stuff including....
2 seasons of inbetweeners
Evil genius (game)
Star ocean first departure + second evolution for PSP
Microsoft flight sim X
25 GB of roms consisting of all of the GBA , GBC , N64 , SNES and Megadrive games ever made.
Sid meiers alpha centuri (no idea why.)
Defense Grid (game)
Dungeon Keeper 2
Metal Slug 1-5
Act of War (game)
Supreme Commander (game)
2 seasons of big bang theory (apparently - i dont remember queuing this :S )
44 Disney films (30gb worth)
2gb of Live at the Apollo
20 James bond films
about 40 episodes of bleach to get me back up to date

Pretty much all of which i dont even want and will never watch , but hey - this terrabyte harddrive aint gonna fill itself eh.

End of exams

So i realise i havent done a proper blog post since the 4th or the 5th. Apolagies for that.

My proteins genes and genetics exam on saturday went okay , the linked physiology paper however was absoloutely terrible (as twitter readers would have seen) - couldnt answer most of the questions and am quite afraid im going to fail that module overall and have to resit (where i'll only be able to get a maximum mark of 40%)
My last exam was today , Animal and plant biology , a subject which is essentially 9999 facts to remember about irrelevant bullshut you'll never need to know. I was pretty worried for it but , what can you do - tried learning the entire subject more or less in 2 days. The exam was.... mixed. Before even starting i knew this was going to be a slag to do - a pass would suffice and was my main target.
The exam consisted of 3 sections , short questions , an animal question and a plant question. I started with the short questions.
You may begin.
*flip*
Define and compare between cladistics and traditional taxonomy.
...
Fuck.

The short questions were a mixed bag , for the most part bad but a few of the questions i did know.
The animal question... Good! Or well.. as good as it could have been really , and by that i mean i sort of knew it (compared to anything else where i sort of didnt know it)
The plant question... Explain the ways plants have evolved to take up phorphorus. ARGH. I wasnt even sure what plants needed phosphorus for - i definately skim read this part of the notes.~
I did my best and managed to cobble together about 3/4 of an A4 side , dont know whether any of it was relevant though >_>

At any rate , its done.
I came home , slotted a carton of lychee juice and then wasnt sure what to do.
Played through ghost squad wii in lukes room , such a small TV and such a crappy remote :/
Played some crysis , tried xmen origins game but it ran like shit , tried installing demigod but it hard crashed my pc twice...
Went out with the guys to get food for BBQ - £2 for 24 burgers and £1.50 for 20 large pork sausages , on the sausages bag it had an 'approximately' written around the main text - as such it was kind of hard to judge whether it meant approximately 20 , approximately pork or approximately sausages. For £1.50 for 20 , who knows.
Ate BBQ , played around , listened to music etc etc. Came back at 9:30 just as it started to rain.

Now im sitting here , not really sure what to do.
Wasting time doesnt have the same appeal when you have nothing to be doing. What a shame.
At least im free now.