Aaaaaaand relax...

I've avoided blogging about Cambridge ever since I submitted my application. It's been such a big part of my life, but I've always maintained that this blog was to be about more than What I Did On My Holidays.

More than that, as my optimism varied from day to day, I wanted to avoid committing anything to the cyber-ether that would later cause me to look back and cringe. I have complete and historical editorial control over my posts, of course, but as a matter of principle I try not to tinker with or remove old posts except to correct typos or formatting. Quite apart from anything else, it'll be interesting to see how the blog - both my writing style and the way I think - develops over the months and, possibly, years.

However, the deed is done - the interview took place yesterday, and it's time to record the events that led up to it, for posterity and for the sake of those who read this thing and might be curious. So, here's a potted history of my attempt to insinuate my way into possibly the world's most prestigious academic institution.

• Having made the decision to apply, I had a couple of weeks to get the UCAS form completed and submitted.
• I consulted all and sundry regarding my Personal Statement, and the end result was pretty good. Thanks go to the dysfunctor and various good friends and colleagues for critical commentary.
• The written reference presented a tricky choice of referees. The inestimably wise Dr Coates, my tutor at Birmingham Uni; my good-humoured Japanese Tutor, Hiromi; or my incomparably supportive line-manager, Gill. For one reason and another, Gill ended up providing my glowing reference.
• Deciding which college to nominate was tricky. I was tempted to do so on the basis of application requirements (essays, tests, interviews etc), especially upon seeing that Trinity Hall seem to rely principally on the Thinking Skills Assessment (a form of testing at which I excel), but upon the Chair of Studies' advice I eventually went with Wolfson College - a college open only to mature (over-21) students.
• Shortly after submitting the application, I was requested to complete the online Supplementary Application Questionnaire, specifically for Cambridge applicants. Another several hundred words of selling myself ensued, and I was nearly late submitting this as I had difficulty obtaining a suitable photo. (As I was amused to discover later, the print-out received by the interview panel was of such low resomolution that it may as well have been a photo of my cat)
• Many agonising days of waiting later, I received a letter from Dr Sally Church inviting me to an interview with her and Dr Barak Kushner on Weds 10th December, 4pm. I was also requested to provide two examples of marked essays by the preceding Friday. Since I hadn't written an academic essay (not that would be suitable for Humanities, at least) since my GCSEs ten years ago, this was a problem...
• A brief email exchange with Dr Church resulted in a request to provide a 1500-word essay entitled "Discuss the nature of society-state relations in the modern world in any region of your choice." I had a week to research and write it (including the stag-weekend in Amsterdam) and I'm pretty pleased with the result. Again, many thanks to friends & family for their support and advice. The dysfunctor's girlfriend, Chisa, was particularly kind in putting me in touch with a fellow academic in the field, although I was sadly too rushed to take advantage of this.

The day finally came, and I got the train down to Cambridge, suited up and looking dashing. It's always nice to know that you can brush up well when the need arises. Lucky tie and everything.
I managed to keep my nerves under control for most of the day - I usually do well at interview - but upon stepping off the train I suddenly felt an unholy lurch in the pit of my stomach. I've never been so anxious about anything before, which is a strange thing to admit; there were more serious, more important and more uncertain occasions in my life, I'm sure, but right then it was hard to remember any. It probably wouldn't have done me any good if I had, either.

I have a friend who suffers from occasional panic-attacks, and he's tried to describe them to me before. I've never had such a thing, but right then I think I understood a little of how it feels.

Anyway, I managed to control my bladder and stop shivering, and sat with a calming cuppa tea for half an hour or so. As I walked up to the faculty for the interview, a well-worded, well-timed text from a friend arrived to soothe me. I had five minutes to sit in the common-room with a couple of other young prospectives (for Chinese), and I realised that I was in a far better place than they were. I had chance to reflect on my previous Cambridge interview, back in 1998, and how I had been successful on that occasion, and was far better prepared and equipped this time to face the panel.

As it turned out, the panel was so much more relaxed and informal than I was expecting, too. I finally got to meet Dr Church - a pleasant, quiet lady, whom I feel may even have been a little more intimidated by the interview situation than I was - and the other interviewer, Dr Kushner. He was a very likeable man, with an air of intelligent confidence when he spoke. His enthusiasm was clear, in spite of the late interview, and he seemed quite eager to discuss everything from the ideas raised in my essay to the possibility of studying Taiko during the 3rd year in Japan.

Generally speaking, I think I presented myself fairly well - enthusiastic, intelligent and affable, if a little green. Most importantly, I think I demonstrated a genuine interest in the subject, and established that I'm already learning what I can. Beyond being a bit more coherent with my ideas, it's hard to know what more they would've been looking for.

I'm by no means certain that the interview was a success. However, I got the impression that they weren't just "giving me a chance"; rather, that they were already hopeful and wanted to see if I lived up to their expectations. If I read it right, I think my chances are decent.
Anyway, a couple of things were said which gave me good reason to be hopeful:

1. When discussing the possible difficulties of being a mature student among a small class of 18-year-olds, many of whom would have joined "principally to pursue an interest in Anime", Dr Kushner intimated that it was more about gregariousness and personality than age, and that I seemed like the sort of person who'd get on fine. It felt like a vote of confidence.
2. More significantly, my prior studies of the language were raised. It was suggested that I may find the first year "boring" if my knowledge and fluency in Japanese were of a sufficient level, since students are expected to enter with no prior knowledge. The notion of direct-entry to second year was raised, and that made me feel that they were seriously looking at how and where to fit me into the syllabus.

Good signs, then, and I don't think I really made a tit of myself at any point. It's hard to gauge how well they took me, but I felt that I got on with them pretty well, and got to express myself. They tested me a little - follow-up questions to throwaway comments - but I think I kept the ball rolling in the right direction.

Anyway, time for me to stop worrying about it now. The deed is done, and I've devoted quite enough energy to this application now. It's out of my hands. Time to focus on the next event in this month's hectic schedule - my best friend's wedding.

I think I'll need a holiday after this Holiday Season. Roll on January...

Mada wakarimasen (I don't yet understand)

My Japanese teacher set me the task of writing a four-panel comic last week. I just had time to finish it before my lesson, so I didn't get the chance to scan it in. You'll have to make do with hastily-shot camera-phone photos (my translations follow each panel):

LONG DAYNot again! You lazy #%!!*!

I work so hard, and you just do nothing...

I'm always looking out for you, but you never show any gratitude!

Myow? (Not again...)

The translation in the last panel was going to read "Feed me" - which would be funnier and, let's face it, much more true to life - but I don't know how to conjugate the Imperative Form yet, and I like having the cat throw the starting exclamation back at the woman.

The more astute students of Japanese will spot my obvious error (apart from the laughable simplicity of most of the grammar I've employed) - the second panel should end せん (Negative form) rather thanす. It probably reads to a native Japanese-speaker the same way as a double-negative does to me, meaning it probably makes your eyes bleed.
Well nuts to it. It's my first comic ever to see the light of day, so just one glaring error in an unfamiliar language is good enough for me. Mind you, this post is now available for comment, so I'm sure I'll be told soon enough just how many other linguistic gaffes I've managed to cram into four panels...

The more astute students of art, humour and other matters of taste will spot the fact that my comic is neither pretty nor funny, since I can't draw or come up with jokes. Strictly speaking I imagine the only thing that qualifies this as a "comic" is the fact that it has four panels. This gives it the same artistic merit as a Ford Transit, only without the choice of colour an optional SatNav.
Still, I did make the effort to go slightly manga-ey in the first panel, and that's got to count for something. Please.


Aside from this travesty of the modern medium, the lesson was even more interesting than usual. We over-shot my allotted hour - by about an hour! - partly thanks to the distraction of a burgeoning friendship between Hiromi's son & me (based principally on DS games and the ability to pull faces), but mainly due to an extensive discussion about language and learning.

We chatted about our experiences of learning different languages and, as is often the case, the act of discussing the topic caused my thus-far nebulous ideas of the subject to coalesce into a clearer opinion. In essence, I think we progress through successive stages of fluency, something to the tune of:

• parroting - repeating words and phrases exactly as you hear them.
  
• knowledge - getting to know what those words & phrases mean, and recombining them in context.
  
• understanding - coming to grips with the interplay of context and content: conjugation, form and style (this is where you start to appreciate the fundamental differences between languages with different roots)
  
• application - using your understanding to apply the language in different everyday contexts: on-the-fly construction of appropriate sentences, the beginnings of real expression.
  
• habit - over time, on-the-fly processing becomes embedded: at this point, you're able to actually converse at a practical depth and speed.
  
• intuitive use - the habits embed deeper: you can pretty much "think" in the language.
  

So by this token, my learning of English as a native should have followed a similar pattern, right? Well, there are probably hundreds of books and papers on the subject, but nothing makes for a blog-entry like an embarrassing anecdote...

Cast your imagination back to my childhood - we're talking 20 years here...
*pause for a little cry*
...sat cross-legged on the floor of the village primary-school's assembly hall, staring up stiff-necked at the projected lyrics on the wall, hoping some poor kid doesn't wee themselves again (there really is nothing as pitiful as a little boy sat silently with his red, tear-streaked face in his hands as, one by one, his former friends leap away excitedly from the slowly-expanding pool of wee in which he stews...).
The song may be a well-known one, or it may be something our musically-inclined head teacher composed himself. He wrote assembly songs with the same casual frequency that other people make a cuppa tea. What matters is, the last line of the chorus was a sustained:

"And praise your hoooooo-ly naaaaaame!"

(Thinking about it, Mr Johns was a bit secular to have written that.)
The line was not - I can't stress this enough - the more confusing "And prisha-horrrrrr-lee-naaaaaaay!"

Not that I was aware of this, becase that line had mostly smudged off the acetate sheet, but then it didn't matter. I was parrotting the phrase in order to sing the song, but without knowing much about the lyric's significance and only having heard it sung the same way, I didn't have any reason to think differently. I was hardly likely to have the opportunity to apply the phrase in my playground banter and have it corrected, and frankly it served its purpose without requiring any knowledge of its real meaning.
At the time all I cared about was getting through the song so I could relax my neck, and not sound like Andrew Bunting in the process (a boy whose curiously rich, tone-deaf bass was probably the cause of all that embarrassing incontinence - I suspect he would have caused whales to beach themselves and go into premature labour given a sufficiently low melody)

Those who were fortunate enough to watch TMWRNJ, back in the day when there was anything on telly on a Sunday except bloody Hollyoaks, may remember Richard Herring banging on about a similar misunderstanding, insisting that Jesus was "the Lord of the Dance Settee" (said he). Come on, there are whole books dedicated to children mishearing speech and believing that "the ants are my friends", or whatever.

The point is, we learn the same way as children, it's just that when learning something new we don't have any preconceptions with which to judge our current understanding - until we come to learn a second language.

So last night, in learning how to conjugate verbs to give the Past Tense, I discovered that shouting できました ("dekimashita") at the end of a round of Hiragana-bingo in our early lessons was not equivalent to shouting "House!"
It meant "finished".
I have developed some minimal level of proficiency in Japanese, which has helped me to evolve this little island of (incorrect) Knowledge, giving it a land-bridge to the ever-expanding continent of Understanding, wherein the highway-planning agency of Directed Learning is extending it's road network of Application, so the articulated lorries of Habit can start to wear their useful grooves into my neural pathways...

So, for all that I find Kanji attractive and interesting, learning stroke-order is as nothing when compared to trying to compose an admittedly un-funny joke, for in such ways are we forced to re-evaluate the misheard lyrics of our early lessons, and come ever closer to understanding the heart of what is, at this stage, still a foreign language.

Which is why you've been subjected to my Ford Transit of a comic.


Dekimashita.