Japanese with anime voice: episode21
Hello, I’m Sachi.
April 1, April Fool’s Day. In Japan, today is 新学期 (Shingakki). 新学期 (Shingakki) is the first day of the school year, which is divided into smaller semesters. So, in honor of 新学期 (Shingakki), Japanese with anime voice will change its delivery frequency to 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, starting today! The timing of 新学期 (Shingakki) is great, but the timing of the change to April 1 is also great! To all our listeners, I hope I can count on your continued support for many more years to come!
Well, since today is April Fool’s Day, the change in broadcast frequency is actually a lie. Five days a week is almost every day. I don’t have the confidence to continue to broadcast every day. That’s why I lied! I’ll be broadcasting five days a week from now on! Have you all been fooled by my lie? I wanted to try this April Fool’s Day thing once. It’s not so easy to come up with a story that you can tell is a lie, but it seems to be true and you are slightly fooled. But even if you do it knowing it’s April Fool’s Day, it’s still a lie, and the aftertaste is not good. It’s not something you get used to. And it was a complicated lie. I’m sorry. I’m going to publish five days a week, Monday through Friday. This is not a lie.
So, a new semester is about to begin at Japanese schools, and one of my fondest memories of the new semester in my school days is when I was a 2nd-year student in high school. When a new semester begins, a student’s grade is usually one grade up from the previous semester. So, it was a new semester after moving up a grade. But in the last semester of my second year of high school, before I entered my third year, my homeroom teacher told me, “With your exam results so far, I can’t see you advancing.”. That teacher was my math teacher, and he was the same teacher I had had for both my first and second years. And I think my math test scores for the two years were less than 30 points in total. I got red marks on all of them, and even when I took the extra tests, I didn’t score more than 20 points.
Japanese school tests are scored, and if you answer all the questions correctly, you get 100 points; if you get one question wrong, your score is deducted. 20 points or less means you either did not answer the question or got most of the questions wrong. Well, in my case, I either didn’t answer the question or just wrote down a random number. I never woke up during math class, and my notes were blank. I was never good at math. Numbers made me sleepy, and I thought, “I don’t need math in my life.
So, I was majoring in a department that no longer had a math class after my third year. I thought I was lucky to not have to take math in my third year, but I was surprised to find out that I was in danger of failing out of the class because of my bad score. I was like, “How is that possible? I didn’t hear that!”. Not being able to move on means I have to do the second year of high school one more time, and more importantly, I’ll be in the same grade as the students one year younger than me, right? Our high school has changed the uniforms from one grade down. If I don’t move up to the next grade, I will be one year older than the other students in the same grade, and I will be the only one in a different uniform. That would be absolutely disgusting. It would be torture. Right?
I had to make sure that I would be promoted to the next grade! I was so impatient that I started studying for the last test so that I wouldn’t get a red mark, but there was no way I could study by myself if I was not smart enough. So I asked a friend from junior high school who went to a better school to help me study. I even called her on the phone. She was really good at teaching and was very easy to understand. Better than my math teacher. She was so easy to understand that I wished she was my teacher. And she did it over the phone, too. Isn’t that amazing? And the score on the test was, I think, 80 something, 82, 4, something like that.
At that time, I was so confident that I was sure to exceed 80. Thanks to my friends. Then, the teacher was surprised to see my score and praised me for my achievement. I got carried away and told him, “Yes, I can do it if I try.” If you can do it, you should have done it from the beginning. So I made it to the third grade of high school and started the new semester without incident. But you know, I am the kind of person who can’t get motivated to do anything if I am not pushed to the limit.
That was a good memory of my youth. Good…or not? I don’t know. In Japan, it is the time for students to start a new semester, but April is also a good time to change your living environment. In fact, it was also a good time for me to change my update frequency. Do you have any plans to change or start something this April? For example, are you moving, changing jobs, or starting a new diet? Please let me know in the comments section!
