Quote:
Originally Posted by YuriTokoro
Hi.
Could you correct my English?
"A University Entrance Examination"
I think many of your schools start in September every year, while Japanese schools start in April.
The Japanese school system is six years of elementary school, three years of junior high school, three years of high school, then two or four years of university.
Many foreign countries seem to have many options to finish schools, while we only have the 6-3-3 system in Japan.
Just after I graduated high school, I entered a pharmaceutical school. Normally, you would complete university training then enroll in a professional school in your country, right? You can take time to decide your profession which seems very convenient.
However, students in Japan need to decide before they're seventeen whether to become a doctor, pharmacist, lawyer, or another profession. I took an entrance examination for pharmaceutical school when I was seventeen. The school was one department of a university where they taught medicine and other fields of study typical for Western universities.
When I worked as a pharmacist, one of the office women said to me, “You decided to become a pharmacist when you were 15 or 16 years old, didn’t you?”
She was right. I decided when I was 16 and started preparing for the exam. Japanese universities and professional schools are hard to enter, but many of them are easy to graduate.
She said, “I can’t believe that! I didn’t imagine anything about my future when I was 16! I wish I did. If I have done that, I could have gotten a better job and salary!”
How old were you when you decided your occupation?
By the way, this is when I had the entrance exam. I didn’t know a certain English word in the English examination. The word was “pub”.
I have been to some pubs in Ireland now, but normal Japanese 17 year students don’t know what “pub” is! What do you think?
Thank you!
Education in Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Mostly compositional revisions this time, Yuri. Specifically, the sentence that explains the different lengths of time spent in each section of elementary/high school. Also, I changed the numerical breakdown from 3-3-6 to 6-3-3 to better reflect the listing of years in the previous sentence. The numerical form was kept the same as it could be though of as a complete noun and not a collection of numbers as a list.
In the listings of professions (doctor, pharmacist, lawyer) I removed the indefinite article "a" from each. Usually repetition of the same article isn't strictly necessary if the nouns are singular. This makes the passage easier to read and communicates the information so the reader can remember it easier.
Finally, in the conversation with the office woman, I changed "can get" to "could have gotten". The situation she describes (knowing earlier in life what she wanted to do as a profession) did not happen, so it is hypothetical. It did not happen, so any reference to it must be described as a possible action that was not performed.
The word "pub" in the English examination was probably there as an additional test for the students. Not of how well they knew the material taught in the classes themselves, but a test of how much the students knew about the subject *outside* of the curriculum. College/university tests like putting in things like that to test knowledge and reading skill.