Seriously. Sure, you guys may think that "Ooooh, my college final exams are so hard," or "I'm totally going to fail my high school final," but in all honesty, there is no test harder or more important than the one I'm going to take in about three weeks.

It's called the DLPT (Defense Language Proficiency Test), and it is a royal bitch.

There are three parts to it: Reading Comprehension, Listening Comprehension, and the Oral Proficiency Interview. (Make your shitty jokes now. :D)

So why is this so hard? Because it's not in my native language. That would be easy shit.

No, it's not even in a language I've been studying for awhile.

It's in Chinese, and I've only been studying that for 63 weeks. Five days a week, six hours a day, at the world's hardest language school.

The requirements to pass are to get a 2/2/1+ on reading, listening, and speaking respectively according to the Interagency Language Roundtable Scale.

While a 2 might seem easy, it's actually harder than it might seem. Most people who are not native speakers will not get to a level 4, no matter how much time they spend on it. Almost none make it to level 5. And that's after many years of study and living in the society where the target language is spoken.

To get to level 2 in 63 weeks is nothing short of a miracle. The pass rate for the DLPT5 so far has been in the range of about 30-40%, so far. And that's just out of the 50% of people who manage to get to the test from the beginning of the course. Normally classes start with 30 or so people, and manage to lower to about 15 from the original class, and five or so rollbacks from other, advanced classes that they failed out of. I made it that far.

And hell, two out of the three requirements to pass the DLPT I'm not worried about at all. I can speak at about a level 2 in chinese (with a requirement of 1+) and easily listen at a level 2+/3 (with a requirement of 2.)

However. You ask me to READ chinese, and that's where you lose me. I've not been quite so good at it. I'd say there's about a 60-40% chance of me passing the reading portion.

"This sounds hard," you say. "But why don't you just take it a second time if you fail?"

Because I can't. Fail once, and it's look for a new job, pretty much. Since I'm Aircrew, they're not giving Aircrew post-DLPT (which is the six-month extender course for people who failed the first time around.)

All that training, and a year and a half of my life, effectively for nothing.

If I manage to pass this test, I get to fulfill two of my lifelong dreams: learn to fly, and live in Japan.

"But why are you going to Japan if you're learning Chinese?"
Because we don't have any military bases in China, silly.

"How will you learn to fly?"
Flight training. Joyous stuff. How else?

Plus passing means I get to get the hell out of California sometime in the middle of March.

THANK YOU GOD.

Anything else I might be missing...

OH YES.

Since that test is rapidly approaching, I'll probably have to pull a MaestroMoodSwings and disappear from the radar for a couple of weeks. I'll pop in from time to time, but I highly doubt I'll be able to put out any music during that time. You never know, however, adversity is a highly powerful inspiration, or so I've heard, and god knows I'll have a lot of stress to relieve. Whether I'll do that through Madden, Call of Duty or music is yet to be known.

SO IF I DISAPPEAR.

I'll see you guys on March 5th, when I'm done with all the tests. And I'll be a goddamned wreck until (and possibly after) I get the test results.

Wish me luck! :D