Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Silly things people forward.

At CUUMBAAYA, Joel stuck up a post recently saying that his co-workers were forwarding around the psychopath test.

This post will make more sense if you take a second and check it out.

I came up non-pyschopath. Actually, I recently paid a lot of money to confirm that I have no psychoses whatsoever. (I'm aware that as a general rule, people who brag about how their psychological tests reveal them to be not demonstrably crazy are to be avoided. I consider myself to be an exception. Suffice to say, it's wise to get oneself tested for all of one's potential genetic diseases.)

The psychopath test is, of course, debunked on Snopes, but I still like it. I am especially fond of how, though it is surely inaccurate, it focuses on weeding out those among us who are not just sociopaths but smart sociopaths. It has been my experience that stupid sociopaths really are pretty harmless. Kind of like how one imagines a caveman focused on his own physical survival.

BTW, my coworkers are forwarding the Japanese IQ test around.

Here are the instructions are in English
1. Get everyone across the river. Only 2 persons on the raft at a time
2. The father can not stay with any of the daughters without their mother's presence
3. The mother can not stay with any of the sons without their father's presence
4. The thief (striped shirt) can not stay with any family member if the Policeman is not there
5. Only the Father, the Mother and the Policeman know how to operate the raft
6. To move the people click on them.
7. To move the raft click on the pole on the opposite side of the river.


(Actually, when I look at the instructions on the site, I could swear that the instructions are in Chinese, which would indeed make the test difficult for the average citizen of Japan. Don't totally trust me on this one. I was planning to study in China in college and I took some classes and then tutored a Chinese guy who was learning English for awhile, but my Chinese really sucks, especially when outside the comfort of the pinyin. When the CSO gets home, I will have him take a look. He's had some Japanese.)

CC
who realizes she has conflated a few things here, but is writing this more to amuse herself than to impart valuable information on psychology, or Asian langauages.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's a little difficult in cases like this to exactly determine the native language of such instructions. Japanese has three scripts, one of which is kanji, which uses Chinese characters. These instructions are written entirely in Chinese characters. That's unusual for Japan: even when kanji is used, it most often has a sprinkling of hiragana script to allow verbal tense and other linguistic cues. So, as someone with two years of Japanese under his belt (but only a tiny amount of Chinese), I'm gonna say this seems to be a Chinese, not Japanese, test. That said, literate Japanese people would be able to read and follow the instructions, because while many young Japanese are notoriously bad at kanji, these instructions are quite simple and use kanji that anyone with a high school education would be able to follow.