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I just might have passed that Chinese exam

I had to wake up too early this morning, to try to get in a little more studying. The exam started at 8am, and the location was several kilometers away, so I wanted to leave by around 7am to be sure I got there in plenty of time. I set my alarm for 5:30am, so I could get up and study, and then another for 6am, as I usually snooze or disable the first one before I’m really awake. I ended up snoozing both until about 7:10am.

I pound on Jesse’s door to see whether he’s up, as he has to take the exam too, and turns out he was in the shower. Meaning he’d gotten up before me and was really just rubbing it in by smelling good. I went to the exam in my sweatpants.

Outside, we’d just missed the tram, so we decided it’d be better to walk than to wait for the Saturday morning schedule to hook us up with a ride. It worked out fine, because the test actually started at 8:30am. Looks like of all the things we studied, the when and where of the exam hadn’t made the list.

The exam itself could have been worse. There were actually several sections where the professor wrote the questions in pinyin underneath where she wrote the characters, so those were pretty easy for me. A vocab word or two failed me, and I know at least one instance where the grammar was so complex, I got a little mixed up, but other than that, it was OK. When it came to the all-characters translation part of the test, I was tired and not at all in the mood for tic-tac-toe.

As the waves of characters washed over me, I was quite sure I recognized one of them as ¤ε, which of course isn’t a Chinese character at all, but that’s really what it looked like. Apparently it was the word for “to eat.” Damn. Really looks like this: 吃

Given the amount of questions I know I missed, like that example, I estimate I got a low-to-mid-B. Not bad, but nothing too great.

I’m excited about the prospect of learning more in the coming months. Our professor has agreed to hold a Monday night “off the record” session, as Chinese III isn’t officially offered next semester, and of course our whole group leaped at the chance to do it. It should get started in March or late February, so I’ve a month reprieve.

I’ll probably make an in-depth post later on about what I’ve learned so far, as I find it pretty groovy, but in the meantime take a look at the Wikipedia article on Chinese radicals. It explains how characters are broken down and categorized, something that I learned too late but nonetheless helped me a ton in committing characters to memory.