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To be completely honest, I can’t really read Mandarin

I’ve been working on getting a scholarship to study in Taiwan for Fall 2008. Of course, I’ll definitely need to brush up on my Chinese before I go.

Back in the States, I’ve already taken two quarters of Mandarin. The coursework was primarily in Pinyin, which means I didn’t really learn many characters. My pronunciation was decent, though, as I was fortunate enough to have a professor from Taiwan and one from Beijing. I got the best of both worlds, so to speak.

Here in Germany, I took an additional course in Mandarin, which assumed knowledge of characters. Pinyin was used exceedingly sparingly (basically whenever I asked the professor to write something in Pinyin). It was in some sense a crash course, and I had to learn at least 200 characters for the final exam, which I ended up getting a B on.

In Taiwan, however, the characters are very different from the characters used in mainland China.

Regarding the trip to Taiwan in the fall, I recently received a placement exam for Chinese via e-mail. I thought, “No sweat!” and popped it open. I actually laughed out loud when I saw it. First question:

(   )今天是李小姐的生日,王先生___她吃飯。

1. 送
2. 請
3. 買
4. 賣

If you know the answer, hook me up in a comment, OK? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Fuck traditional characters.