One semester down......

Today was the last day for exams. The exam was to last 2 hours, of which we needed every minute. Except one part of the exam, the entire exam was all characters.

The first part of the test was to translate the characters Pinyin, with of course the correct accent. Okay, I'm lucky I can get the word let alone the correct accents. Next came the quantifiers. Many nouns used in the Chinese language have their own measure word with the default measure word 个。Personally my favorite but I digress and we weren't allowed to use this one. After that we had a few sections where you had to choose the correct character for the sentence. Now the fun starts. One section was a string of Chinese characters that you had to put together to form a sentence that someone from China could understand. Okay, when I speak, I limit my words to maybe 4 or 5 to make a sentence, apparently our teacher thought we needed to form longer sentences. After that was done, we had sentences that were incorrect and we had to correct them, followed by words that were presented to us to make a sentence, and last but not least a story (3 paragraphs) followed by 5 questions that needed to be answered. Oh and did I mention, that all the answers had to be in Chinese characters. Two hours wasn't long enough.

Our teacher did reward us after the exam with a cake to celebrate our success and to say good-bye to some students going back home or moving to other parts of China.

For the rest of us, there will be class again next week.