Wo Zhonggou hua shi bu

Which means, despite the lack of accents, "my chinese is bad" and just how bad it is was demonstrated today in my Mandarin Chinese written exam (As well as German I do 20 credits of Ab Initio Chinese - it's compulsory for Single Honours students to do 20 credits in a subject outside of their main subject area). For those who aren't sure about the manner in which Mandarin Chinese is composed:

• there are the characters, the ones people have made into tattoos etc. These are extremely hard to remember accurately as each character is made up of oraticals of which there are too many to remember. There is the symbols for a woman, a man, a knife, a fire etc... but these do not always refer to the actual meaning of the character as each character can have various meanings. Many are so similar that it is very hard to differentiate between them. Apparently if you learn 500 of the 2000 characters, you'll be alright.
• then there is the anglicised version of the character known as 'pinyin'. Each character has an anglicised word attributed to it, which, like the characters, may have many different meanings.
• There are five different accents within the language: The raised tone, the low tone, the neutral tone, the undulating tone and the one I can never remember which looks like a German umlaut (not often used). These aren't the official names for the accents by the way. Each accent can give the word a different meaning. For example, 'ma' with a raised tone at the end of a sentence indicates a question. A neutral tone indicates 'mother'.

So perhaps you can appreciate how confusing and difficult Chinese has the potential to be. And, good lord above, did we suddenly appreciate today just how confusing and difficult it is. I opened my exam paper to give it a read through and truly thought for a moment I had been given the wrong one. We had been informed that we needed to learn about 20 common characters, which I had, and of which about 3 were of use. I REALLY struggled, to the point that I left the examination room with a tension headache and a sinking feeling in my stomach. Luckily my speaking exam and the continuous assessments had gone well so all hope is not lost. However, my entire average will be dragged down by this. I'm feeling really quite annoyed and forlorn as I feel as if I should have revised harder and we were led to believe it wouldn't be as hard as that.

Oh dear.

I'm now worrying about all my other exams and it is not a nice feeling. I just know that this particular exam couldn't have gone much worse and I'm not in a state of mild panic about the others I have already done and have yet to do.

Eeek.

You may not see me for the next week as I'll have my nose to the grindstone so hard that it'll be red and raw by the end.

Zai qian

Vienna xxx