Placement Test

I was called yesterday evening on my mobile phone and had to confirm about three times that, yes I will come and no there are no schedule conflicts.
And today finally the big day...Placement Test Day!
The test started at 10 am and all in all you had one hour and forty minutes to complete the written and oral parts of the test.
Our teacher arrived a few minutes late, so we already thought that we were at the wrong place, but finally she showed up! We were maybe around eight people in my room and after checking attendance we got the worksheets. Then our teacher announced that the oral test will happen simultaneously, just outside the door and guess who was the lucky first person...me of course :)

Some advice for the oral test:

1) be prepared to answer difficult questions..."please summarize the last newspaper article you read"...quite advanced for me I guess ;)

2) saying something is better than saying nothing! you can use some English words, just integrate them into the Korean sentence! noone expects you to know all the words in Korean!

3) if you don't understand ask her to repeat the question one more time slowly. if you simply don't understand the keyword ask about the meaning, this helped me to answer a question which I didn't have any clue about...

4) sometimes just lie...just say something which could be correct for you! (I mean the teacher is not really interested in your favorite color...just say the first color which comes to your mind so you can answer as quickly as possible and thus make a very proficient impression)

I did ok I guess, could have been far worse...lots of false starts, but whatever ;)
The written test was a little bit frustrating. It covers everything from the very beginnings to the really really advanced stuff. Unfortunately they started asking about that really really advanced stuff from page four on (until page 13 or 14 or so). Well, honestly I couldn't fill in more than the first three pages... :( I understood the meaning of the sentences afterwards but I've never before heard of the grammar you were supposed to use. It was all about grammar anyways...no text comprehension, no vocabulary...
On the last page you had to write a short essay. You could chose between two topics but since I didn't understand the first one I had to pick number two, which fortunately was really really easy: travelling.
I finished my page and with that the whole test after around one hour. I took some more minutes for proofreading and left to have lunch :) The Intensive Course starts on Monday but I'm quite sure about my level already ;) so I guess there will be no surprises :)

For lunch, me, Stephanie and another girl I met at the placement test went to the Chinese student cafeteria for a change. They are supposed to serve Chinese food there but some (most?) of the stuff looked quite Korean to me ;)
I had a spicy Soft-Tofu-Stew with rice. Spicy but delicious:

I love how you can already see that it is really spicy before even trying it

Afterwards we had a coffee together (I love Caramel Macchiato) and I had to go to the Qualitative Research class. Class was ok, it was a little bit of a drag today...We always repeat the stuff which we had to read anyways very extensively, which can be good because you can remember things better but it's also a little bit boring sometimes...My research project by the way will be about Korean as a Foreign Language :)

Since the class is really long (three hours) it was already nearly dinner time afterwards. I arranged to meet up with Stephanie and her roommate to go to the cafeteria in the Women's University. Cafeteria food is really cheap and convenient and it can be quite tasty (although sometimes it really isn't ;) This time was again good, I had some Albap, which I already blogged about before referring to it as flying fish roe rice...

Albap

I'm not really fond of fish eggs so I usually scoop out most of them ;)

Now I just prepared the text for tomorrow's class (the annoying one). Well, I learned that Internet journal articles aren't the best...I mean, 14 spelling mistakes on six pages of text...three mistakes in the references...proofing some self-evident stuff as well. Everyone makes mistakes but most of these could have been found with Word's spellcheck...Also: how about proofreading your paper? it's only six pages so proofread it twice! Finding so many mistakes makes me quite angry *grrrrrrr*
Wish me good luck for the class tomorrow! I just pray that the professor speaks English this time and we can avoid further conflict! Because, believe me, if she speaks Korean again there will be a lot of conflict...