Today’s exam was, as you may or may not have figured out by reading the title, English Language Profiency. It consisted of four parts:

Reading and listening: well, reading and listening. Not much to say about that. Both went quite well, reading a little less so, but still.

Writing: we didn’t actually have to write an essay during the exam, thankfully. We did have to correct a given essay, filter out style errors and such. That also went … okay. I think.

Vocabulary: about 3500 words (I didn’t count them myself, the number was mentioned in the foreword), spread out over 20 chapters in a 267 page book, that’s a lot of vocabulary right there. But somehow I must have managed to get most of them in my head because that part went very well. Plus, I have a bonus point to add that I earned earlier this semester, also by studying vocabulary (if you passed the test by 8/10 you got a bonus point). I felt a tiny little bit of what it must feel like to be Hermione when I discovered that I had indeed passed the test by 8/10. (Shush, it’s my blog, I can brag all I want!)

Grammar: all about subdivisions of divisions of types of words, exceptions to exceptions to restrictions to rules and deviations thereof, and even more complicated things than that. An anthology (hm, that’s not nearly as pretty a word as it is in Dutch):

Abstract interpretations of non-countable nouns vs instantiations, or nonce substance interpretations; the distributive or joint interpretation of distributive constructions; general and typical partitives; invariable nouns with singular or plural agreement; it-clefts; the unmarked and marked case; oblique apposition; single-gender and dual-gender human nouns; the polar echo construction; finite and non-finite clauses; the royal, editorial and auctorial we (or, to say it more fancily, pluralis majestatis, editorialis and auctoris); all kinds of dummy its (anticipatory, extrapositional, cleft, impersonal, ambient, and expletive it); bare and extended be-existentials or presentationals with locative, temporal, predicative, infinitival or participial extensions; the pro-forms ‘so’ and ‘not’; the non-emphatic use of reflexive pronouns with or without an antecedent; … And those are only from the first two chapters, mind you. Phew!

There I was, thinking English grammar would be the easiest thing I’d ever have to study. Boy oh boy, was I wrong! I did enjoy myself learning it, though. I made a kick-ass summary (that doesn’t feel like the right word to use but I can’t find a better one), which I’m not going to throw away, because I’m too proud of it and it’s damn interesting as well. </language nerd talk>

The studying was made a bit easier by the slides. Our grammar teacher is a pretty cool guy, too bad class was on Monday mornings. I usually didn’t make it, but oh well. He’s young, hip and, well, pretty good-looking; he sang to us on various instances and he managed to put the following in slides about *grammar*: quotes from ‘Allo ‘Allo, lyrics from Hurt, I’ll kill her, Wear Sunscreen, Alanis Morisette and some others; this example of the use of simple present for timeless truths (and several more Friends quotes throughout the rest of the slides), a reference to Obama, a Statler and Waldorf conversation, a Gandalf quote, a Garfield cartoon, a Yoda quote (you can probably guess which one), and many, many more pop references. He’s cool.

So, this is the first exam I’ve made that I have a good feeling about (it’s the fifth in total). Being the optimist as I am try to be, I say that’s a good thing! And you know the best thing? I actually learned something I can use, yes indeed. Things I can use in this very blog post, for example.

PS: Did you know there are at least thirteen kinds of genitive (inflectional, sibilant, analytic, prepositional, periphrastic, double, oblique, phrasal, group, elliptic, independent, local, locative, …)? Admittedly, some of these are synonyms, but it’s still ridiculous, right?

In case you’re wondering: sometimes I feel like writing in English, or sometimes it fits the subject better, but you can comment in any language you prefer. (But not French. Or German. Or, you know, any other language than English or Dutch. )