Tests

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So I've been going through a bunch of tests in the past couple days.

First of all I took a Chinese test this morning. It was a bit rough! There were two parts of this test, the first part was listening and the second part reading. The listening wasn't too bad. I know I made a couple mistakes - one I chose the wrong answer and it kept going before I could change it, two I didn't write one of the characters properly and third there was one where I didn't take notes on a long passage. I often have difficulty with listening for one main reason - I understand everything the people are saying in the listening, but when I have to read and answer a question based on it it's a bit more difficult cause I have to read (which I'm not great on - although not horrible it's still considerably different from my listening). The second part (reading) was extremely hard, there were no simple, day to day conversational type things to read, they were all things from newspapers or from notices - literally business Chinese. I did something I've never done before and hopefully won't do again. I first tried to read the passages, but it didn't work cause there were too many words I didn't know. So I ended up scanning the passages for the characters in the answer questions and then answering them. I suppose it's a way of educational guessing but I hope the next test isn't like that cause it really made my brain hurt.

The second set of tests I've been going through have been with Cam. As I told my mother tonight Cam and I have troubles because we're people from two different families living together but we also have trouble because we're in a bicultural relationship. So it's a bit more difficult than normal. Tonight was the first time he said "you're not my friend, so that's why I do things different sometimes". It shocked me at first but then I understood that we don't have the relationship of friends, it's more than that. Sometimes the things he says shock me and I don't get it until maybe I've already said something wrong.

Just to set the record more permanent than it already is Cam and I got officially engaged with a call to my father this past week.

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