On Sat­ur­day, I got up early once again to go to uni­ver­sity since I had to take the sec­ond part of my French as a sec­ond lan­guage exam: the oral exam.

The writ­ten part last week went well, also it was extremely bor­ing and quite long. It started with an 400 words essay. It took me about 20 min­utes to write it, but I had to sit around for the whole hour since I wasn’t allowed to leave. Then, we had the lis­ten­ing part and the read­ing part (both mul­ti­ple choices ques­tions). I hate mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions, I find them very ambigu­ous. Even as a native speaker, I had no idea which answer fit­ted best a cou­ple of times. Any­way, I’ll get the result… in three months! That’s right. Appar­ently, cor­rect­ing French exams is a very long process… maybe they send them to Paris?!

Once thing that annoyed me a lot was that the per­son super­vis­ing the exam (I’m not sure whether she was a TA or a teacher) explained the words in the test in Eng­lish. I mean, this is a French lan­guage exam… if stu­dents don’t under­stand the ques­tions in French, I don’t see the point. Plus, she couldn’t explain cer­tain words in Eng­lish, but she didn’t know what the French word actu­ally meant! No kidding.

Any­way, my oral exam lasted exactly three min­utes. It may have some­thing to do with the fact I wrote in big bold let­ter “I am French !” in answer to the ques­tion “where did you learn French?” in the pre­lim­i­nary ques­tion­naire. The exam­iner was a nice guy and admit­ted there was no point in test­ing me any fur­ther. Phew, thanks.

After the exam, I wan­dered around in the uni­ver­sity, tak­ing pictures.

Hall­way	Mes­sage Board
Stu­dent Lounge	Read­ing The Paper
Study­ing	Danc­ing
Lock­ers	Library
No BBQ, We Told You!	Lonely Stu­dent

Related arti­cles:

1. On Cam­pus (Part II)
2. On Cam­pus (Part III)
3. French Pas­tries
4. Sights of Paris (Part II)
5. Whoui Spik Inglish