Back to College

It is official.... I am now a college student once again. Today I registered for classes at Soochow Suzhou Daxue (known to locals as SuDa, "daxue" = university). The whole registration process was a little crazy. First, you fill out the application, get your student ID, pay, take a test and buy your books. While credit cards are used some in China, for the most part it is a cash society. So I showed up and paid for my classes IN CASH. After paying, I was all set to buy my books, but was told that I first needed to take the placement test. With much trepidation, I went into the room for the written test. Ohmigosh. For the first part, I was supposed to translate from English into characters, the second part you had to choose from several sentences (that were of course written in characters) which was grammatically correct, and finally you had to translate a section from characters into English. Yikes! It was stinkin' hard. I think that I recognized about 20 characters on the ENTIRE PAGE. After staring at the page for several minutes, I finally told the teacher that I didn't know enough to complete the test. Yes, indeed Chinese keeps me humble. From there, it was on to the oral exam. I did much better on the oral portion and was able to have a conversation with the teacher about: where I was from, why I was here, how many children I have, their names and ages, where I lived, and how I would travel to the university every day. After talking with the teacher, she thought that I could go either way maybe a level 1 maybe a level 2 (level 1 is the beginners). I told her that I preferred to do level 1 due to the amount of characters that I don't know. She suggested doing what is called "level 1 - fast class." I bought the appropriate books and classes start Monday. Watch out Chinese, you have bested me so far, but I may just conquer you after all. Of course, only after several years of serious studying..... I will keep you posted on my progress!