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there's something bizarre
about taking a final exam with a dictionary at your elbow.
this course had bi-weekly quizzes. the format was always the same: four or five questions, each of which included a short passage from something we'd been reading in class, which we were to translate (and he'd give us a short wordlist so we didn't get hung up on deceptive cognates, etc.), and two words for which we were to identify some feature -- the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever.
the final was just like the quizzes, only longer.
thing being, the glossary has, for each word, the definition and the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever right there! so, like, sure, we could only use the glossary and not flip back through the book to look up footnotes and pronoun tables and whatnot, but who needed the rest of the book? not sure if something's dative or accusative? think it matters? look in the glossary -- those were the professor's instructions!
i confess myself a bit baffled. (not arguing, mind you, but baffled nonetheless.)
i suppose the fact that we've been doing this all semester did make it easier for us than it would have made some random person off the street armed with the same glossary, because the glossary didn't say anything about sentence patterns and idioms and stuff -- so once i'd pulled the word-by-word translation out of the glossary, i was able to make it into decent-sounding modern english sentences, which was what he was testing.
fair enough. not thinking about it any more now, that's for sure. two down, one to go -- i'm going to catch a quick nap, then bang out the rest of this paper and wonder why the hell le boy hasn't gotten back to me yet. (even if he says no thanks, he still has my dictionary. grr.)
this course had bi-weekly quizzes. the format was always the same: four or five questions, each of which included a short passage from something we'd been reading in class, which we were to translate (and he'd give us a short wordlist so we didn't get hung up on deceptive cognates, etc.), and two words for which we were to identify some feature -- the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever.
the final was just like the quizzes, only longer.
thing being, the glossary has, for each word, the definition and the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever right there! so, like, sure, we could only use the glossary and not flip back through the book to look up footnotes and pronoun tables and whatnot, but who needed the rest of the book? not sure if something's dative or accusative? think it matters? look in the glossary -- those were the professor's instructions!
i confess myself a bit baffled. (not arguing, mind you, but baffled nonetheless.)
i suppose the fact that we've been doing this all semester did make it easier for us than it would have made some random person off the street armed with the same glossary, because the glossary didn't say anything about sentence patterns and idioms and stuff -- so once i'd pulled the word-by-word translation out of the glossary, i was able to make it into decent-sounding modern english sentences, which was what he was testing.
fair enough. not thinking about it any more now, that's for sure. two down, one to go -- i'm going to catch a quick nap, then bang out the rest of this paper and wonder why the hell le boy hasn't gotten back to me yet. (even if he says no thanks, he still has my dictionary. grr.)