greek: the end of semester one

My exam is over: the test itself wasn’t as bad as I was fearing; the split between memory work and translation was about 70/30. I don’t think I scored 100%, but I felt like I went pretty well.

The real nightmare was in the lead-up to the exam: we had a vocabulary of over 400 words, and 13 chapters of translation exercises to be familiar with… it felt like a lot of content, and I tend to see every gap in what I know, rather than see how much of the course I already have in my head.

I took a day of holidays from work the day before my exam, so that I could have a solid run at studying. Somehow, I managed to stay up past midnight doing revision. This made getting up before 5am (to drop Kel at the physio) all the more difficult, but at least the car was parked, and I was sitting in a cafe by 6:30am (drinking decaf – a long black, and then a latte) to do my last minute revision.

At 8am, I decided to go over to college. Since the lectures start at 8:45am, I thought the exam would be an 8:30am, or perhaps a 9am start. No, in fact, it was a 9:30am start! So suddenly, I had an extra hour to spend revising: by now, I just wanted the exam to begin (an odd sensation in itself).

So I went to a different cafe, and had a hot chocolate, and flicked back through my notes yet again.

I don’t think cramming for a language exam would ever get more than a few marks, and I wasn’t expecting anything from this last cafe to show up in the exam.

As I flicked through my notes, I remembered something the lecturer had said about one particular word – the word Elijah in Greek – Ἠλίας. Some names when they go from Hebrew to Greek – go a bit crazy. Elijah is no exception – as a word, it doesn’t behave as you’d expect.

In the same section of the textbook, there was something else that I also wrote out – something I hadn’t noticed at all until that moment – and that was in the exam. Somehow I managed to remember it. In a few weeks, I’ll find out if I remembered it correctly.

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3 Comments

  1. I’m not sure what I find more distressing; the exam or all this talk of decaf!

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