Midterm day! Well, the midterms went all right I think. I think I did better on the writing/grammar test than I did on the listening/reading test. And I know I misspelled a lot of words too… Not sure when the results will be back, but I’m looking forward to knowing what it’ll be. The listening test was the hardest for me. The CD we listened to was clear for the most part, but some of the words were said too quick for me to comprehend very well. Which means I need to listen to the CD’s from the books more and more and study more and more.

The tests are set up like this: if you take the writing class, you take a midterm the day before. The main writing/grammar test is two hours long and focuses on words and grammar with various questions like fill-in-the-blank, choose the right word to complete the sentence, use the right grammar point to connect two sentences, explain the wrong grammar usage, etc. And at the end of this test, we had to write 3 conversation stories each about 1 page long. This is where most people have trouble, mainly because the hour and 40 minute test time goes by very quickly and they can’t finish in time. After this test we have a 20 minute break and then we start the listening/reading test. It’s one hour long and the first 20 minutes is the listening half where we listen to a CD with various conversations and have to answer the right, or sometimes wrong, answer, or write sentence answers too. The conversations are repeated once, and then again a second time during the last 10 minutes of class. The hard part about the listening tests is trying to listen to the conversation and read the question at the same time. I try to read the questions ahead of time and remember so I can focus on listening, but sometimes you have to answer 2 or 3 questions while listening. I’m getting better at the listening tests after taking so many of them at Yonsei and now at Sogang, but they can still be tough. After the listening part, you go straight into the reading part of the test where you have to answer various questions, fill in the blanks, or put the story in the right order. Usually there are 5-6 short stories that are taken from the books. So if you study the reading portion of the books a lot, the reading test will be a breeze. The other part of the midterm is the “interview.” We get a partner and have to perform two 3 minute conversations based on the main topics throughout the book. It can be memorized or ad-libbed, but it has to be done without any paper or hints to look at. The two conversations are randomly picked from a selection of 16 topics… After the conversation portion, you have a one on one “interview” with the teacher for a few more minutes. The final tests are the same as the midterms, except the “interview” is with a different teacher and is about 8 minutes long. It tends to be just answering questions the teacher will ask. But instead of short answers, they want long explanations using the new grammar and words we learned. So one has to study a lot to do well on these tests…

After school I met up with the church missionaries and my language exchange friend and we all got lunch together at this good restaurant. It had various meat dishes that seemed very Western style (roast beef, teriyaki chicken, silk steak, etc.). The food was all very good and I got pretty full. One of the missionaries is Korean and the other is from the US. The one from the US has only been here about 4 months and has a hard time with speaking Korean still. Although compared to when I was hear for only 4 months, she is much much better. She can understand for the most part when Koreans talk which is good.

I spent the rest of the day relaxing at home