oloriel | Well, that was that

Exam: survived. Middle English part went all right, Orality/Literacy (my favourite ;_;) part was miserable, Pragmatics was okay-ish. When I left the office, I was expecting something 3*-ish. Came back in to be told "Unfortunately we could only make it 1.7"...

Managed to bite back "AHAHAH, 'unfortunately', are you kidding me?!". Attempted to be not too ridiculously obviously relieved and surprised. Had to laugh when they praised how well I'd done on the ME part, though (reading out loud & on the spot translating a bit of Chaucer, discussing a couple of noticeable words and forms, + additional questions). That quite honestly was the easiest part. I mean, I had to hand in a corpus of ~2000 lines (I chose three Tales from the Canterbury Tales, namely the Reeve's, the Franklin's and the Nuns' Priest's) from which 20 lines would be chosen by prof. As one of the topical foci I had listed was dialectology... shall we just say that I was not entirely surprised that the 20 lines were from the Reeve's Tale, and included some dialogue from the students?

Sadly, on Orality/Literacy he asked some theoretical stuff and thanks to some brainfarts I got helplessly mixed up with the terminology. Buggre all this for a larke. (Aggregative ≠ additive... >_>)

But anyway. This wasn't the miracle I was hoping for, but it wasn't the execution I was dreading either, so there.

Wish I could say "Anyway, it's OVER!" now, but noooo, only ONE of my examiners has managed to grade my respective essay so far. And one of the others has apparently had an accident so I'm not expecting to hear anything from that direction soon... ~~Irgendeine blöde Sau hat schon alle Ergebnisse und in allen Fächern 1,0. So Leute gibt's doch gar nicht. Ehepartner von Mitlesenden natürlich ausgenommen.~~ So as I don't know the full results yet and might yet have to return for seconds in March, first person to go "Yay it's over!!!" is going to be growled at, nothing personal. It ain't over 'til it's over.²

Oral exams have always been my greatest terror and greatest weakness. Until now, I've always been better when I've been armed with pen and paper (I am a thoroughly literacy-damaged person). It is kind of ironic that the best result I've managed (so far) is in... the oral exams.

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*Rough guideline to German academic grades: 1.0-1.5 = very good, 1.6-2.5 = good, 2.6-3.5 = satisfying, 3.6-4.0 = sufficient. More than 4 = not passed. 1.7 is a good "good". You do not have to understand this.

²This is only a tautology when looked at semantically, i.e. naïvely, but I'll spare you the Pragmatics lecture. Just don't mention it.