Bombed the last dictation of the semester

In third-year Chinese, we have to take a 听写 every Wednesday. The name is misleading because, unlike at Princeton in Beijing, where teachers would read out a few sentences and we’d have to write them down in characters, all we have to do here is look at sentences of pinyin and write out the correct characters.

It’s a pretty good system to make students keep up to date with each week’s vocab lists. I like having a midweek quiz because it makes studying for the end of week test much less work.

I generally do very well on tingxies, and rarely forget even one entire character (I often screw up a radical or two). Today, however, I was unprepared, and suffered the consequences. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter; we take these things so often that it will hardly affect my grade.

Still, it was a bad note to end my semester on, and I’m disappointed in myself for not preparing like I usually do.