Kept for My Occasional Nostalgia

So I think this would be a good time to reflect on my past two weeks of crazy learning of linguistics and how the exam turned out, as well as little things that have surfaced in my consciousness recently. 

The two-week revision period isn’t as butt-clenching-ly intense as I’d imagined. After 3 or 4 days of crashing through the “grammar” section everything else (that includes sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics etc.) felt kind of anecdotal and was thus read more for pleasure than for information. 

The exam turned out kind of a roller-coaster ride. There were 3 parts, the last two of which are all essays and the first consists of three individual questions that I assume is aimed at testing the basic linguistic knowledge and analytical skills, namely figuring out “meaning unit” (lexicon) in a list of words in a foreign language, figuring out the phonological pattern of a foreign language (again from a list of given word) and syntactical comparison between two languages. 

For any sane being it would probably be a stupid act to dawdle for one hour on Part I Question I when the test itself is 2.5 hours, but I don’t know if it’s the weather or if it’s the time of day, that is exactly what I did. That means I have to finish the rest at a relatively paced rushing-thru, which I did until 7 minutes to the end I realized I had forgotten about the last essay question….so even beyond the time limit I just wrote and wrote and wrote without even much thinking going on but the single voice that’s screaming through my hole body that “I’m gonna finish this damn thing”. When I submitted I was 17 minutes overtime. 

Now looking back and writing about the incident only 3 days after it happened I felt like I am writing some other people’s miserable story, and it feels unreal. But I guess that’s the psychological distance that I’ve got to have to actually learn something from it instead of whining tearlessly. 

I think the heart of the problem is that I’m a reader of information but not a fan of practical application. I certainly know all the definitions of the terms and their inter-relatedness. But I only had a somewhat vague and peripheral once-over when it comes to how linguists have utilized that “logicalization” process to arrive at something concrete: namely figuring out the patterns of a foreign language. During the revision period the thought of doing actual real-time analyses of foreign tongues actually occurred to me more than once, and I knew it was quite a vital part of what linguistics entails, but somehow I just let it brush me by because there has been another interesting information to read and synthesize, which I feel more comfortable doing. Well, I guess that never turns out well. 

Now the written exam is over with a phone interview still on the way. I think it would do me good to do a review of my strengths and weaknesses in mental preparations for that, and hopefully I will be able to deliver better stuff. 

Peace,