Chinese Test 1

Ulgh. The phrase "my brain hurts" comes to mind... But the few characters that I couldn't remember I eventually figured out via context. There was one place where we were supposed to rearrange the characters into a coherent sentence. Well, several places, but one place where I couldn't come up with anything that satisfied me. What I finally put down would translate as "My younger brother and your younger sister are what?" It would make sense to me with "who" instead of what, or if there where a 'zuo' in there, making it a question of what they "do" (as in job), but if the characters were all there as given, then I'm just confused.

Still, I'm reasonably certain I passed it. Hang on... Okay, just making sure I hadn't gotten 'zuo's character mixed up with 'dou's. Anyway... I'm thinking that next time I'll take it on Tuesday and skip out on an office hour, as I was a bit wired from the test when I got ready to teach my stats class.

Oh, I showed my flash card set to one of the guy's in Theory of Knowledge. I used most of the cards from the set of 80, and put a single character on each one. So, at least 70 distinct characters. He was asking how many characters there were. Answer: thousands upon thousands. Then I held up the bundle of cards: "And these are the ones we've seen so far." Most of them, anyway. I left off some of the plain radicals that we haven't used as vocab yet. ^/^

UPDATE: I'm not the only one who struggled with that particular derangement of characters. A student who is only taking 101 again because 102 got cancelled thought there must be a missing word as well. And I strongly suspect it was "zuo", so that we were supposed to construct a sentence asking what the little brother and sister do. Bao Laoshi said he would look at it and see if he had, in fact, left something out.