Bring on the Night

Monday C took the 2nd of 5 exams needed to complete the obligatory Danish course. She had to do both written and oral tests, and had to wait until today to hear the result. It was a pretty gloomy wait, but today she was told she passed.

C has been nervous since before Christmas, and with good reason. Not that she doesn’t do her homework; because she studies really hard and would make any average Danish student embarrassed about his/her lack of effort. She was worried since the test is absolute crazy hard as far as I can figure. No only did she have to be able to recap 3 different mini-books and engage in conversation about them, but she also had to prepare random conversation about 5 preset light topics like “What did you do at Christmas”. Add to that 3 tougher topics more where C drew the “change in sex roles since year 1900”. Pretty hard when your Danish vocabulary is less than 6 months big. Then there were the time pressured written test (15 min) where the students had to write an email, fill in blank and make different semi-complex sentences.

May sound easy to some, but you try doing that after 6 months of learning a new language.

Yesterday she came home and didn’t have a clue about how she’d done, other that that she passed the oral test. She had a hunch that she messed up the written part, since she was under a lot of time pressure. So I completely understood why she felt worried and exhausted yesterday when I came home.

I just got a sms from her 2 hour ago saying: “Jeg bestod” (eng: I passed). I bet her mood today is better now. This calls for celebration with some good food! I bet I have to spend some doe on some flowers too.

Knowing how difficult Danish is, I am really proud of her.