Probing an Examination and Pitiful Learning Endeavours

On Friday I took the day off from the bookshop and had a holiday-holiday, wherein I did pretty much nothing, and it was a very nice experience. Saturday and Sunday are relaxed in any case, so it was only this morning where I set off somewhere, namely to the university to write my Latin exam.

Last night I felt overcome with guilt for not preparing for the exam carefully. After the 'orare' thing I decided to try something else. So I began reviewing the textbook from last semester so that I could tell apart the declensions, conjugations, and parts of speech more swiftly and therefore finish the exam more swiftly. But I hadn't gotten far.

During a massive case of guilty anxiety, I tend to keep on reading things on the internet to keep my mind off of it late into the night, as the guilty feelings keep gnawing and gnawing away, conscious all the while that I should go to sleep soon and set the alarm clock so that I wake up in time. The process ends in my going to sleep in the early morning hours, 'worn to a frazzle.' This case of guilty anxiety was comparatively light but unpleasant per se.

I did not expect the Latin exam to be massively difficult in terms of vocabulary, but the syntax is a crapshoot; either I know what's going on or I don't, even after knowing what each word in a sentence means individually. So there wasn't so much more preparation I could do aside from finding a reputable side-by-side Latin-English text with accurate grammatical elucidations (which I don't expect to find easily) and gradually gathering experience with the differences between the languages (which would also take two or three months, I think). Which I didn't do.

After a shower and a little internet time I set off twenty minutes early, and therefore had plenty of time to reach the class and study more of the textbook. Since the confluence of students to the campus has diminished, the Nollendorfplatz-Krumme Lanke U-Bahn line has shortened trains now, so I awaited it at the front of the platform. At Dahlem Dorf station the strawberry vending shack was shuttered. In the streets between Dahlem Dorf and the Rostlaube there was no discernible difference in the quantity of people, though.

At the room where the exam was to take place, the door was locked and nobody was waiting in front. Overzealously I went to the Latin/Greek department to inquire, to be rightfully advised to wait in front of the room and hope that people would start coming by and by. So that was what happened, and after we had (presumably) all gathered, the professor showed and apologetically herded us to a different classroom wherein we wrote our exams. It was one sheet of paper, with a very slightly simplified text of Cicero wherein he brings the matter of Verres and Sthenius to the attention of all. To assist our feeble minds there were fortunately commas added into the text to separate the main and ancillary clauses, as well as a summary of events in German above the text; the professor even read out the text to us once so that we could hear the groupings of the words. And we were allowed to use our dictionaries. Nevertheless it was a task which took up at least an hour for me, and I was the first person done.

As soon as I got home I found a professional translation on the internet, and saw that I had made a key error but hopefully not one that obscured the elegance and fairly accurate nature of my text as a whole.

As one can tell from the self-praising tone of the previous sentence, I feel quite smug, not only because I came up with logical if inaccurate translations by the end, but particularly because I was also so happy that Latin is over for this first pair of semesters. It was a six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. class which swallowed up even my Friday evenings in the first semester, riddled with naps as unslept nights avenged themselves, and on one hot evening made into an extra penance by my feeling sick for two hours straight. In one or two weeks' time I need to stop being smug, though; otherwise I won't learn from the mistakes I did make, and otherwise I'll have a nasty surprise once the marks are in. (c:

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Aside from following current events exhaustively through my new overlord, Twitter; and reading books and other things for enjoyment; I am planning to go on long bicycle rides to explore Berlin. (I feel like cycling to the North Sea, though that wouldn't work since I'd be borrowing my brother's or mother's bike.)

As far as amateur journalism is concerned, it's been a relief to find that either the media have been on a good streak lately, or there really is a lot of profound and good stuff in existence as long as one strikes on a worthy publication. My crusading spirit has been a little appeased. I will say, though, that purely going from instinct I think that the reporting about Syria in the mass media has been completely misguided, and that the revolution going on now will be the absolute worst thing that could happen to the country and to American/European interests. While I supported even the invasion of Libya, I think that the situations in Tunisia and Egypt could have been solved better if they had been dissociated from each other entirely and not interfered with by Western interests; conversely I think that the suppression of protests in Bahrain was absolutely shameful and that here the moral equivocation of e.g. the EU was clear. Syria is something else altogether, and is being turned into a frontier of armed groups, government forces which are presumably splintering off to something else, local fighters, population groupings (e.g. the apparently de facto autonomous Kurds near the Turkish border), and intelligence agencies which is a wild west without any guarantees for civilians' security. Of course the massacres and mistreatment of children in custody must be investigated and legally prosecuted in Syria, but I think that it could be done under the existing government as long as the state military and police apparatus are held out of the investigations. Basher Assad is, at least, neither deranged nor bloodthirsty. As for Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, etc., I have absolutely no clue what is going on in those countries but I think we should have a clue.

Anyway, since I haven't been writing blog posts about these things, I have been weakly attempting to supplement my courses of university study until my bad conscience wears off.

One of these weak attempts is a learn-one-Arabic-word-per-day thing. Though I will not need Arabic for my specific Culture and History of the Near East programme, it seems like a waste of opportunity not to pick up a bit on the occasion. So I come across an Arabic phrase or word on the internet, copy and paste it into a translator to find out what it means, and write it down into a notebook; then I take each letter and copy and paste it individually to see what it looks like in its main form, to come up with a translation. The Arabic alphabet is full of phenomena like the Greek sigma, which looks like σ except if it is at the end of a word ς. So this way I am very, very slowly learning the alphabet as well as words like talib, Misr, and arabiy (I'm not too sure about the transliteration). But I feel like doing something adventurous and challenging and of having some kind of knowledge which is relatively rare rather than redundant, so I've ordered a Farsi textbook through the bookshop and have taken down the ISBN, etc., for a course in colloquial Urdu. We do have materials for learning Hebrew and Russian, too; but I worry that I will mix them up with Greek (I've already mixed up the 'Η' and 'Ν' at least once), whereas visually Arabic and Farsi look different. Besides the unsuccessfulness of past attempts at engraving the Hebrew alphabet on my memory is discouraging me a little; I remember what aleph and gimel look like and that's pretty much it.

Besides I want to read the Koran in Max Henning's German translation, and am presently bogged down in Annemarie Schimmel's quite valuable introduction. Even in the Bible I haven't read much at one stroke. One night in 2003ish when T. and I were collaborating on a Spanish project I had lots of free time and so tackled long segments of it, and another night I was trying to find out if Job's story was as senseless as it sounded (I decided to ignore it in my personal theology); and for some reason I was quite interested in the Book of Esther. In fact this may also be connected to the compulsion I felt to go to church again around that time — Mama was attending one and so I went along a couple weekends, before finding out that as usual the people and building and so on are distracting, and that I only become neurotic about things like eating fish on Good Friday rather than deepening the spirit of religion, so I don't feel good-er, if I go to church. In any case I don't consider theological texts easy reading. But it seems dumb to study Islamic Studies without reading the Koran, and I might need the knowledge of it in my Moorish Science Temple essay due October — it would be good to be able to discern the evidently great differences between the MST's religious text and the 'orthodox' Koran without needing to rely entirely on a scholarly treatment by someone else.