Emmet's Student Diary 伦敦学生博客第31周

I'm now in the middle of my exams. I had one on Monday in classical Chinese so it's one down and three to go. That's why I've been spending more time in the library than in the bar. We have two exams in modern Chinese; one of those is in traditional full-form characters and one in simplified characters.

In our first week at university, the head of the Chinese department told us just how important it is for us to learn and appreciate traditional characters. Michel Hockx said that if we want to read any Chinese literature or poetry that's 60 years old or more, this is an essential skill to have. China clearly has an extremely rich and long literary tradition so it's no surprise that SOAS prides itself on being one of only three universities in the UK that teaches 繁体.   

Emmet isn't spending as much time in the bar at the moment

Having spent the entire year studying traditional characters, learning the simplified versions in the past couple of weeks while trying to revise hasn't been that easy. The main problem is the exceptions to the rule that we have to memorise. In most cases a character consistently simplifies in a certain way across the board. However those exceptions can catch you out quite easily and if you get it wrong the character you're writing is unrecognisable or it looks as if you've just invented a new character.

So, I'm finding that it's not as straightforward as it looks and there's more learning to be done. It may be taking up valuable revision time but I don't mind in the long run. At least we know how important it is to learn simplified characters. Next year in Beijing we will have a class in newspaper reading and we can't even do something as simple as that without being able to recognise and read 简体.

So, we're all counting down the days until 1 June and then I've got a summer in Shanghai to look forward to. We won't have quite as much suspense waiting for exam results as other students. Since, fingers crossed, we will all be in Beijing in September, we will get our exam results within just a couple of weeks. Our year head challenged the class at the start of the year to be the first ever to pass in every case so the whole class can go to Beijing. Once again, fingers crossed.

Email Emmet at  chinaelt@bbc.co.uk