Over the course of these two weeks we had another of our word competitions, where we are split into two groups and have to write as many words relating to the topic on the board as we can.  This time the topic was sports, and we are no longer allowed to use pinyin.  We are all looking at words we have prepared beforehand though so it doesn't make it that much more challenging, but it's good to have moved away from pinyin!  I am pretty sure my group lost the last time, but this time we won!  We had 60+ types of sport written down, which I think I'd struggle to think of in English, let alone Chinese. 

On Friday we had our comprehensive midterm.  I always find it hard to judge how I might have done, but it seemed to go ok.  If I get it back I will try and snap a photo of the questions, but in the meantime I will add a couple that I can remember.  The first section was just choosing the correct words to fill in the blanks in various sentences - fairly straightforward.  The next section was making words.  This was weird because it was almost too easy, leaving me concerned that I wasn't doing it correctly!  Normally when we have to do this our teacher just gives us a single character and we can make whatever we want, but here it was words like 满意，清楚，热闹 etc., and so there were lots of 不太，很，非常！

The next section we were given lots of sentences and had to say whether they were correct or not.  For example:

我再想去那个饭店 - incorrect because, in contrast to 又，再 has to come after 想。

昨天我买了衬衫 - This one was difficult, because our book (using the exact same sentence) teaches that this is basically incorrect, and you only put 了 immediately after the verb if you have more than a single object following it.  So it would have to be 昨天我买了一件衬衫。However, I know that in reality this construction is actually fine, so I marked it incorrect and then put a note next to it.  Not really sure why our book says this sentence is incorrect. 

After this was a comprehension section.  And then the final question was writing a 200 word piece on 介绍你的购物习惯。I have since heard from some students that they didn't know what 购物 meant and so wrote something completely unrelated.  I feel a little bit sorry for them, but at the same time we had this question for our homework a couple of weeks ago, and our teacher told us before the exam that the final question would be a repeat of something we have written for homework in the past few weeks! 

This is turning into a longer post than I anticipated, but I just want to briefly talk about some grammar we hit on this week, which was approximate numbers.  An interesting point, which completely makes sense, was that while you can say 两三个，五六个等，it's never ok to say 九十个！After this the new thing for me was the positioning of 多.  Even though I don't really understand why, I now feel more comfortable using 多，knowing that with a multiple of 10 多 comes immediately after the number, whereas with other numbers it appears after the measure word/noun - 十多个月 vs. 九个多月。