I met with Professor Nelson today to take the French language exam.

He asked me to bring with me a book or a paper that I would like to use, so I brought Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat's Distributions, Théorie et problèmes.

The exam was relatively short: it lasted about 10 minutes or so. It began with him leafing through the book and pointing out a small section (a bit more than a page) and ask me to sight-translate it. The first half went over alright. Near the end of the passage I came to a phrase with a form of the verb "intervenir". It is, of course, an obvious cognate for "intervene", but for some reason I couldn't piece together the sentence... so he helped me out with it. Turns out that I was stuck on the sense of intervene as "come-between", whereas the text use it more in the sense as "affect". (If pressed, I would've said: "The evaluation of the form is not intervened by the value of the function φ at points other than the origin", which sounds positively stupid.)

After that one stumble, he thought a bit, and decided that the section he chose was still too math-heavy (it is true: the more equations there are on a page, the easier for one to guess what the foreign-looking words mean. And I guess that is why he had me translate the statement of the problem rather than the solution: the former is more prose-like, and the latter has more breaks and equations). So he flipped through the book, saying something to the effect that he saw a page which resembles an epistle. Turns out it was not a letter, but a problem from some exam of sorts. (The parenthetical citation looks something like "Exam given by Professor so-and-so on This day of that month of a particular year", which does resemble what a citation for a letter would look like: "correspondence with Professor so-and-so yada yada yada".)

So Professor Nelson flipped through the book some more, and settled on asking me to translate the Preface to the book. The first time through I made a bad mistake on the first sentence: I sort of just read it quickly and said what I think it says. He made me go back and redo that sentence, so I gave a word-by-word translation which, alas, is indeed rather different from what I said the first time, and he is satisfied with it.

So five years worth of studies in the language did pay off. I managed to pass the French language exam with the minimal of preparation (just a few cursory glance at the book before hand, and looked up a handful of words whose meaning I was uncertain). Now I need to start worrying about the German exam.