The frustration of it all

Well here we go, my first posting, my first blog! Where shall I begin with this whole frustrating process of obtaining a driver's licence in Denmark?! Well maybe I'll start with a brief run down on where I am at right now. Yesterday I took the Danish driver's theory test and failed! You are allowed 5/25 pictures wrong and I got 6 pictures wrong. Each picture has mostly 4 questions about it, and you must get ALL questions correct to pass that picture. It seems many people yesterday got 5+ pictures wrong and I believe that around 30% of people fail this test, so obviously it is not an easy test to pass, and at least for me it suggests that there is something wrong if that many people are failing the test! Most of these people have taken an intensive driving school course (compulsory if you are not converting your licence) and could probably answer most if not all your questions on road law correctly! So what is the problem? Quite simply these tests are designed to confuse, trick and make you fail! In addition to the tricky way these tests are worded, you also need to learn certain terms and what is expected when these certain terms are asked. For example, "what must you pay particular attention to here?"...with yes/no answers to the following: the course of the road, the surroundings of the road, the type of road, the condition of the road, oncoming traffic, the traffic lights, pedestrians, etc. Mmmm, well I suppose I should pay attention to all these things to some degree, but which ones should I pay PARTICULAR (you will get tired of hearing this word in the test!) attention to? After investing a lot of time learning when something was particularly important and when not, I thought I had worked out some of their logic and learnt that I needed to focus on the immediate situation in the picture and that whatever the most immediate danger was is what I should pay particular attention to. I practised the online tests (for which you have to pay for access and which are quite frankly wrong and flawed in some instances...in another post I'll talk about this) and managed to get to a point where I consistently passed, however it is apparent my efforts were still not enough to pass the actual test which contained a few new and confusing terms. In addition to the fact this test is confusing and difficult to pass (even for Danes), as foreigners we are forced to have an interpreter for the test, who reads out the questions in the chosen language as the 20-30 year old slides are shown to you on the projector! You also pay for this luxury of an interpreter, which for me and my class of 12 was of course in English. Well I have to say that my interpreter yesterday had a poor command of the English language, and I could tell by the look on several peoples faces and by a question for clarification, that I was not the only one who had a problem with understanding the meaning correctly. Its bad enough that we are forced to take this difficult test and forced to pay extra for an interpreter, but then on top of that the interpreter we get does not have a good command of the language! I've met many Danes who have very good English, and in fact probably most Danes would have had a better command of the language than the interpreter we got yesterday! Just to highlight that this was not just my problem, after the test many of my fellow victims had the same opinion! So it would seem that the odds are stacked against you passing this test, and to me it seems that passing it is as much about luck on the day as any road knowledge!