PeterMollenburg wrote:s_allard wrote:We haven't heard from the OP in nearly a week. That's a week less to the exam. I would hope that progress has been made.
I suspect doing nothing, even if the original goal was real. Harsh I know, still it's my suspicion and I'm allowed to voice my own suspicions, provided I let myself, which I have.
PeterMollenburg, please refrain from making negative remarks about other forum members, especially novices asking for advice. Yes, we can safely assume that most novice language learners will give up after a few weeks, and that most people with ambitious plans will fail. This includes the people that post here for advice.
And yet, some of them do succeed.
When you offer advice here, assume you do it for other people reading the thread, now and in the future, at least as much as you do it for the original poster. And you can assume that after the first page or so, most advice threads will tend to drift a bit, especially if the original poster disappears. It's OK for this thread, for example, to turn into a general discussion of how to reach B1 really fast in general, and how other people here have done it.
s_allard wrote:This is where the use of a tutor comes in. You can find a good teacher on iTalki or Verbling for around 25 USD an hour. 20 hours of tutoring will set you back 500 USD. That's a fraction of what those high-end courses cost, and you can do a lot with 20 hours of tutoring. Plus you can spend time practicing with a native speaker for free or for next to nothing over the Internet.
What are chances of passing that B1 exam after two months?. I suspect it would be quite high. Let's say 80%.
If somebody is looking for a really tutor who specializes in exams, you should actually ask these questions:
- "How many of your students have taken a CEFR exam, and which exams?"
- "How many of them of them passed the exam and earned the certificate?"
My DELF B2 tutor had worked with 7 individual students preparing for the DELF B2 before me, and 6 of them passed. (She told the 7th he wasn't ready and he took it anyway.) If you need to pass a high-stakes exam, these are absolutely fair questions to ask.
Also, to find exam tutors, try searching on iTalki, and type in the name of the actual exam you're going to take. Tutors who work with particular exams will often list it in their profile. And expect to pay more—no $10/hour French tutor is likely to have exam experience, but some of the $25/hour French tutors will specialize in CEFR exams. (French tutors are some of the most expensive. Even hung-over French college students who mumble want $10/hour for conversational tutoring. Blame the cost of living in France and the high demand?)
But because good tutors are so expensive, you need to make very efficient use of them. Their job isn't to teach you the language! You can learn to read and listen on your own, and you can get your writing corrected for free on lang-8 or iTalki up through about B2. (At C1 and above, the free correction sites seem to be much less effective, because nobody wants to correct two-page essays with only subtle oddities of wording. So at C1 or C2, yeah, you might want a tutor to correct essays.) You should use your tutor for two main things: focused conversational practice on exam-like topics, and correcting a couple of sample exams.
You should still expect to do very intensive self-study, and once you reach the B levels, to spend lots of time with native media. The DELF B2 and DALF C1 exams require you to deal with almost any non-political subject you might find in a middle-to-highbrow newspaper or first-year university textbook, respectively. No course will give you that breadth by itself. Unless you're very rich, you can't afford enough tutoring to reach a high level without massive amounts of self-study!