The exam was not easy but not particularly difficult I would say, except for listening part that was extremely difficult (and that was the consensus of the whole group), so I will lose many points here. The audio material had many background noises, the excerpts were taken directly from some radio programs and were not read by professional actors like in preparation books or even previous tests available on the University of Perugia website. For the writing part, we had to choose one of the two topics but I forgot to indicate the number of the selected topic on the response sheet as required - I hope they will rate my writing skills anyway and not give me 0 points for that.
The speaking part was also nice, sure I didn’t speak as fluently as other candidates who spent up to 20 years in Italy but I think I should get those 33 points out of 60 nonetheless for speaking. We’ll have to wait at least 3 months for the results, then some more for the certificate. And yesterday, I could put my Italian skills into practice because I had to call La Repubblica customer service (as it turned out, they are located in Albania) to deactivate my subscription (in theory, it can be done via mail but two mails I sent were rejected/undelivered by their servers, so they don’t make it easy to resign their services).
So I had this plan to sit TRKI B2 exam as my next language project but in the end I decided against it. My priority for next year will be to get my Romanian and German to C1 level (March and June respectively) and I’m not sure I can squeeze in Russian somewhere between them or before the Romanian exam. And TRKI is quite special, meaning that for example the speaking part lasts 45-60 minutes and consists of 15 different tasks, or in the writing part candidates have only 55 minutes to write 3 texts, 250 words overall. I could probably make some effort and give it a try but this time of the year, with Christmas and holidays, is not the most suitable one for intensive study of Russian
and I use language exams as an opportunity to spend time with the language, learn something new and enjoy the process along the way, whereas the idea of sitting TRKI so soon, in February for example, overwhelmed me. Moreover, there is no exam center in Cracow so I would have to go to Warsaw (presumably, TRKI can be taken online but online exams are more stressful than regular ones so I’d like to avoid it if possible), so that’s another reason to postpone it. I would also have to sign up to some lessons to practice speaking and writing and it’s simply not that easy in December/January due to my work commitments. So Russian will have to wait and instead, till the end of the year I’m going to hone in my listening skills in Bulgarian. I can see some progress in the area and I’d like to use the momentum to take these skills even further.
Hebrew – lesson 17 from « Manuel d’Hébreu niveau avancé »
Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 4384, mastered 4166 out of 19999 sentences
#Occitan from French => playing 1260, mastered 557 out of 1658 sentences
Reading – I read Amadeo Balbi’s “Dove sono tutti quanti?” and really liked, I recommend his YouTube channel to those interested in physics and astronomy (I was hopelessly bad at physics in high school but still like to listen to knowledgeable people explaining it in simple terms to a complete ignoramus like me). And now, I’ll start reading Tan Twan Eng’s “The House of Doors” – I loved his two previous novels so I have high expectations about this one.
