Prohairesis wrote:One last thing I wanted to ask you was whether, generally speaking, there's a big difference between the C1 and C2 exams ? I do realize my question may seem to contain a contresens, but it's a question I've been asking myself for quite a while. I know that depending on the language and exam board, the differences and difficulties between the two levels may vary. But what is the distinguishing factor between the two levels ? I've read the official CEFR criteria, but they only confuse me more.
Hello, friend.
I would say that the principal difference between the Goethe-Zertifikat C1 and C2 exams comes down to Sprachgefühl. I heard a teacher once put it to us as follows: You might potentially be able to BS your way through some parts of the C1 exam, making educated guesses with the multiple-choice parts, but there's absolutely no outsmarting the C2 exam by trying to cover up holes in one's knowledge. Sprachgefühl simply cannot be made up, and success on the C2 depends on having acquired gobs of it and deploying it almost with a sort of finesse.
Along those lines, I found it far more straightforward to prepare for the C1. I did the prep books by Klett and Hueber, I hoovered up as many Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen as I could, and I practiced the writing and speaking sections with peers and teachers. It was fairly mechanical; end of story.
When it came to the C2, I did all the mechanical preparation, too. But my prep-course classmates and I were constantly driven up the wall with the realization that many of the answers seemed almost arbitrarily to hinge upon whether you, the test-taker, had come to agree with the rather subjective view of the test author, one which sometimes even appeared to flout conventional logic. Even our teachers didn't find many of the sample exams' answer explanations compelling. Time after time, we'd look over answers in bafflement and say among ourselves, "Yes, I get that this claims that B is correct, and I know the first five definitions for this verb in the Duden... but, no, I'm sorry, I don't find at all that B is a convincing answer for the question in the way that it's posed." Of course, who cares what some foreign test-taker sitting in a room in Frankfurt thinks? Nobody. At the end of the day, it all comes down to whether one can think like the test writers, anticipate their logic, and apply it to the answer choices, however poorly suited some of the answers seem.
Your academic background will help you enormously with the C2. It is, as one of our teachers put it, a "bildungsnah" exam. A person who doesn't already enjoy spending hours each month reading
Der Spiegel, SZ Langstrecke, GEO, etc., will have a miserable gap to bridge in preparation. A person not up on current events and the broader concerns floating around in contemporary German society will also have a lot of remedial work to do.
That's the other principal difference between the C1 and the C2, I'd say: A person could conceivably sit and pass the C1 exam right at the end of finishing a C1-level course sequence at the Goethe-Institut, hot off the presses. I saw a few people do this fresh out of C1.2, and several passed. But it generally wasn't a strong pass, more like an average of 72%. With the C2, however, it simply doesn't appear possible to try the same tack. There is too much to be absorbed after the completion of C1 to be able to pop into a month or two of full-time C2-level work and pass the exam after that, to say nothing of taking the time to further develop one's Sprachgefühl. One acquaintance of mine was determined to pass the C2 in Munich after one month of C2-level instruction... he failed the exam five consecutive months as he kept trying. But he did pass eventually, just not on the one- or two-month timeline he had envisioned for himself.
Oh! I know you've said you're not so big on working through a traditional textbook. But I have to speak up for the amazing
Übungsgrammatik für die Oberstufe: Deutsch als Fremdsprache (ISBN: 978-3192074486) and the
Sag's besser workbooks, all from Hueber (and purchased in Freiburg!). Working through those books systematically starting at the B2 level on my own kicked my ass hardcore. Nothing else brought me such a dramatic improvement as those books for the amount of time invested.
I have heaps more postmortem stuff I could say about the exams, but I'll keep quiet in the interest of everyone's sanity, and out of interest for what others add. If you ever have further specific questions, just shoot.