AroAro's log (languages, books, certificates)

[AroAro]

German – I finished "getting familiar" with the last part of the exam – the speaking part. Well, this is where the things are getting really hard! I know at least what to expect more or less but to be honest I may just as well fail that part. Goethe B2 is now a modular exam, so I need to get 60% from each of the four parts in order to pass and I cannot compensate for example bad speaking with good reading. On the other hand, if I fail the speaking, I will have to retake only the speaking part to get the certificate (I’ll have one year to do that) and not the whole exam.

Anyway, the speaking consists of two parts. The first one is a 4 minute expose/monologue, so I have a little bit of experience from DALF C1 which helped me a lot to analyze quickly the subjects - when I see a subject, I can immediately come up with a few arguments/things to say (but how do I say it in German?). The second part is a conversation with another candidate and I honestly don’t understand why the Goethe Institute forces candidates to take the exam in pairs. I don’t know who the other candidate will be, what their level will be, will they monopolize the conversation and so on. It's just too much stress but I just need to accept it the way it is.

I will now do the sample tests – reading and listening parts.

Bulgarian – reading “Bulgarian Textbook for Foreigners”

Occitan – lesson 42 from „L’Occitan Sans Peine”

Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 3515, mastered 3186 out of 19999 sentences

Reading – still reading “Love, Again” by Doris Lessing. It’s strange to read a book about love that is so passionless.

[AroAro]

German – I did 9 sample tests. For reading part, my average score is 93/100 and for listening it’s 91/100. I noticed a difference in difficulty levels between Klett and Cornelsen publishers sample tests – the latter are more difficult and I wonder if they may be closer to real Goethe exams… Luckily, I never scored below 60/100 points and that’s a good sign. In fact, my lowest score was 87/100 a few times but there was obviously no stress factor so I guess that on the day of the exam, my score will be rather around 80/100 for both parts.

Just for the record – I’ve been reading one article from “Der Spiegel” every day and am now half way through it. When it comes to listening, I subscribed to many YT channels, I can recommend for example “Quarks Dimension Ralph”, “Dinge Erklart – Kurzgesagt”, “Desy” – 10-15 minutes videos are perfect when I have some free time during the day.

Next step – practice writing.

Bulgarian – I’ll start reading the dialogues from “Bulgarian Textbook for Foreigners Part 2”

Occitan – lesson 49 from „L’Occitan Sans Peine”. I’m putting Assimil aside and will read “Grammatica Occitana” (by Josep Salvat) and will start Clozemaster for Occitan.

Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 3585, mastered 3262 out of 19999 sentences

Reading – finished “Pulse” by Julian Barnes, will start reading Sofi Oksanen’s “Kun kyyhkyset katosivat” in Polish translation (“Gdy zniknęły gołębie”).

[AroAro]

German – I did all the writing exercises from the sample tests. Of course, it’s hard to judge oneself but I guess I should attain the passing score (60/100). I’m really glad to be preparing for this exam because I can already see how many words I’ve activated, even though I still have to check just as many in the dictionary. And now I have 4 weeks left to work on my speaking competences in German (which are pretty much non-existent).

Bulgarian – reading “Bulgarian Textbook for Foreigners Part 2”

Occitan – I read chapters on substantives and adjectives from “Grammatica Occitana”

Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 3655, mastered 3341 out of 19999 sentences
#Occitan from French => playing 80, mastered 0 out of 1658 sentences

Reading – I quickly read “Kun kyyhkyset katosivat” – amazing book, highly recommended. Now, it’s time for a book in Italian – I bought a legal copy of Elena Ferrante’s “L’Amica geniale” in ebook format but I just can’t send it to my Kindle, so I read it on my smartphone instead.

A few days ago, I received my detailed results of DALF C1:

dalf.png

I knew I did relatively well in speaking and writing but didn’t expect to get full marks in both parts – I admit it feels very rewarding though. If there is one piece of advice that I can give to anyone peparing for DALF C1, it’s to prepare a long monologue for the speaking part – the longer the better (that’s also the recommendation I got from my tutor). The speaking part lasts 30 minutes and all the preparation books recommend to speak 8-10 minutes during the monologue phase – in fact, one should speak twice as long. If you speak only for 8 minutes, there are 22 minutes left for the jury to take control of the conversation and direct the exam where they want to take it, whether you like it or not. Whereas if you speak for 15-20 minutes, you’ve probably covered all the facets of the problem, so the jury won’t surprise you and won’t ask any tricky questions (that was at least my case).

[Cavesa]

Congratulations!!!! Those are awesome scores! And you're also the first person I've ever seen to get better scores at production than comprehension. No clue, how you've achieved that, you are awesome!

[Caromarlyse]

You rock! Well done!

[AroAro]

Congratulations!!!! Those are awesome scores! And you're also the first person I've ever seen to get better scores at production than comprehension. No clue, how you've achieved that, you are awesome!

Thank you! For a big introvert that I am that came as a surprise as well! I think one of the reasons is that I probably really nailed the exam structure and I gave the examiners exactly what they expected to read and hear in writing and speaking parts. The other thing is that listening and reading parts are quite tricky because there are basically only open-ended questions. I guess that's why I lost the most points in reading even though I found the text straightforward to be honest (for example for true/false questions, one needs to quote the correct fragment of the text that justifies the answer and only if the quoted fragment is the right one, will you get a point - if not you get 0 points). I'm curious to see how these scores will relate to C2 exam that I'm planning to take next year...

You rock! Well done!

Thank you! And I'd like to thank you for the tip you gave me to take a few lessons with an experienced tutor, it definitely paid off!

[Cavesa]

The other thing is that listening and reading parts are quite tricky because there are basically only open-ended questions. I guess that's why I lost the most points in reading even though I found the text straightforward to be honest (for example for true/false questions, one needs to quote the correct fragment of the text that justifies the answer and only if the quoted fragment is the right one, will you get a point - if not you get 0 points). I'm curious to see how these scores will relate to C2 exam that I'm planning to take next year...

Yep, I really think C2 DALF is easier than the C1

[AroAro]

German – I've been focusing on the speaking part (prepared around 20 presentations, and practiced them by speaking aloud to myself). This part of the exam is supposed to last 4 minutes and that’s not enough to go really into details, the time finishes quickly, so I guess it’s important to monitor the time so as not to exceed it. And I’m supposed to ask one question to the partner after his/her presentation – I’m really bad at asking questions! The second part of the speaking exam is a conversation with the partner, of course I didn’t practice it but I tried at least to learn some useful phrases.

Hard to predict how I will fare in general, surely not that well but maybe well enough to gather those 60 points? Like 30/44 for the presentation, 20/40 for the conversation and 10/16 for the pronunciation, that would give me a passing score and I would be extremely happy about it. From what I understand after browsing different forums, for Goethe exam the structure of the presentation is not that important (unlike DALF C1 for example), what the examiners pay attention to is the “fluency” of the speech, and that’s definitely something that is missing when I speak German. On the other hand, they say that the speaking part has the highest passing rate of all the parts so who knows.

I will continue to work on the speaking part but mostly just try to enjoy German through listening and reading.

Bulgarian – rereading “Intensive Bulgarian vol.2”

Occitan – I finished “Grammatica Occitana”, it helped me to understand Occitan conjugations. And now, I will continue with Assimil (2016 edition) but the lessons 50-100 focus on dialects, poems or historical texts (not something that I fancy that much), so I will just go through them at a leisurely pace.

Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 3790, mastered 3462 out of 19999 sentences
#Occitan from French => playing 220, mastered 0 out of 1658 sentences

Reading – I’ve finished a few books in the last two weeks (maybe that’s a sign that I should spend more time preparing for Goethe certificate…):

- Elena Ferrante - L'Amica Geniale: wonderful book, I found it rather easy in terms of language (that’s a good sign for CELI4 exam I’d like to take later this year…) and reading on smartphone was quite pleasant too
- Yoko Ogawa - Grobowa cisza, żałobny zgiełk (in English Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales): she’s an amazing writer, I’ve read only two books by her but they strike the right chords with me
- François Mauriac - Le noeud de vipères: at first, I thought it would be a boring book but I got quickly hooked up and read it in just two days. I’ve never seen so many verbs in “subjonctif imparfait” in one book.
- Patrick Modiano - Les Boulevards de ceinture: ok, so it was the third and last book by Modiano that I’ve ever read, and in my opinion he’s a very mediocre writer, I just can’t see why they gave him that Nobel Prize (truth be told, the last 3 French winners are huge disappointments)
- Yan Lianke - Sen wioski Ding (English: Dream of Ding Village): that one is good although very depressing at the same time, it’s about AIDS epidemic in a Chinese village where people sold their blood hoping to become rich but contracted the illness in return

And finally, I’m going to start a book in German – “Lügen über meine Mutter” by Daniela Dröscher that I will read via onleihe.de service of Goethe Institut.

[AroAro]

German – the exam will take place next Saturday at 8am (so early!). I still haven’t figured it out how to get to the exam center (50km away from Cracow), I will probably have to wake up at 5am to get there on time. I’ve been practicing speaking part (einen Vortrag halten) every day but mostly just surrounded myself with content in German (watching a lot of YouTube videos in German, reading articles on Der Spiegel online and so on).

I finished reading “Lügen über meine Mutter” – the book is marketed as a book about the author’s mother who struggles her entire life with overweight but for me, it was more about being (or not-being) financially independent and how it can influence the decisions we take in our life, and that was really thought-provoking. On the other hand, I didn’t like small passages in the book that were probably supposed to prove how tolerant/leftist the author herself is, that was quite awkward to read.

Anyway, I will review some German connectors before the exam but other than that, will do just more listening to German.

Bulgarian – I finished rereading all the Bulgarian book I have, and from now on, I will concentrate on listening. One thing I’ve recently noticed – I finally started to hear the renarrative mood when listening to Bulgarian podcasts/videos. The problem is that it sounds almost the same as Polish past tense so my mind treated it as if it were past tense, which is not of course - so I’m glad to finally make the distinction.

Hebrew – so because Bulgarian goes more or less to maintenance mode for the time being, I decided to work again slowly on Hebrew, I did two lessons so far from Manuel d’Hébreu niveau avancé (ed.Asiathèques).

Occitan – lesson 70 from Assimil

Clozemaster
#Hebrew from English (Fluency Fast Track) => playing 3900, mastered 3564 out of 19999 sentences
#Occitan from French => playing 330, mastered 0 out of 1658 sentences

Reading – I’m reading a book in Polish, then I will start Guy Deutscher’s “The unfolding of language”.

[AroAro]

I think my yesterday's Goethe B2 exam went rather well overall, although the listening part was really hard and that's where I can see a risk of not getting enough points. I messed up the first listening exercise where you hear five snippets only once and answer ten questions in all. I guess I can get anywhere between 0 and 10 for that exercise. I do think that my German listening skills are good at least, I just don't get along with the way they are evaluated by Goethe Institut The reading part was also difficult compared to sample tests I had done, especially the exercise where you have to insert missing phrases. On the bright side, the essay in the writing part was about climate friendly travels. I couldn't believe my eyes they gave us such an "obvious" topic, that was very kind of them. This is not to say that writing was easy because the time constraint was really daunting. I wrote a draft first and then copied it to the answer sheet but for the second writing task (official letter to a supervisor), I had to write directly on the answer sheet so as not to run out of time.

Two hours later I had the speaking part. My partner was a guy from Egypt (he lives in Poland now) and I think we did both ok. I had a better presentation but he was better in the discussion part. When we left the exam room, we continued speaking in German for about 15 minutes and it was so cool to use the language spontaneously in real life situation! It was funny because we made tons of grammar errors (glad the examiners didn't hear us!) but the goal was simply to communicate without any prerequisite scenario (like during the exam). And it was nice to test our capacity to hold a conversation in German, it felt actually even more rewarding than doing reasonably well on the exam we'd just taken. It turned out he had never spoken German before the exam day, just like me, and he needs the certificate to get a job as a doctor in Germany. I appreciate the fact that I can take language exams without any additional burden, I mean exams are still stressful but my professional or personal life doesn't depend on me getting a B2 or C1 certificate. So there's no pressure at the back of my head that I have to succeed, otherwise my plans will shutter.

Let me just mention that 17 people took the exam plus some new people appeared for listening or writing to retake those parts. I was sure one of the examiners (a supervisor from Goethe Institut Krakau) was a native German speaker but when she finally presented herself, it turned out she's got a very Polish sounding name and surname. I was really impressed with her accent and intonation.

So now, it's time to start working on Celi 4 exam in November. I promise it's the last language exam I'm taking this year I will write more on that next time, cheers!