Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

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schlaraffenland
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Tue Jun 13, 2017 10:14 am

Just a few thoughts about French while they're still floating around...

I have begun to suspect that I might be ready for grown-up books at last, so I got a couple, and it seems to be going well. I guess a few things compelled me to take the leap. I had planned to wait until later to begin extensive reading of original texts, so I had been confining myself to news articles and easy readers. I finished two of the latter last week and tried to let the unknown, flowery vocabulary glide over me instead of stressing out about every single word and noting it. I was afraid I'd simply be passing my eyes over the text with this approach, disengaged, but I got into it a lot more than I'd expected. And the result of not interrupting myself five times per page with dictionary lookups was that I got into a pleasant rhythm and read for a good hour at a stretch without it feeling like an imposition.

I've realized, though, that I need to move on. For one thing, I'm not doing myself favors by turning reading into a chore; I have forced myself to use the easy readers on the assumption that I couldn't handle a real novel or nonfiction text yet. Strangely enough, the easy readers often gloss things I would've considered far below what a B2 student should be able to recognize (ferait, anyone?), while leaving gobs of ornate and literary language unglossed. So I came to feel as though the explanatory notes were often of little help anyway. And if they aren't helping, why shouldn't I just read things with no notes, but which are instead naturally interesting to me?

News articles are a perennial favorite, but here, too, I am starting to feel exhaustion set in. I have listened/read along daily to the Journal en français facile for weeks now, and I have certainly refined my understanding of where liaison should occur. But I largely ignore unknown words in the reports, of which there are plenty, so I don't benefit from having been exposed to them. I will probably lighten up on all the news, or at least not feel compelled to maintain a daily habit of consulting newspapers in three languages. This is to say nothing of the fact that the news content itself is all too exhausting and saddening....

More generally, perhaps I am coming to a point in French where I am trying to figure out where best to divert my attention and resources. The scatter-shot approach I took to German did prove effective over the long run, but I also feel it was not the most efficient. Part of my ignoring the bulk of unknown words in French texts is a result of not wanting to put the cart before the horse. With German, my goal was to absorb every last unknown word I saw anywhere, any time. I was learning the vocabulary from my textbooks, as well as the contents of Langenscheidt's lifesaving Grundwortschatz Deutsch, but I'd also enter somewhat esoteric or one-off words from books or articles that I really shouldn't have prioritized as an A2 learner back then. ("Höhlenartig"? Why did I think that that was so important?) As a result, I knew a good number of flowery words before I could even properly talk about my job functions, and that was very frustrating and made my writing weird.

With French, I am trying to avoid that scattered and uneven approach and trust that the stream will simply bear me toward these B2+ words in due course. Only Grundwortschatz Französisch stuff goes into Anki until I have learned every last word from it (~3800). Then I will give myself free rein as far as memorizing the weirder stuff. I am still on course to complete the list by year's end, if not a little later than that, at a constant clip of 400 words per month. It is a strange and uncomfortable feeling to let go of micromanaging my vocabulary acquisition and let words slip away, but I also recognize how useful it is to trust new methods and see what they bring. After all, I figure that many of these fancier words will recur in texts many a time, and I'll look them up over and over again; I can't imagine that a useful word will ever occur just once, during my not-scooping-up-every-word phase, and then never again in my experience with the French language. I'll get everything I need as long as I feed myself a steady stream of new material at every stage of learning. Well, that's what I hope.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby Prohairesis » Tue Jun 13, 2017 11:50 am

I've been following your log entries with interest and have a few comments to make regarding your current strategy for vocabulary acquisition.

Schlaraffenland wrote:[...]but I'd also enter somewhat esoteric or one-off words from books or articles that I really shouldn't have prioritized as an A2 learner back then. [...] As a result, I knew a good number of flowery words before I could even properly talk about my job functions, and that was very frustrating and made my writing weird. [...] It is a strange and uncomfortable feeling to let go of micromanaging my vocabulary acquisition and let words slip away, but I also recognize how useful it is to trust new methods and see what they bring.

Reading this made me smile, because I went through the exact same experience, and the same thoughts have occurred to me, as I was still in the crucial phase of acquiring vocabulary in French. This was back in 2009, at a time when I felt my learning curve had stagnated and with much frustration, I decided to just throw myself in the deep end. As a result, the first book I endeavored to read was Marcel Pagnol's "La gloire de mon père".

Now, this book is not heavy reading. It's a roman d'apprentissage (coming-of-age story) about young Marcel growing up in Provence going out hunting with his father and coming to grips with his approaching teenage years. However, the problem was that the language and the register in which the book is written are very formal and outdated (or suranné, as one would say in French). I ended up spending ridiculously long hours looking up every word. After a while, the enthusiasm wears off and you start questioning the usefulness of such an exercise. I learnt words like conter fleurette à quelqu'un, which is a really flowery - pun intended - way of saying faire la cour à quelqu'un, or to flirt with someone.

With German, I'm opting for a more practical approach, all the more since I'm preparing the Goethe-Zertifikat C1 in a very short time-frame. And like you, I've learned from my errors and my tendency to micromanage my vocabulary acquisition. As you work your way up the ladder, you learn new words, sometimes these are more convoluted versions of words you already know (but with finer nuances), but what I find to be true - to me, at least - is that these words tend to express complex ideas and concepts, and not just common nouns for physical objects (although these fill up a good chunk of Le Petit Robert, I'm sure). The aim, as you probably very well understand, is to practically understand "virtually everything heard or read and be able to distinguish finer shades of meaning" (bad paraphrase of the C2 descriptor). But the process of language acquisition itself is, I would say, akin to how a painter paints. You start with the basic colors, the background, then you work on the finer details, then the finishing touches. Systematizing and prioritizing your approach to language acquisition is just like that.

So I guess what I wanted to say was that your reasoning is impeccable and that I definitely think your approach is well thought-out and practical. Also, I definitely think you should give reading without the extra notes a go. It makes the reading experience a lot more authentic and makes you speculate more when you are unsure of the meaning of a word or a phrase in the text - which is a more active process. Keep up the good work !
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Thu Jun 15, 2017 10:00 am

Prohairesis wrote:Reading this made me smile, because I went through the exact same experience, and the same thoughts have occurred to me, as I was still in the crucial phase of acquiring vocabulary in French. This was back in 2009, at a time when I felt my learning curve had stagnated and with much frustration, I decided to just throw myself in the deep end. As a result, the first book I endeavored to read was Marcel Pagnol's "La gloire de mon père".


:lol: Uncanny! This is exactly what I got myself a couple of months ago to L-R. We watched the film a couple of times in high school, so I vaguely remembered the plot, and I've always had a soft spot for how charming it is. But, just like you, I found some of the language outdated or overly specific to the point of not being helpful for my current level. As far as L-R goes, too, I seem to have obtained versions that are auseinandergeklafft (gah, I can't think of the English for this now ;) ). The audio, read by Pagnol himself, agrees more or less with the English translation. But those seem to draw on an edition slightly later than my French text -- sometimes, whole paragraphs are missing in my French texts compared to what Pagnol reads (!). So I've laid that aside for now, as well as the French translation of Howards End that I had bought. It seems to be going more smoothly right now with Thich Nhat Hanh, who writes quite clearly and repetitively, and that is reflected in all the translations of his work that I've read.

Prohairesis wrote:So I guess what I wanted to say was that your reasoning is impeccable and that I definitely think your approach is well thought-out and practical. Also, I definitely think you should give reading without the extra notes a go. It makes the reading experience a lot more authentic and makes you speculate more when you are unsure of the meaning of a word or a phrase in the text - which is a more active process. Keep up the good work !


Thank you for the Ermutigung! I guess we'll see how it goes. There are so many interesting turns of phrase in this TNH book that I feel tempted to capture them after all, but just not to learn them right away. Maybe put them in an Anki deck that I suspend and later merge with my >B2 material? I guess we'll see.

[Edited to correct how I spelled Thich Nhat Hanh's name, since I accidentally Germanified him ("Hahn") the first time around ;) ]
Last edited by schlaraffenland on Thu Jun 15, 2017 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Thu Jun 15, 2017 10:06 am

And a few thoughts on languages that are not French...

German
I am ahead of my monthly goals, and I'm probably done with the Super Challenge without actually knowing it. I miss the days of workbooks and gradual improvement! It's temping to add a workbook back into my routine, but the whole point is that I need to be moving away from spending so much time on German relative to my overarching goals. I also have a pernicious book-buying habit that no amount of book buying seems to assuage. Well... it's not so bad in and of itself, but it isn't good to buy books and not to make time to read them. I got two more tonight, but when will I look at them? Not sure.

Japanese
My class has come to an end, freeing me from the panic the night before every meeting when I would begin the week's homework at 2am and get up at 7am in a daze. I guess I'm free not to have to sit through any more classes now, as I had promised myself a few months ago in my blind and inexplicably ardent frustration. And yet... in all honesty, I will probably go back for at least another half term sometime this year. But I have learned once and for all through this experience, and through my extended stay in Japan last year, that class learning is just not for me except under very specific circumstances. And I finally have enough experience to recognize that, and to recognize the circumstances that make class-based learning effective for me. So, for the 95 percent of courses that one could conceivably take that don't meet the criteria, I can simply walk on by and not worry about it all, I suppose. Thank you, 天神 ! You've granted all those wishes so far...
Kanji is going well. I am just under halfway through Heisig.
Vocab is all right, too. I will wrap up my Minna no Nihongo I-and-then-some list in about three months. In my current (deceptive?) state of equanimity, I'm even toying with the thought of adding material from Instant Vocabulary Through Prefixes and Suffixes. Or perhaps that would make more sense as I learn the kunyomi readings of words next year? Or maybe I shouldn't be spending the free time with further Japanese at all. I don't know.

Norwegian
My first 6WC has come to an end. I found it interesting and revealing, as I have never before participated in any sort of competition/self-improvement exercise that I can think of, whether against myself or others. The Super Challenge and the 6WC have been the first. I'm definitely still very much an A1 in Norwegian; there can be no talk of miracles here. But terms like "miracles" obfuscate the fact that great commitments of time and energy have gone into their making. (I think of smallwhite and her amazing progress in Greek, but she clearly put in a serious commitment every day!) I didn't put in a ton of time, by contrast, and consequently, I didn't come very far. Nevertheless, I'm happy that I made the commitment to do something each day in Norwegian, even if very little. I really would like to pay it more heed in the coming months. If only I'd ramp up the time and energy investment, I could have Assimil done by Thanksgiving and conceivably be able to converse with my acquaintances.
There's another thing I learned through the 6WC: Even with the best of intentions, a concerted push in the target language may simply not be possible when that language has to fight with other language commitments. In other words, Norwegian is purely a hobby endeavor, and I don't have a clear academic or professional goal with it. French, on the other hand, very much has those exigencies about it. And Japanese had the pressure, at least, of regular class meetings. Against those time constraints, a hobby language, even with the backing of the 6WC, could not compete. I think it's not possible for me to hope to train the 6WC on a hobby language and improve rapidly while trying to get another language up to C1+. The goals are simply too much at odds. If I had somehow devoted ~20 hours per week to Norwegian during the challenge, I would have noticed the drastic reduction in resources as far as French, and that wouldn't have been good.
I'd like to do another 6WC someday. I don't see it happening for the next round, because, honestly, what would I do differently? If I selected Norwegian again, I know I wouldn't be able to devote any more time to it than I do at present, with or without the challenge. (In fact, I'm likely to have less time to devote to it later in the year.) And I don't want to make French the subject of a 6WC, as I feel that that somewhat violates the spirit of rapid improvement in a language where one is something of a beginner.
I think I will just carry on as I have been doing, and I will do my best to ensure that I shift my Norwegian time toward Assimil. And my reward for finishing around Thanksgiving/December will be... Occitan! Maybe. Why is there still no Assimil Amharic? ;)
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sat Jun 24, 2017 11:18 pm

German
I finished reading 4 3 2 1 ! That was a long ten weeks or so. I have easily another several thousand pages lying around that I could dive into, but I will grant myself a little break. On my last visit to Germany, my friend gave me Daniel Kehlmann's Ruhm, which I will start next month. It's only 208 pages, which will be a nice palette cleanser after having read something six times as long.
I write daily, but mostly SMSes and the like. I think I need to incorporate academic-style writing back into my normal habits, even if I don't have an exam for which I need to prepare. At the least, I think I will go back to doing some workbook pages regularly. I miss grammatical exercises.

French
I guess I have made more progress than I would have assumed. This month, I've read easy reader versions of Notre Dame de Paris, L'écume des jours, Jean de Florette, and Manon des Sources. I also read Thich Nhat Hanh's Apaiser l'esprit face à la violence : La réponse du zen au terrorisme. As I read the last pages of Manon des Sources last night, I realized how much more breezily it had gone compared to the beginning of the month, when I was reading Notre Dame de Paris. It really does do wonders to drink from the fire hose. And there is still almost a week left in the month.
Migros (!) offers language courses and a computer-adaptive placement test. I took this for French a few nights ago and scored one notch below C2. The texts felt fairly challenging to me, but not impossible. I have tended to do better in circumstances where inference is important, and I think that that's what accounts for my score here, as opposed to any sort of ~mastery of the French language~ (insert trumpet fanfare here). I certainly cannot write without a dictionary on a level comparable to the results of this (reading) test.
In the last four months, I focused a lot on passive skills and tried to swallow my anxiety about letting the current carry me along. I think I'm in a good place to begin re-introducing active skills. I will make a concerted effort to write every day for the second half of the year, and to speak, even if just to myself. I have laid aside workbooks for now, since I seem to have picked ones that are either a bit too easy (Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French) or a bit too detailed (Großes Übungsbuch Französisch).
I will also begin gathering intermediate/advanced vocabulary and expressions into a second Anki deck, which I will merge into my principal deck after I have learned everything in Langenscheidt's Grundwortschatz Französisch. I don't want to let these expressions pass me by, and the time seems good to begin collecting them, even if I don't begin learning them until December. Meanwhile, I would say about 85 percent of the words presented in the Grundwortschatz Französisch are ones that I learned years ago, so it has not been a great burden to take in 400 total words a month. It's more a process of bringing those 85 percent back into my active memory.

Japanese
I am just under the halfway mark for Heisig! And I still get a good 20 percent of reviews wrong each time. Sigh. But I keep going.
I feel serious burnout when it comes to my vocabulary deck. I just don't care. It doesn't help that, in my aversion, I push the reviews until the very end of the day, so I get even more wrong. I don't know why I can't just walk away. I guess I don't like the thought that I'd then have to spend even more hours somewhere down the line re-learning and practicing the gobs of material I would've forgotten in the meantime. At my current rate, it will take another two to three months to complete the new cards waiting in the deck. We'll see if I can make it. Blah. I just feel zero motivation. But since I've quit practically every other thing I've ever attempted, I thought it would be nice not to quit for once, especially when I really want to quit.

Norwegian
My SRS-guided learning schedule is going well, though it has indeed only been six days. I didn't spend any time this month watching or reading Norwegian media, since I was making a big push on French stuff. I am really going to let laziness take over in this case and just do whatever Assimil tells me to do, and then we'll see where I am around November. I have not tried DIALANG for Norwegian (and what would be the point, when I know I'm A0?). In fact, I am liable to get a false positive, given what I mentioned about inference above. I will hold off on any diagnostics until completing at least the full passive wave of Assimil, if not the entire course. It'll be interesting to see how DIALANG assesses me at that point.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sat Jul 01, 2017 11:06 pm

YTD totals as of 30 June:

GERMAN.
Pages read this month: 410 ( = 8.2 Super Challenge books)
Hours of AV consumed this month: 7.2 ( = 4.7 Super Challenge films)
Vocabulary learned: 429/1000

FRENCH.
French in Action eps. watched: 52/52
Vocabulary learned: 1610/3800
Pages read: 780

JAPANESE.
Vocabulary learned: 973/(1300, will change over time)
Kanji learned: 1075/2200

NORWEGIAN.
Assimil Norwegisch ohne Mühe: 12/100 + active wave: 0/100
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Mon Jul 03, 2017 8:41 am

German
It appears I'm done with the audiovisual portion of the Super Challenge! I reported all my backlogged stuff to the bot and was pleased to have cleared the 100-film mark. I was a little more surprised that the 1,200+ pages of 4 3 2 1 did not bring me over the finish line for the reading section. I swear that when I had plotted things out in March or April, it looked like I'd be done after finishing that book. I didn't tweet when the bot was down, and I don't think I forgot to report a finished book, unless I'm really blanking, so I'm confused there. But it doesn't take much incentive for me to continue reading, and I have a lot of material, so I continue happily.
Vocabulary learning is also going OK. The daily review burden hovers around 100 words, which I don't find too taxing. It's nice to think that I will round out the year with a thousand words I didn't know in January.

French
Well, these last few days have really been a trial of my patience, but I am determined to keep going. I've felt like a rat running through a maze trying to find a way to sit the C1 exam and to be certain to receive the results in writing before I apply to universities next spring. I had believed that I was in a good position with a ten-month head start on preparing, and no constraints as to where in the world I would sit the exam. I began some preliminary research on Thursday so that I could see what the winter and spring would look like. It's been a rude awakening to discover 1) how infrequently and how sporadically even the largest test centers in France administer the DELF/DALF; 2) how long it takes most centers to release the diplôme (up to six months!); 3) how uneven the guidelines are about methods of registration and payment; 4) how inflexible the test centers are concerning the distribution of the test results, particularly to candidates who do not reside in France; and finally, 5) how poorly some of the test centers distribute and market crucial registration information. I've been galled to find some test centers in major cities that provide a link to exam dates from 2015 when one goes to look for the most up-to-date offerings. Other test centers show only the date of the next exam but provide no overview of the complete set of dates for 2017. More understandably, but still frustratingly, some centers give no information at all yet about 2018 dates. (The CIEP does provide a set of dates across France going into next year, but not all centers offer all the exams on all the given dates, and participation seems almost arbitrary.)
It looks like the last possible exam date I can hope to snap up, and still hope to receive my results in time for May 2018, will be December 2017. And that's provided I can even secure a reservation to take the exam, which I won't know until September or so and must do in person. I've found only a couple of centers where I can hope to do this. If I am compelled by circumstances to register at my second choice, I will actually have to fly back to collect my results in person in the spring. At least that center is not abroad, but -- what gives?
What frustrates me the most about the process is that I'm not the one lacking time here. I began planning a year in advance. I'm not the one who wanted to cut my preparation period short by five or six months. I am lucky to have plenty of time at present and had created a well-paced schedule that was bringing me toward my goals. It's frustrating to have to change those plans to sit an exam for which I will not necessarily be ready, and on which I may therefore score substantially lower than I would have done later on, and at some considerable personal expense, all because of byzantine bureaucratic minutiae. (It hurts a bit, too, that I really don't want to improve or build upon my French. It is not a priority for me, and I would prefer to devote my attention to other languages. It's simply a necessary hoop through which I must jump to get to the thing I do want.)
I spent several hours this weekend seeing what it would look like to compress nine months of work into three. It is doable, certainly, but unpleasant. I will start tomorrow with increasing my vocabulary learning by 50 percent per weekday. We'll see what the review load looks like after a week or two. I don't plan to alter how much I read or watch, but I will need to be all the more stringent about writing frequently and getting the grammar down cold.

Japanese
Hoo boy. In light of the above, I guess it's a good thing that I did some pruning a few days ago with respect to my learning schedule. I felt dead inside each day as I went through the requisite vocabulary, like I were pushing a stone from one side of a field to the other, and my lack of engagement meant that I would get simple words wrong over and over again. I just. Don't. Care. And I thought, "Really? 400 more words until I meet my goal for this year?" I couldn't picture going on even another day, so I looked ahead at what would be due and suspended cards like crazy. I got the list down to 60 or so words that I'm actually curious about, since I repeatedly hear them or have wanted to know how to say them. And then I'll call it quits on that for the time being. I can always unsuspend the cards later if I want to learn abstract things out of context.
I am still learning kanji and won't alter my schedule there. Two hundred characters per month seems to work out pretty well.

Norwegian
My SRS-dictated review schedule is going well. I have only completed two weeks' worth of Assimil lessons, of course. But I am trying to ignore the discomfort of the bleeding edge, that newness, and take refuge in the knowledge that I will see the lessons again and again, and I'll smile at them in time as though they're old friends. I will need refuges like this to take me away from the annoyance that comes in having to focus so much energy on French. ;) Because it looks like the fall of this year will be insane, I guess I won't be able to start learning Occitan. Now that I know that, I'll make sure to devote all the more attention to doing well at Norwegian.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby Systematiker » Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:35 pm

I've somehow missed your log, though we've interacted a bit elsewhere on the forum - good that I didn't miss it for too long, it wasn't too much to catch up on!

Shame about the French and having to ramp up your schedule - especially having to flip back again on Occitan (I think you just recently gave in on learning it anyway, right?).


Also, I just have to say, I can commiserate with what you did to yourself in German for vocab and are trying to avoid in French...as I'm the guy who learned Antlitz before Gesicht... :D
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jul 03, 2017 5:30 pm

hi,

I undersrand your frustration with the dalf organisation. In my country, the exams are run every February and every May. Which is the exactly same time as most university exams. And nothing later in the year. It is stupid, true. and frustrating in comparation with the Goethes running exams four or five times a year.

But I think you may rely on the dates from 2017 or 2016, I don't think most centers change the dates dramatically. They are too lazy for that.

The results dates are scary, but it may console you that the results are often available earlier, I got mine after a month or so, therefore a month or two early. I'd say the centers are mostly covering their behinds, so that noone can complain, if things go slower one day.

Is the exam required by your university really Dalf? If not, than perhaps another of the same level may be more convenient. TCF is quite well spread too. Perhaps it might be possible to ask your target university for advice.
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Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5831
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Tue Jul 04, 2017 11:20 pm

Systematiker wrote:I've somehow missed your log, though we've interacted a bit elsewhere on the forum - good that I didn't miss it for too long, it wasn't too much to catch up on!

Shame about the French and having to ramp up your schedule - especially having to flip back again on Occitan (I think you just recently gave in on learning it anyway, right?).

Also, I just have to say, I can commiserate with what you did to yourself in German for vocab and are trying to avoid in French...as I'm the guy who learned Antlitz before Gesicht... :D


Now that is a feat! :D

Thanks very much for your kind words -- I've read your posts with interest, too. I think our educational backgrounds/research interests have some overlap, to say nothing of the time in Germany. I hope someday I can add some Dialekte to my list like you!

Cavesa wrote:hi,

I undersrand your frustration with the dalf organisation. In my country, the exams are run every February and every May. Which is the exactly same time as most university exams. And nothing later in the year. It is stupid, true. and frustrating in comparation with the Goethes running exams four or five times a year.

But I think you may rely on the dates from 2017 or 2016, I don't think most centers change the dates dramatically. They are too lazy for that.

The results dates are scary, but it may console you that the results are often available earlier, I got mine after a month or so, therefore a month or two early. I'd say the centers are mostly covering their behinds, so that noone can complain, if things go slower one day.

Is the exam required by your university really Dalf? If not, than perhaps another of the same level may be more convenient. TCF is quite well spread too. Perhaps it might be possible to ask your target university for advice.


Thank you very much, cavesa. The bureaucratic hangups are indeed quite annoying, and they seem puzzling to me. I could understand if exams were rarely offered if I wanted to qualify in Uzbek or Japanese... but when a language is spoken natively on four continents, it's strange to see how sporadically the testing is offered! But what can one do? I'm just glad I found out about this now and not in March of next year.

As for what the universities will require, it's somewhat hard to say. Basically, I am competing with Abituriente who have probably studied French since their early teens. When the universities do refer to necessary skills, they speak vaguely of B2/C1 competence. Some of the programs I'm looking at don't care whether I submit proof of proficiency in languages at all, since they claim they will look at one's school transcript or Abitur for the evidence. In my case, though, I have no Abitur, and that transcript is two decades old. :X So I realized early this year that I'm not a strong candidate without some external proof of my ability. In addition, some of the programs will only admit 6 to 10 foreign students per year. I figure that I need to build as strong a case as possible for my entry, so I should take the highest-level exam for which I'm ready at the latest possible date. I plan to improve my French well after the date of any exam and eventually settle around C1+. But I hope I can show concrete proof of at least B2 readiness in the coming months. Then I can worry about all the political bureaucracy that surrounds attempting to secure a residence visa abroad... :D
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: 120 / 150 Expressions françaises (120/150)


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