aokoye wrote:Thank you for this post but especially the recommendations of Übungsgrammatik für die Oberstufe and Sag's besser. You're the second person here who has strongly recommended Übungsgrammatik für die Oberstufe, which I suppose means I should actually start using it I'm pretty sure it will also kick my ass but I am in no doubt that it'll be useful. Which Sag's besser books did you use? All of them or just a few?
Glad to help! I have Sag's besser, Teil 1 and Teil 2, both by Hans Földeak. I've worked extensively out of Teil 1 but have done more of a buffet-style approach to Teil 2 so far, dipping in just where I needed to do so. My teachers at the C1 and C2 levels, and the teachers for the C2 exam prep course, drew very heavily from Teil 1 photocopies to drill us. It was invaluable, especially the sections on Umformungen and Nominalisierung. In fact, those are what helped developed my Sprachgefühl lots in a short time. It was just a couple of weeks before the C2 exam, and I'd regularly get only 50 or 60 percent of the Nominalisierung exercises correct from Sag's besser. There were combinations I simply hadn't ever seen, even after however many hundreds of hours of practice. I wanted to eradicate the discouraging feeling from getting so many (very simple, very precise) things wrong in those exercises. I made cloze deletion cards in Anki for all of the Nominalisierung exercises I got wrong -- "You got me this time, but you're never gonna fool me again if I see you in the wild!" -- and it worked like a charm. I learned dozens of idiomatic formulations in a short time through those books.
aokoye wrote:Also I, for one, would be really interested in hearing more of your postmortem about exams. I'm very likely taking TestDaF in September after spending two months in Germany and Austria (I'm going to Freie Universtät Berlin's summer school for four weeks and then visiting a friend in Vienna). I'm very likely at a B2(.2) right now and am hoping to test into the C1 class this summer. I will likely never take the Goethe Institut C2 exam, but hearing you and others talk about it is both very interesting and useful.
Sure! I am unfortunately not familiar with TestDaF -- knew many people who took it, but I never looked at it myself, since I decided to go the Zertifikat path. But if you are already in the German-speaking world this summer, you've already got a huge advantage for your practice, as you know. I think if you are challenging yourself not just with things at your level, but above your level, you will make astronomical gains in your couple of months. The Übungsgrammatik für die Oberstufe is great for that, as mentioned. The level of detail is just amazing and even taught me shortcuts or rules that we never once touched upon in classroom work with the standard textbooks. I didn't earnestly focus on learning Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen until I was well underway at the C1 level; I wish I had started at B1. It would have made my expressions a lot richer a lot sooner. The lists of N-V-V in the back of classroom textbooks like Erkundungen C1 or C-Grammatik: Übungsgrammatik Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Sprachniveau C1/C2 (same publisher/authors) are a godsend for this.
If you have specific questions about particular challenges, I'm always happy to help.