It's really not much time!
My "book-learning" update: I've done the first two lessons of Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Advanced German). I'm glad I know a bit of French otherwise I would probably spend a lot of time just looking up words. So, current status is that I'm on the third lesson. One minor disappointment with Perfectionnement Allemand is that it is the new edition. What's wrong with that? Just a few minor gripes with the actual format of the book. The slightly older versions (same edition in terms of content I believe) were compact, with semi-hard covers and a red-string bookmark. I can't stress how useful I found this older format. Hard-wearing thanks to the semi-hard cover and quality binding meant that my copy of "New German With Ease" has lasted a lot of abuse extremely well. It doesn't have a lot of reference material at the end, but that has just helped by keeping the size down so that it fits into just about any pocket I have, including my pants pocket, which can make it remarkably accessible. And the red-string bookmark means convenient, instant access to the page you're up to. It doesn't bulk up the book like most bookmarks, and because it's attached it saves a little time every time you want to access it. Considering that sometimes all I might have is 20 seconds at a traffic light to look up a phrase I had difficulty with, this quick access can really add up.
Still, I have to say that even just in the first few lessons the quality and quantity of dialog, extra information and new vocabulary seems excellent, as ever. By the third lesson it definitely seems to be beyond the end of New German With Ease. Very impressive stuff.
My other book is Lesetraining B2: Leseverstehen in Progression bis zum Goethe-Zertifikat B2. I haven't done a lot from this book yet. I started reading the first test question and realised that what my former German teacher told me via email about the B2 exam was definitely going to be true for me:
"Im "echten" Test gibt es natürlich Aufgaben zu Hör-/Leseverstehen, zum mündlichen und schriftlichen ausdruck - das ist auf B2-Niveau nicht mehr nur Grammatik. Man braucht einen entsprechenden Wortschatz. Und eine Menge Motivation."
Here was the very first test question and already there felt like a lot of words I didn't know! A lot of motivation would definitely be needed!
Not to worry, though. This was the point, after all. I expected to need to learn a lot of vocabulary, and it doesn't seem the book will disappoint in that respect :-) All good preparation for the test then! The method I've chosen to deal with this is to note down all the words I don't understand (partially or fully) on a piece of paper and then look them up using Linguee to add into a new Anki list. Since I finished doing this, I've reviewed the list a couple of times, and then re-read the question. It's like a whole new world! Now I can come up with answers and feel fairly confident that they're correct (remember that the book has NO ANSWERS!) [EDIT: The answers have been found! See this post for details]. Now I just need to do that for every question in the book and hopefully I'll have covered a whole bunch of vocabulary that I need for the exam but am current missing :-) That might not be easy however - I looked up about 80 words and phrases for the first question alone!
And just three months to go...
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