Just recently I've been going through more of the practice listening test material supplied by the Goethe Institute for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 exam. I've got one more of these to go. I realised after starting one of them that I had done it once before, but I didn't remember the details enough to really help me answer anything, so it was still decent practice/checking my current level. They both went well - in the Modellsatz test, I got 20/25 for the two listening test questions, and in Uebungssatz 01 (which I had done before but forgotten) I got 23/25. I think the real reason for the difference in results is just that I was familiar with the exam format the second time. This practice is really important because, the more familiar you are with the exam format, the better you can concentrate on showing what you know. Both of these test results were with the normal time/repetition restrictions from the actual exam (the audio Goethe supplies has all the correct repeats and gaps built in already). After I do Uebungssatz03 (I wonder where I can find Uebungssatz02? Or 04??), I'll either work on the test exams from TestDaF because they are on a scale from B2-C1, or just the C1 practice exams.
I recently re-did a couple of the "level checking" tests I had done last year. Here's one of them:
http://www.goethe.de/cgi-bin/einstufungstest/einstufungstest.pl
I got 20 out of 30. I'm actually pretty sure this is close to what I got when I did it ages ago. What's going on there? In the meantime, my vocabulary has increased significantly. I know that for sure. My reading ability is up to the stage where I can comfortably and enjoyably read a significant novel (not that I understand every single word or phrase!), and I feel reasonably comfortable (not fluent) in conversations with native speakers. Both of these facets have definitely improved.
What hasn't really changed is that I still haven't gone to any structured classes. Although I've read some of a really good German grammar book (without trying to memorise it), I haven't spent much time on learning the sorts of minutia which seem to fill most courses - is it "wenn" or "ob", for example. I'm not saying this isn't important, I'm not saying that I don't care about making this sort of mistake (I do!) but I don't think they're as important as improving conversational fluency and vocabulary, and I haven't spent much time on them. Anyway, I'll check back this level in a few months and see if anything's changed!
One last bit of exam practice to mention - I did one of the "correct the mistakes" questions in the Schriftlicher Ausdruck section of the B2 Modelssatz mentioned above and got 8 out of 10. On of the two mistakes I missed was "wenn" being used instead of "ob/wann" :-) You get 15 minutes to do this section in the exam, and I did it in 8 minutes. I think that for one lunchtime soon I'll print out a few of these questions and do them all at once, because I can probably knock over a bunch really quickly.
Other than that, the focus will remain, for the next week or two, on listening test practice (at a higher level next).
By the way, all of the above have been squeezed into the few lunchtimes I've had free lately. If it weren't for lunchtime, I don't know when I would get this stuff done at all!
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Leseverstehen B2 finished!
So, finally, I've finished all the practice reading tests in Leseverstehen B2. It took me 2 weeks to find the time to finish the last few tests. So much other stuff always comes up to fill my lunchtimes, which is my main free time to do this kind of study. Anyway, phew, I did it. I ordered the book on the 16th of March last year, and got it a few weeks later, so I finished it in under a year. It wasn't the only thing I did in that time, of course, and I did it in fits and starts. When I first attempted it I immediately discovered, on the first "easy" practice test, that my vocabulary was woefully inadequate. I immediately started a new Anki list just to contain the words that came up from this book. Since that time it has become my general list with words from everywhere going into it. It has grown to 2,600 "facts" (1,300 cards, which probably represent at least 2,600 words and phrases). And I haven't even added all the words from the last 3 or 4 practice tests yet! Studying this list, and adding to it on a semi-regular basis, have proved to be vital so far.
Speaking of my Anki list, I've been a little slack with it lately. I don't know why, but for a few days there I couldn't find the time and/or enthusiasm to do my daily study, even though I kept up my other activities. After a bit of a burst yesterday, I should be able to catch up today.
As for other activities, I recently passed the halfway mark in Der Beobachter. I'm up to about page 330, and the story's really starting to get interesting. I still don't think we've met the murderer yet, but who knows. I could be totally wrong. Time will tell. I've also kept up my weekly Stammtisch at work, though I really don't feel like my fluency is improving enough - probably because I haven't been able to meet up with my other German-speaking friends very much lately. I really get a lot of opportunities to talk in the time that I'm with them, and they make me feel very comfortable. I feel like I'm at the stage where, in order to progress, I really need to be doing more. At a lower level, you can make good progress with an hour a week, but as you get better, the time requirement goes up. Sure, if you've got the time and the opportunity, do as much as you can from the start. But when time is limited, and you can only really focus on one thing in your life at a time without letting everything else fall by the wayside, then, like me, you can probably only do a lot of interaction in your target language in concentrated bursts. That's what I feel like I need to do now. I also need to take a leaf out of Keith over at Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning and watch a lot more German TV and movies with no subtitles. The main problem I have is that I need the volume turned up, and since I can only watch them once my daughter has gone to sleep, that really means watching them on my phone. And since that doesn't support a lot of resolutions and formats, that means a slow conversion process for each one, often with a loss of audio sync or some other annoyance. Maybe I should get some remote headphones and just watch stuff on the TV!
As a final note to sign off, I've pretty much decided that I should just do the B2 exam now to get it out of the way, and think about aiming to do the C2 in the future as I discussed before. I wasn't sure when I found out that the next exam date will be the 18th of April and I thought that that maybe gave me enough time to prepare for the C1 instead. Perhaps it does in everything except that my speaking probably won't be up to the required level in time. Even if I could do it, the chances are that I would be looking at somewhere between a low pass and a fail. Since this has always just been a goal to help encourage and push me on, I think it would be better to get a good pass at the lower level for now. Still, I plan on studying for the C1 exam in terms of listening practice, etc, as I'd rather be over-prepared than under!
I haven't sent in the form yet, but at least I know the date for my exam now: the 18th of April. I'm looking forward to it!
Speaking of my Anki list, I've been a little slack with it lately. I don't know why, but for a few days there I couldn't find the time and/or enthusiasm to do my daily study, even though I kept up my other activities. After a bit of a burst yesterday, I should be able to catch up today.
As for other activities, I recently passed the halfway mark in Der Beobachter. I'm up to about page 330, and the story's really starting to get interesting. I still don't think we've met the murderer yet, but who knows. I could be totally wrong. Time will tell. I've also kept up my weekly Stammtisch at work, though I really don't feel like my fluency is improving enough - probably because I haven't been able to meet up with my other German-speaking friends very much lately. I really get a lot of opportunities to talk in the time that I'm with them, and they make me feel very comfortable. I feel like I'm at the stage where, in order to progress, I really need to be doing more. At a lower level, you can make good progress with an hour a week, but as you get better, the time requirement goes up. Sure, if you've got the time and the opportunity, do as much as you can from the start. But when time is limited, and you can only really focus on one thing in your life at a time without letting everything else fall by the wayside, then, like me, you can probably only do a lot of interaction in your target language in concentrated bursts. That's what I feel like I need to do now. I also need to take a leaf out of Keith over at Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning and watch a lot more German TV and movies with no subtitles. The main problem I have is that I need the volume turned up, and since I can only watch them once my daughter has gone to sleep, that really means watching them on my phone. And since that doesn't support a lot of resolutions and formats, that means a slow conversion process for each one, often with a loss of audio sync or some other annoyance. Maybe I should get some remote headphones and just watch stuff on the TV!
As a final note to sign off, I've pretty much decided that I should just do the B2 exam now to get it out of the way, and think about aiming to do the C2 in the future as I discussed before. I wasn't sure when I found out that the next exam date will be the 18th of April and I thought that that maybe gave me enough time to prepare for the C1 instead. Perhaps it does in everything except that my speaking probably won't be up to the required level in time. Even if I could do it, the chances are that I would be looking at somewhere between a low pass and a fail. Since this has always just been a goal to help encourage and push me on, I think it would be better to get a good pass at the lower level for now. Still, I plan on studying for the C1 exam in terms of listening practice, etc, as I'd rather be over-prepared than under!
I haven't sent in the form yet, but at least I know the date for my exam now: the 18th of April. I'm looking forward to it!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Almost finished Leseverstehen B2!
Good times! I've done the first test from test 14, and there are only 15 in the book. I've been doing them all in 40-60 minutes, and usually 20-22 out of 25. Generally I got 15 out of 15 in the first few questions (with exceptions in those stupid "positiv or negativ+skeptisch" type questions) and generally lose points in the fill in the blanks exercises. When I first started with easier exercises I thought I would just never be able to do them, and now I consistently get about 7, which I'm quite pleased about. I plan on trying to come up with a few tips for this type of question. I'll go back through and sort them out, but one I've noticed (which I keep missing myself) is that there's often one blank that's for a "sich". There's are easy to find because they'll occur early in a sentence or a relative clause, and may have an adverb next to them (which should hint that you don't want to try to think of another adverb!). Something to look out for...
I've also continued reading "Der Beobachter" and just got up to page 190. Another old lady just got whacked in a horrible way, and the main female character just cheated on her husband, for no real apparent reason. I'm not really enjoying the story about the main female character's family, to be honest, but I'm getting a feeling that she is somehow linked to the murderer. At the moment, they are completely disconnected from the murders, so it's a bit weird.
I've also been reading, very occasionally and in very short bursts, "Das Parfüm" at work sometimes. I'm only up to page 32, and I haven't been adding its vocabulary. Given that it's only 250 pages long, I probably wouldn't have been better off to just read it in the first place to give me that boost of having at least one full German-lanaguage novel under my belt. Der Beobachter is 650 pages long! But really, it's pretty easy reading. Lots of conversations, not complicated, a fair bit of day-to-day vocab, so it's a good choice really, and my progress has been OK.
Hopefully by my next update I'll be finished Leseverstehen B2 and can figure out what "study" type material I should focus on next. I'll probably start to focus on doing C1 level listening tests because that's an area where I would really like to bring up my comfort. I mean, I listen to a lot of German audio podcasts, and understand most of it in broad terms, and some of it perfectly, but I still think I have some work to do here to feel fully comfortable all the time. However, I think I'm close to being ready for the listening section of the B2 exam, which is why I've been thinking I'll do it sometime soon, and set a more distant goal of doing the C2 exam in another year or so perhaps.
More updates on this later...
I've also continued reading "Der Beobachter" and just got up to page 190. Another old lady just got whacked in a horrible way, and the main female character just cheated on her husband, for no real apparent reason. I'm not really enjoying the story about the main female character's family, to be honest, but I'm getting a feeling that she is somehow linked to the murderer. At the moment, they are completely disconnected from the murders, so it's a bit weird.
I've also been reading, very occasionally and in very short bursts, "Das Parfüm" at work sometimes. I'm only up to page 32, and I haven't been adding its vocabulary. Given that it's only 250 pages long, I probably wouldn't have been better off to just read it in the first place to give me that boost of having at least one full German-lanaguage novel under my belt. Der Beobachter is 650 pages long! But really, it's pretty easy reading. Lots of conversations, not complicated, a fair bit of day-to-day vocab, so it's a good choice really, and my progress has been OK.
Hopefully by my next update I'll be finished Leseverstehen B2 and can figure out what "study" type material I should focus on next. I'll probably start to focus on doing C1 level listening tests because that's an area where I would really like to bring up my comfort. I mean, I listen to a lot of German audio podcasts, and understand most of it in broad terms, and some of it perfectly, but I still think I have some work to do here to feel fully comfortable all the time. However, I think I'm close to being ready for the listening section of the B2 exam, which is why I've been thinking I'll do it sometime soon, and set a more distant goal of doing the C2 exam in another year or so perhaps.
More updates on this later...
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