As usual, there's a Rammstein song for every situation...
I just found out that all the language centre staff at Goethe-Institut Sydney went home at 3pm WITHOUT SENDING OUT THE RESULTS.
Can you believe it? Why must they torture me so! That means I won't know till next Monday at the earliest. I think I'll email them next week to find out when they're planning on sending the results. Not knowing is killing me.
What if I'm waiting just to find out that I failed? That would be completely shit :-) I wouldn't mind waiting if I knew I had passed!!! Oh well. I'll just have to wait I guess. I remember being surprised when they said the results should be ready by the end of next week. Now... Ich bin enttäuscht. I'm going to go listen to the song to console myself...
One funny thing this just reminded me of actually. While I was wandering around the Goethe Institute at some stage on the day (remember, this was my first time ever in the building), I came across some posters which talked about people's German learning journeys, with regards to how they interacted with the Goethe Institute in particular. I think they were meant to be success stories but, to be honest, they struck me as examples of the complete failure of their teaching method.
The first story I read seemed reasonably typical. The first "bubble" on the journey gave the date of the guy's first class with the Goethe Institute (presumably as a teenager) where he had no knowledge of German at all. The next bubble talked about how some German people he knew were surprised to hear him speaking German to them after just a few classes. Sounds promising so far. The sequence of bubbles talked about trips to Germany for work, for classes, for extended holidays, etc, etc. The final bubble showed him happily working in a German-speaking company. I think it still mentioned him doing minor courses to help him from time to time.
The astonishing thing was the timeframe - 13 years from the first bubble till the last! Now, the last was his "very comfortable" phase, so I guess we should assume he had been fluent for quite some time. But looking back on his "bubbles", he complained about having trouble understanding people and expressing himself after something like 7 or 8 years of doing Goethe courses in and out of Germany itself, and after extended holidays and work assignments in the country itself (and by extended, I mean 3 weeks to 6 months!), in German. OK, so he could easily be setting very high goals for himself, and good on him if he is... But mein Gott is that a long time to reach some kind of comfortable fluency.
Look, I have to admit a few things here. Firsly, I may have got most of the details wrong. My memory is hardly "photographic". In fact, I'd settle for it being a magic eye puzzle most of the time. BUT, I think the general thrust of the story was as I reported - from zero to cool in 13 years, with lots of courses and time in the country in-between. I don't mind the time in the country bit, but all that expensive studying would appear not to have had much of an accelerating effect.
The second thing to admit is that my German ability is somewhere about the B2 level, maybe up towards C1 in reading, but perhaps not even at the required B2 standard in speaking (only the exam results can give me any confidence in that!). That is to say, I don't know how long it will take me to reach the same sort of level as this guy achieved, and I certainly don't mean to knock what he did.
All I'm saying is, it didn't sound to me like a really ringing endorsement for the Goethe Institute courses :-)
I haven't yet been in any Goethe Courses though, so I'm not speaking from direct experience here. Chances are, unless I find some wealthy benefactor, I'm unlikely to ever attend one either. My own German studies, in brief are:
1) A useless one or two semesters in high school. I tried to study it in year 9 but they wouldn't run the class because only 3 students wanted to do it.
2) I did one twelve week absolute beginner's night course later in high school (with my mother, of all people!). It was really poorly run, and dominated by old people who read ahead and wrote in all the answers and a older female student who could speak German FLUENTLY but said she wasn't confident. The teacher would say "does everybody understand?" and this fluent speaker would say yes, so we would move on. I did learn the phrase "ich habe meine Badehosen vergessen" which could come in handy I suppose, though I've yet to use it.
3) Fast-forward almost 20 years with no German study, and basically no exposure to it (though I did study something - I went to Alliance Francaise in the meantime), and I find myself living in Germany with my wife. We are both native English speakers, and I was working in an English-speaking company. At this time I started using Assimil's "New German with Ease" which can be twee at times, but was truly brilliant for giving me the ability to understand spoken as well as written German. I could even speak a bit, even though I didn't do much.
4) During this time my company sent my wife and I to German classes after we had been there about 3 months or even more I think. Assimil had already put me way beyond this level, and I asked to go to a higher level, but I was told that the pace was pretty quick and the next level up would be too hard. And besides, my wife didn't want to go to classes alone. What did I get out of the classes then? Not a lot, to be honest. I heard a lot of butchered German, and a lot of people (in the first one or two classes at least) who just rejected the difficulty of everything immediately. Happily, these idiots left pretty quickly. It was just like being in high school again. Except, back in high school, you were stuck with the idiots for the whole year, if not the whole six years :-) The main thing I got out of the class was some good vocab and a good friend in the form of the teacher. I still write to her occasionally and she even very generously corrected something I had written to help me prepare for the exam, which was lovely of her.
5) Pretty much as documented in this blog! About 4 or 5 months after getting back to Australia, I picked up learning German again.
The total time for all the real parts of that (steps 3 to 5) is roughly 2 years so far. When will I stop? Probably never. I know that I will change focus to other languages at some stage, but as yet I'm unsure when. This may actually be the subject of a future post, so stay tuned!
As usual, if you've got comments on any of the above, feel free to leave them below - especially if you've had experience with German courses in general, and Goethe Institute ones in particular, that you would like to share...
Friday, April 27, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
My Experiences with the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 Exam at the Goethe-Institut Sydney
[EDIT on 08/01/2013: To anyone planning to do the B2 exam soon, please also check out my post-mortem where I examine what went right and what went wrong]
In this post I'll write about the actual day of my exam and how things ran. The intention is to give future test candidates some perspective about what the test setup is like, and also just to record it now while the memory is fresh, because my mind is like swiss cheese usually.
I'll start with the night before when, at about 9pm, as I finally had my first opportunity to study for the exam the next day, my daughter, who we had just put down to bed, vomited. She had been coming down with something since the night before, but this was her first vomit. It was on the floor, wall, in her bed and in her hair. So, it was off to the shower for the second time that night, and a bunch of washing had to be done too once she'd got back to bed. By about 10-10:30pm I was sitting down again, finally ready to study.
You see, it's shit like this that I think people without kids can't appreciate. Yes, we all have jobs, or other studies, and all sorts of other junk to deal with too. But then, when you've dealt with all that other crap, and you finally sit down (late) to do some final study, your kid throws up all over themself in bed. The joys of parenting!
At this stage I decided not to do too much so I could get to bed earlier, but I still didn't get to bed till just after midnight. I got to sleep alright, but at 5am I woke up from something and just couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about the exam. Oh, and the rain was BUCKETING down. I mean in sheets as thick as lead. The weather chose to continue doing this for the rest of the day, which explains why the road outside the Goethe Institut in Sydney was flooded and they had literally had sand-bags protecting one of their entrances. Crazy!
My plan was to not use English once I entered the Goethe-Institut so as to get into the right frame of mind and stay there. This was immediately broken when, as I stepped through the door, the receptionist said "are you all here for the exams? Upstairs, please". In the waiting room upstairs I found about, I don't know 10-15 people, all waiting for the exams. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to anyone then as I had to make a trip to the bathroom - nerves will do that to you. When I came out we went to register. The people who were still standing there waiting to register were all asked what level they were doing. They were all either A1 or A2. I found out later that one girl was doing B1, and I was the only one doing B2. When I was asked what exam I was doing, despite being asked in English and despite the fact that everyone else had answered in English, I stuck to my plan and answered in German :-)
Then we returned upstairs. I had a chance to guess at everyone's ages by this stage, and I think that, although I may have been one of the oldest, there was a broad range. I would say mostly mid-20's to mid-30's, with one or two younger. I can't say I looked at everyone in detail though, but it was far from my "nightmare" mix of heaps of high school or early university students all doing the B2 exam or higher, and all being much better than me!
After a short while all the people for the A1 and A2 exams were taken off to separate rooms for their introductions to the exam conditions, etc. There were three of us left in the waiting room - me, the young woman doing the B1 exam, and another woman who had come in with one of the men doing the A1 exam. Whenever anyone coming through asked us if we were here for the exams, this woman was at pains to point out that she was just here as moral support with her boyfriend and that she was a native speaker. What luck for me! We started chatting in German and had a good 5 minutes to talk about why her boyfriend was there (they were planning on emigrating to Germany, so he needed to have some language skills to show for the immigration application process, and I guess even A1 is enough to count as something, as basic as it is). During our chat the young woman doing the B1 exam asked this German speaker something, which the native speaker didn't understand. I'm pretty sure I remember understanding it, or just not hearing it properly because she spoke too quietly. The German woman had to ask her to repeat it several times. I don't think it was wrong, or her accent was bad (it sounded good to me in this short sample), she just lacked the confidence to project her voice adequately when speaking German. I felt really bad for her, because I felt like that could really knock her confidence before the exam. Looking back, I wish I had told her to come sit with us so she could chat too. I hate thinking that this might have shaken her a little. I know I would have felt bad if the German speaker had kept asking me to repeat.
Luckily for me, since I was sitting next to her, she could understand me perfectly. I told her the spoken part was the bit I was most worried about because I left practising it till too late, but she very reassuringly told me that I'll do very well because my German was very good. What better compliment could you receive right before a German exam! A great confidence boost!
We were then called down to do our exams in separate rooms. I had a whole classroom to myself, which was both relaxing and weird at the same time :-) The order of exam components was all completely different to what I expected. I was given the written components in the following order:
1) Hörverstehen (Listening comprehension)
2) Schriftlicher Ausdruck (Written expression)
3) Leseverstehen (reading comprehension)
I expected the order to be 3, 1, 2, but it didn't matter too much, though I might have preferred not to do the listening section first!
I found out later that the exam organiser was locking me in to the room, and it could only be opened from the outside. Woah! Fire risk! Sure, it's cheaper and easier for them to run, but if someone burns to death some day during an exam, there'll be hell to pay...
So, Hörverstehen. I think it went OK. It's in two sections - the first part you hear only once, and you need to fill in the correct details in a table of information - surely some sort of itinerary. These 5 questions are worth 2 marks each, so I was very disappointed that I missed one of them. I knew I had the answer wrong so when I copied it over to the answer book, I just had a guess, but that was almost certainly 2 points gone, without allowing for other mistakes. Oh well. The second part is 10 questions worth 1.5 each. I think this part went better and less ambiguously than many of my practice runs had gone, so I think it was OK. My usual score for this part is about 7/10 = 10.5/15 points. I hope I got enough in the first section to bring this over the 15/25 required.
Just a sidenote, it's not strictly necessary to get 15 out of 25 in every section. You need 45/75 for the written parts, and 15 out of 25 for the spoken part (at least, of course!) to pass. However, I made it my goal to not let any area be weak enough that I needed to hope for cross-subsidisation between them.
The Schriftlicher Ausdruck section went OK I think. There's a written composition part, and correcting errors in a letter. I think the second one I got at least 6 in. I would have said 7, but I made a silly change as I was copying my answers to the answer sheet that's given me doubts. However, I've just looked it up and even the answer I thought was right is wrong, so I can stop worrying about it. I definitely got it wrong! :-) Damn... I knew there was something else in that sentence which I wasn't sure about, but I was so sure of this one that I ignored the other thing. Oh well, can't change it now.
In the free composition, I did this differently to how I practised it. In practice, I had written a rough version and then copied that over as a final version. VERY, VERY TIME-CONSUMING! I noticed that I wasn't making many corrections during this time, so in the exam I made brief notes of sentence fragments and words for each point and then just tried to compose it once and write it neatly. Any bad mistakes I just crossed through and wrote again. This gave me time at the end to re-read it at least once, which is good. It seemed mostly basic in its sentence structure (I deliberately tried to keep it that way to avoid tricking myself with over-complicated sentences) but it covered everything and had a decent flow. You are required to write at least 180 words - I think mine was at least 300! One thing I should have done at the end is to focus on grammatical errors of mismatches in the endings on the articles (words like "ein", "der") and related words ("mein", "dein", etc) and adjectives. I know what these should be, but often get them wrong in writing when I'm rushing (and VERY often when I'm speaking! This might be my next goal to fix up!).
Finally came the Leseverstehen. The first question in it was a bit awkward - it seemed very broad and ambiguous. Usually I scream through this in practice questions and get it close to 100% right, but this time I'm not so sure. It also took me more than the suggested 15 minutes, but I easily made up this loss on all the other sections (I can read quite fast now when the texts are at B2 level). The other question I had issues with is one that always gets me - the one where you have to say whether the author sees something as positive, or negative/sceptical (or ambiguous, really). So, you have a 50/50 shot. Should be easy! Except that even when I understand the text 100%, and the question 100%, I often find myself strongly disagreeing with the answer. They seem to expect you to find just the first sentence that relates to the question and form your opinion off that, but not always. And therein lies the rub. So, yeah, I think this question annoying. I could easily have got a couple wrong because the possible answer could go either way.
Overall, however, the reading section went OK and I was reasonably happy with it.
I think that all the written parts were OK. I'm reasonably confident that I could pass this part.
After a short 5 minute break, I started my preparation for the spoken part. It went quite well. As I was on my own, I didn't get a choice about the topic, but the topic I got was OK. I used some of the thoughts I had put together for some written practice prior to the exam, because the topics all overlap quite a lot to be honest. One thing that went wrong here is that I didn't make any notes for the dialogue question. (I just spent too much time on the monologue preparation, and didn't get into the right frame of mind for the dialogue. This may prove to have been a big mistake.
At the appointed time one of the oral examiners came to collect me. I went into one of the front offices, which was nicely lit and a pleasant change of venue from the dark, cold classroom where I had done the other parts. I was introduced to my two examiners, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I began my monologue. My memory of it now is that it went OK. Probably about as good, or slightly better, than some of my better practice runs. It was actually much easier to deliver it to an audience than when I practised it by speaking into my mobile phone and listening back later. A real audience, on the contrary from being scary, actually helped with important visual cues of their attention, as well as the occasional brief word of agreement, or acknowledgement of what was said, which helped a lot with the flow I felt.
The second part, the dialogue, was done with one of the examiners because I was the only B2 candidate. He was very nice and friendly, and put me at ease. However, I hadn't prepared for this section, and I didn't have a lot to say about each thing - I should have at least looked over the photos in advance and had a think. Also, I committed the cardinal sin of letting him direct the conversation. I don't think I ever explicitly elicited his feedback, except with the occasional "oder?" or something similar. I was interactive, but more responsive than proactive. I'm really annoyed at myself because I knew one of the marking criteria where I could get points without necessarily knowing more German was by being very interactive, and I don't think I did enough of this to overcome some of my weaknesses where I would score lower. I had no trouble understanding the examiner, and he didn't have any understanding me (at least, none that he showed), but I'm just not sure how this part would pan out for me.
These two parts are worth equal marks overall, so only time will tell now. However, I do already know that spending ALL of my preparation time on the monologue was misguided. I got about 15 minutes to prepare (actually a little less), of which I would suggest to anyone else doing this exam that they spend 3-5 minutes on preparing for the dialogue. I had also prepared a small list of phrases specifically to help with the dialogue, eliciting feedback, etc. I hardly used any of these. It didn't help that I only compiled the list on the night before the exam, and with my limited time available, I didn't really practise them enough to make them flow out of me. I had also, obviously, never practised the dialogue section. I considered asking my Austrian friend at work to help me do that on the day before the exam, but as luck would have it she was off sick that day. All my own fault, of course, for leaving the specific spoken practice so late.
My honest final assessment is that I felt that, although I'm not guaranteed to pass, which is really where I wanted to be before the exam, I should at least come very close. It was definitely the right exam for me to take - B1 would have been too easy, and, although I think I could do OK on a C1 exam, OK in this context would most likely be a fail, especially in the spoken section. So, yeah, whatever the result, I now think of myself as being at B2 level. Still, it would be really, really nice if Goethe agreed. Then I could proudly write the name of my certificate on my resume!
PHEW! Sorry, that was a big post. If you made it this far, your reward is to know that I'll write a post sometime in the near future assessing my studies to this date - what went right, what went wrong, ideas for how to improve in the future, etc.
Danke fürs Lesen!
In this post I'll write about the actual day of my exam and how things ran. The intention is to give future test candidates some perspective about what the test setup is like, and also just to record it now while the memory is fresh, because my mind is like swiss cheese usually.
I'll start with the night before when, at about 9pm, as I finally had my first opportunity to study for the exam the next day, my daughter, who we had just put down to bed, vomited. She had been coming down with something since the night before, but this was her first vomit. It was on the floor, wall, in her bed and in her hair. So, it was off to the shower for the second time that night, and a bunch of washing had to be done too once she'd got back to bed. By about 10-10:30pm I was sitting down again, finally ready to study.
You see, it's shit like this that I think people without kids can't appreciate. Yes, we all have jobs, or other studies, and all sorts of other junk to deal with too. But then, when you've dealt with all that other crap, and you finally sit down (late) to do some final study, your kid throws up all over themself in bed. The joys of parenting!
At this stage I decided not to do too much so I could get to bed earlier, but I still didn't get to bed till just after midnight. I got to sleep alright, but at 5am I woke up from something and just couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about the exam. Oh, and the rain was BUCKETING down. I mean in sheets as thick as lead. The weather chose to continue doing this for the rest of the day, which explains why the road outside the Goethe Institut in Sydney was flooded and they had literally had sand-bags protecting one of their entrances. Crazy!
My plan was to not use English once I entered the Goethe-Institut so as to get into the right frame of mind and stay there. This was immediately broken when, as I stepped through the door, the receptionist said "are you all here for the exams? Upstairs, please". In the waiting room upstairs I found about, I don't know 10-15 people, all waiting for the exams. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to anyone then as I had to make a trip to the bathroom - nerves will do that to you. When I came out we went to register. The people who were still standing there waiting to register were all asked what level they were doing. They were all either A1 or A2. I found out later that one girl was doing B1, and I was the only one doing B2. When I was asked what exam I was doing, despite being asked in English and despite the fact that everyone else had answered in English, I stuck to my plan and answered in German :-)
Then we returned upstairs. I had a chance to guess at everyone's ages by this stage, and I think that, although I may have been one of the oldest, there was a broad range. I would say mostly mid-20's to mid-30's, with one or two younger. I can't say I looked at everyone in detail though, but it was far from my "nightmare" mix of heaps of high school or early university students all doing the B2 exam or higher, and all being much better than me!
After a short while all the people for the A1 and A2 exams were taken off to separate rooms for their introductions to the exam conditions, etc. There were three of us left in the waiting room - me, the young woman doing the B1 exam, and another woman who had come in with one of the men doing the A1 exam. Whenever anyone coming through asked us if we were here for the exams, this woman was at pains to point out that she was just here as moral support with her boyfriend and that she was a native speaker. What luck for me! We started chatting in German and had a good 5 minutes to talk about why her boyfriend was there (they were planning on emigrating to Germany, so he needed to have some language skills to show for the immigration application process, and I guess even A1 is enough to count as something, as basic as it is). During our chat the young woman doing the B1 exam asked this German speaker something, which the native speaker didn't understand. I'm pretty sure I remember understanding it, or just not hearing it properly because she spoke too quietly. The German woman had to ask her to repeat it several times. I don't think it was wrong, or her accent was bad (it sounded good to me in this short sample), she just lacked the confidence to project her voice adequately when speaking German. I felt really bad for her, because I felt like that could really knock her confidence before the exam. Looking back, I wish I had told her to come sit with us so she could chat too. I hate thinking that this might have shaken her a little. I know I would have felt bad if the German speaker had kept asking me to repeat.
Luckily for me, since I was sitting next to her, she could understand me perfectly. I told her the spoken part was the bit I was most worried about because I left practising it till too late, but she very reassuringly told me that I'll do very well because my German was very good. What better compliment could you receive right before a German exam! A great confidence boost!
We were then called down to do our exams in separate rooms. I had a whole classroom to myself, which was both relaxing and weird at the same time :-) The order of exam components was all completely different to what I expected. I was given the written components in the following order:
1) Hörverstehen (Listening comprehension)
2) Schriftlicher Ausdruck (Written expression)
3) Leseverstehen (reading comprehension)
I expected the order to be 3, 1, 2, but it didn't matter too much, though I might have preferred not to do the listening section first!
I found out later that the exam organiser was locking me in to the room, and it could only be opened from the outside. Woah! Fire risk! Sure, it's cheaper and easier for them to run, but if someone burns to death some day during an exam, there'll be hell to pay...
So, Hörverstehen. I think it went OK. It's in two sections - the first part you hear only once, and you need to fill in the correct details in a table of information - surely some sort of itinerary. These 5 questions are worth 2 marks each, so I was very disappointed that I missed one of them. I knew I had the answer wrong so when I copied it over to the answer book, I just had a guess, but that was almost certainly 2 points gone, without allowing for other mistakes. Oh well. The second part is 10 questions worth 1.5 each. I think this part went better and less ambiguously than many of my practice runs had gone, so I think it was OK. My usual score for this part is about 7/10 = 10.5/15 points. I hope I got enough in the first section to bring this over the 15/25 required.
Just a sidenote, it's not strictly necessary to get 15 out of 25 in every section. You need 45/75 for the written parts, and 15 out of 25 for the spoken part (at least, of course!) to pass. However, I made it my goal to not let any area be weak enough that I needed to hope for cross-subsidisation between them.
The Schriftlicher Ausdruck section went OK I think. There's a written composition part, and correcting errors in a letter. I think the second one I got at least 6 in. I would have said 7, but I made a silly change as I was copying my answers to the answer sheet that's given me doubts. However, I've just looked it up and even the answer I thought was right is wrong, so I can stop worrying about it. I definitely got it wrong! :-) Damn... I knew there was something else in that sentence which I wasn't sure about, but I was so sure of this one that I ignored the other thing. Oh well, can't change it now.
In the free composition, I did this differently to how I practised it. In practice, I had written a rough version and then copied that over as a final version. VERY, VERY TIME-CONSUMING! I noticed that I wasn't making many corrections during this time, so in the exam I made brief notes of sentence fragments and words for each point and then just tried to compose it once and write it neatly. Any bad mistakes I just crossed through and wrote again. This gave me time at the end to re-read it at least once, which is good. It seemed mostly basic in its sentence structure (I deliberately tried to keep it that way to avoid tricking myself with over-complicated sentences) but it covered everything and had a decent flow. You are required to write at least 180 words - I think mine was at least 300! One thing I should have done at the end is to focus on grammatical errors of mismatches in the endings on the articles (words like "ein", "der") and related words ("mein", "dein", etc) and adjectives. I know what these should be, but often get them wrong in writing when I'm rushing (and VERY often when I'm speaking! This might be my next goal to fix up!).
Finally came the Leseverstehen. The first question in it was a bit awkward - it seemed very broad and ambiguous. Usually I scream through this in practice questions and get it close to 100% right, but this time I'm not so sure. It also took me more than the suggested 15 minutes, but I easily made up this loss on all the other sections (I can read quite fast now when the texts are at B2 level). The other question I had issues with is one that always gets me - the one where you have to say whether the author sees something as positive, or negative/sceptical (or ambiguous, really). So, you have a 50/50 shot. Should be easy! Except that even when I understand the text 100%, and the question 100%, I often find myself strongly disagreeing with the answer. They seem to expect you to find just the first sentence that relates to the question and form your opinion off that, but not always. And therein lies the rub. So, yeah, I think this question annoying. I could easily have got a couple wrong because the possible answer could go either way.
Overall, however, the reading section went OK and I was reasonably happy with it.
I think that all the written parts were OK. I'm reasonably confident that I could pass this part.
After a short 5 minute break, I started my preparation for the spoken part. It went quite well. As I was on my own, I didn't get a choice about the topic, but the topic I got was OK. I used some of the thoughts I had put together for some written practice prior to the exam, because the topics all overlap quite a lot to be honest. One thing that went wrong here is that I didn't make any notes for the dialogue question. (I just spent too much time on the monologue preparation, and didn't get into the right frame of mind for the dialogue. This may prove to have been a big mistake.
At the appointed time one of the oral examiners came to collect me. I went into one of the front offices, which was nicely lit and a pleasant change of venue from the dark, cold classroom where I had done the other parts. I was introduced to my two examiners, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I began my monologue. My memory of it now is that it went OK. Probably about as good, or slightly better, than some of my better practice runs. It was actually much easier to deliver it to an audience than when I practised it by speaking into my mobile phone and listening back later. A real audience, on the contrary from being scary, actually helped with important visual cues of their attention, as well as the occasional brief word of agreement, or acknowledgement of what was said, which helped a lot with the flow I felt.
The second part, the dialogue, was done with one of the examiners because I was the only B2 candidate. He was very nice and friendly, and put me at ease. However, I hadn't prepared for this section, and I didn't have a lot to say about each thing - I should have at least looked over the photos in advance and had a think. Also, I committed the cardinal sin of letting him direct the conversation. I don't think I ever explicitly elicited his feedback, except with the occasional "oder?" or something similar. I was interactive, but more responsive than proactive. I'm really annoyed at myself because I knew one of the marking criteria where I could get points without necessarily knowing more German was by being very interactive, and I don't think I did enough of this to overcome some of my weaknesses where I would score lower. I had no trouble understanding the examiner, and he didn't have any understanding me (at least, none that he showed), but I'm just not sure how this part would pan out for me.
These two parts are worth equal marks overall, so only time will tell now. However, I do already know that spending ALL of my preparation time on the monologue was misguided. I got about 15 minutes to prepare (actually a little less), of which I would suggest to anyone else doing this exam that they spend 3-5 minutes on preparing for the dialogue. I had also prepared a small list of phrases specifically to help with the dialogue, eliciting feedback, etc. I hardly used any of these. It didn't help that I only compiled the list on the night before the exam, and with my limited time available, I didn't really practise them enough to make them flow out of me. I had also, obviously, never practised the dialogue section. I considered asking my Austrian friend at work to help me do that on the day before the exam, but as luck would have it she was off sick that day. All my own fault, of course, for leaving the specific spoken practice so late.
My honest final assessment is that I felt that, although I'm not guaranteed to pass, which is really where I wanted to be before the exam, I should at least come very close. It was definitely the right exam for me to take - B1 would have been too easy, and, although I think I could do OK on a C1 exam, OK in this context would most likely be a fail, especially in the spoken section. So, yeah, whatever the result, I now think of myself as being at B2 level. Still, it would be really, really nice if Goethe agreed. Then I could proudly write the name of my certificate on my resume!
PHEW! Sorry, that was a big post. If you made it this far, your reward is to know that I'll write a post sometime in the near future assessing my studies to this date - what went right, what went wrong, ideas for how to improve in the future, etc.
Danke fürs Lesen!
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
EXAM OVER!
Today was the Big Day - the day of my B2 exam. I haven't been posting for the last week because I've been using whatever time I can find to practice for the exam, which actually, to be honest, wasn't much. I turned my attention from practising the written section of the exam to just the spoken section. It sounds crazy to me now, but I avoided practising this type of question for a long time, because I couldn't imagine how to even do it, and probably also because I figured that since I had regular speaking practice already, that would be enough. When I finally turned my attention to this type of question, I recorded myself speaking and listened back to it.
I was shocked.
It sounded terrible! Pauses, bad sentence order, searching for words. The pauses were the main thing that got to me.
So starting last Saturday, I practised whenever I could. Actually my weekend was quite busy with work around the house, so it was hardly intensive, but it was certainly important. In the exam today, with a real person at the other end of the table nodding and interacting in their little ways, I felt a lot happier and was really glad that I had done that practice. I still wish I had started earlier, but I can't change that now! One of the main things was to fine tune what I did with the preparation time, which was to write down abbreviate rephrasings of the main text, along with short notes of possible things to talk about. This all worked out quite well for me - I didn't read off my notes, because there wasn't enough detail for that, but I had enough prepared to keep up a good flow without constantly searching for something semi-interesting to say (the topics are always so boring, really) at the same time as trying to remember the words.
The second part was the interactive dialogue which I did with one of the instructors because I was the only person sitting the B2 exam today. I think it went OK too - the instructor kept the conversation very directed. It's hard to tell what they really thought - I think I gave good input, but perhaps I should have tried to drive it more.
This oral exam was the part I was most worried about in the end, given my lack of specific preparation, so I hope I've passed. You need to pass this section (i.e., achieve 60%) on its own, as well as getting 60% in the other 3 sections combined, in order to pass. I could always have hoped for a higher grade, but in all honesty, I'll be perfectly satisfied with a pass!
I hope to find the time soon to describe the overall exam...
And when do I find out my results? By the end of next week, hopefully.
Macht's gut!
I was shocked.
It sounded terrible! Pauses, bad sentence order, searching for words. The pauses were the main thing that got to me.
So starting last Saturday, I practised whenever I could. Actually my weekend was quite busy with work around the house, so it was hardly intensive, but it was certainly important. In the exam today, with a real person at the other end of the table nodding and interacting in their little ways, I felt a lot happier and was really glad that I had done that practice. I still wish I had started earlier, but I can't change that now! One of the main things was to fine tune what I did with the preparation time, which was to write down abbreviate rephrasings of the main text, along with short notes of possible things to talk about. This all worked out quite well for me - I didn't read off my notes, because there wasn't enough detail for that, but I had enough prepared to keep up a good flow without constantly searching for something semi-interesting to say (the topics are always so boring, really) at the same time as trying to remember the words.
The second part was the interactive dialogue which I did with one of the instructors because I was the only person sitting the B2 exam today. I think it went OK too - the instructor kept the conversation very directed. It's hard to tell what they really thought - I think I gave good input, but perhaps I should have tried to drive it more.
This oral exam was the part I was most worried about in the end, given my lack of specific preparation, so I hope I've passed. You need to pass this section (i.e., achieve 60%) on its own, as well as getting 60% in the other 3 sections combined, in order to pass. I could always have hoped for a higher grade, but in all honesty, I'll be perfectly satisfied with a pass!
I hope to find the time soon to describe the overall exam...
And when do I find out my results? By the end of next week, hopefully.
Macht's gut!
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 written composition question: How long it takes me...
I've done three practice questions for the written composition question in the B2 exam. The way I've been practicing them is to write out the full thing as quickly as possible without worrying about how messy it is, and the making a "neat" copy. By that I mean a slightly neater copy. My handwriting has never been neat! Maybe I should have applied to get special consideration so I could type the answer up instead of writing it by hand. That would only take me about 20 minutes...
Anyway, written it must be. So how should I approach it? I'm actually thinking that perhaps I should just write it out as rough notes and then expand on it neatly just once, checking each sentence as I go. The purpose of the first phase would be to get down all the points I need to cover. This should give me more time to just write neatly and check over my work. However, this also means that I wouldn't know how many words I'm going to write in advance.
One thing I want to be sure of is that I stick to the 180 word limit (roughly - less than 200 would be good) because, as long as I've covered all the required points, then the more words I write the more time I have to spend copying it neatly, and the more I have to check. I won't get extra points for writing 250 words, but the marker will deduct marks for mistakes made within those extra 70 words. At least, that's what I suspect. I haven't done any Goethe Institute classes (in fact, I've only ever done about 8 classes in 2010 and about as many about 20 years ago) and, especially, I haven't done any exam preparation classes. I suppose they might have been useful...
Anyway, I thought I'd note down roughly how long each part has taken me for the 3 handwritten practice questions I've done recently, just to get a clear idea in my head of how long it should take in the real deal. Here they are, in the order I did them:
Modellsatz Thema 2: 218 words, approx 48 mins (in 2 chunks) for rough draft. No neat copy made!
Modellsatz Thema 1: 219 words, 45 mins for rough draft, 17 mins for neat copy. I chopped one or two sentences as I was copying it as I was running out of time.
Uebungspruefung 1 (no longer available on Goethe website): 239 words, approx 37 mins for draft copy, 29 mins for neat copy and proof-reading.
You may have noticed that that last one adds up to 66 minutes, but you only get 65. What happened was that I fnished up, felt very pleased with myself, started proofreading and generally faffing about. Then I thought "maybe I'll check to see if I've answered all the parts". And guess what - I hadn't copied a whole paragraph! I went into panic mode and copied it out as best I could, although it was messy :-(
It's not the end of the world - actually I usually finish the second part of the schriftlicher Ausdruck section with a bit of time to spare (even though I don't get 100% on it!), so I won't run out of time, but there's an important lesson to be learned here - be bloody careful!
All of the above are also longer than they need to be. I definitely don't want to do anything more than 220, and would, of course, rather show everything the examiners are looking for in < 200 words, and give myself some time to at least find the obvious errors!
If you've done the B2 or the C1 exam before, how about leaving your strategies for dealing with these questions in the comments!
[EDIT: I just noticed that on page 41 of this B2 exam description there is an example of the level of writing expected. After a quick read, I notice that it's much simpler in terms of vocabulary and structure than what I've been writing, which is good news. I think I can safely focus on trying to eliminate errors and making sure I don't try to write anything so clever that I outwit myself!]
Anyway, written it must be. So how should I approach it? I'm actually thinking that perhaps I should just write it out as rough notes and then expand on it neatly just once, checking each sentence as I go. The purpose of the first phase would be to get down all the points I need to cover. This should give me more time to just write neatly and check over my work. However, this also means that I wouldn't know how many words I'm going to write in advance.
One thing I want to be sure of is that I stick to the 180 word limit (roughly - less than 200 would be good) because, as long as I've covered all the required points, then the more words I write the more time I have to spend copying it neatly, and the more I have to check. I won't get extra points for writing 250 words, but the marker will deduct marks for mistakes made within those extra 70 words. At least, that's what I suspect. I haven't done any Goethe Institute classes (in fact, I've only ever done about 8 classes in 2010 and about as many about 20 years ago) and, especially, I haven't done any exam preparation classes. I suppose they might have been useful...
Anyway, I thought I'd note down roughly how long each part has taken me for the 3 handwritten practice questions I've done recently, just to get a clear idea in my head of how long it should take in the real deal. Here they are, in the order I did them:
Modellsatz Thema 2: 218 words, approx 48 mins (in 2 chunks) for rough draft. No neat copy made!
Modellsatz Thema 1: 219 words, 45 mins for rough draft, 17 mins for neat copy. I chopped one or two sentences as I was copying it as I was running out of time.
Uebungspruefung 1 (no longer available on Goethe website): 239 words, approx 37 mins for draft copy, 29 mins for neat copy and proof-reading.
You may have noticed that that last one adds up to 66 minutes, but you only get 65. What happened was that I fnished up, felt very pleased with myself, started proofreading and generally faffing about. Then I thought "maybe I'll check to see if I've answered all the parts". And guess what - I hadn't copied a whole paragraph! I went into panic mode and copied it out as best I could, although it was messy :-(
It's not the end of the world - actually I usually finish the second part of the schriftlicher Ausdruck section with a bit of time to spare (even though I don't get 100% on it!), so I won't run out of time, but there's an important lesson to be learned here - be bloody careful!
All of the above are also longer than they need to be. I definitely don't want to do anything more than 220, and would, of course, rather show everything the examiners are looking for in < 200 words, and give myself some time to at least find the obvious errors!
If you've done the B2 or the C1 exam before, how about leaving your strategies for dealing with these questions in the comments!
[EDIT: I just noticed that on page 41 of this B2 exam description there is an example of the level of writing expected. After a quick read, I notice that it's much simpler in terms of vocabulary and structure than what I've been writing, which is good news. I think I can safely focus on trying to eliminate errors and making sure I don't try to write anything so clever that I outwit myself!]
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
ONE WEEK TO GO!
One week to go today. In fact, in a week's time from now I'll probably be beating myself up about all the mistakes I made. Hopefully not!
I had a nightmare about the exam a couple of night's ago, which made me wonder why I'm doing it to myself. It took me TEN YEARS after I finished University before I stopped having nightmares about bloody exams - being late to them, not having a clue about how to answer the questions, etc. TEN LONG YEARS, and now I'm paying for the privilege of doing it again.
Sigh...
Anyway, what the hell, right? It'll be fun...
A couple of updates to report. Firstly, my Austrian friend has corrected my two written practice attempts. They weren't horribly bad. Mostly good. A couple of minor errors, some poorly chosen words, and each had one or two sentences which were a little hard to understand. Hopefully that puts them above 60%. My gut feeling is that it would, but I can't guarantee it of course. More practice will follow - I will rewrite these two compositions in order to get the corrections into my head better, and then I'll send them to my former German teacher (well, for 7 or 8 weeks at least) and ask for her opinion of whether I've actually hit the mark at all. She might have an idea of whether these would pass. After that I'll do a couple more at least of this question type.
The other update - since I've run out of B2 specific test material, I decided to do the C1 audio practice questions. I started with the modellsatz on the Goethe Institut's website. It actually didn't go too bad. As usual, on the first part of the audio exam I was too slow, and this time you needed to hear more detailed information and write it down, not just fill in a date, or a price, or whatever. Some of my problem was the detail required, but I actually felt like I heard all the answers, but I just can't retain them to write them down fast enough without missing out on some other part of the audio, and once I get behind I never feel like I can catch up. In the second section, listening to an interview and then answering questions, I did better. As usual I felt like a lot of the answers are too ambiguous. Even now, when I've read through the transcription, some of the answers seem wrong. Upon reflection, I think you need to be really careful that the answer you're choosing isn't supplying any extra details. If that's the case, a more generic answer is actually the correct one. Something for me to remember in the future.
Overall, I scored 14/25 for these two. 10.5 for the second part, and only 3.5 out of 10 for the first part. And that includes a half mark I gave myself because I felt that out of all the details that could have been supplied, I had answered the most important ones for the specific question. In fact, maybe that's just a 1 and not a half. Anyway, 14 out of 25 would be a fail, if extrapolated to the whole exam (though this may be my weakest section even in the B2 exam). I'm not totally unhappy with that - and I will try another C1 practice exam.
The other section I tried from this same C1 exam was in the Leseverstehen. A different type of fill-in-the-blanks exercise to the B2 one I'm used to - this one (Aufgabe 3) is multiple choice. Not too much to say about it except that I got 7 out of 10. Not bad.
Overall, I feel like I am between B2 and C1 right now in lots of areas. Perhaps not in speaking (I have no idea of the required level), but in other areas, probably. However, I won't be able to say that with any real authority until I get that piece of paper from the Goethe Institut saying that I am *at least* B2!
More work will be required...
What else? Still listening to podcasts, I've watched the German Biggest Loser (pretty funny!) and I met up with my German speaking friends at work this week, but not last week due to me having too many meetings on the only available day :-( I felt very awkward at the start this week, but I warmed up quite well. I think I needed a bit of warmup time, but something else that seemed to help was making sure I kept saying little words of agreement while the other person was speaking like "ja", "genau", "stimmt", "das stimmt", "natürlich", etc. I think this is important because otherwise I'm just sitting there silently listening a lot, sometimes getting lost, and then at the end I feel like I need to say something more than just a single word to show my agreement. I need to make sure I keep doing this in future conversations, including the exam.
And since I know a few people who read this will probably be doing a Goethe exam soon, let me end by sending out my best wishes to all of you and good luck for your final week/s of preparation!
I had a nightmare about the exam a couple of night's ago, which made me wonder why I'm doing it to myself. It took me TEN YEARS after I finished University before I stopped having nightmares about bloody exams - being late to them, not having a clue about how to answer the questions, etc. TEN LONG YEARS, and now I'm paying for the privilege of doing it again.
Sigh...
Anyway, what the hell, right? It'll be fun...
A couple of updates to report. Firstly, my Austrian friend has corrected my two written practice attempts. They weren't horribly bad. Mostly good. A couple of minor errors, some poorly chosen words, and each had one or two sentences which were a little hard to understand. Hopefully that puts them above 60%. My gut feeling is that it would, but I can't guarantee it of course. More practice will follow - I will rewrite these two compositions in order to get the corrections into my head better, and then I'll send them to my former German teacher (well, for 7 or 8 weeks at least) and ask for her opinion of whether I've actually hit the mark at all. She might have an idea of whether these would pass. After that I'll do a couple more at least of this question type.
The other update - since I've run out of B2 specific test material, I decided to do the C1 audio practice questions. I started with the modellsatz on the Goethe Institut's website. It actually didn't go too bad. As usual, on the first part of the audio exam I was too slow, and this time you needed to hear more detailed information and write it down, not just fill in a date, or a price, or whatever. Some of my problem was the detail required, but I actually felt like I heard all the answers, but I just can't retain them to write them down fast enough without missing out on some other part of the audio, and once I get behind I never feel like I can catch up. In the second section, listening to an interview and then answering questions, I did better. As usual I felt like a lot of the answers are too ambiguous. Even now, when I've read through the transcription, some of the answers seem wrong. Upon reflection, I think you need to be really careful that the answer you're choosing isn't supplying any extra details. If that's the case, a more generic answer is actually the correct one. Something for me to remember in the future.
Overall, I scored 14/25 for these two. 10.5 for the second part, and only 3.5 out of 10 for the first part. And that includes a half mark I gave myself because I felt that out of all the details that could have been supplied, I had answered the most important ones for the specific question. In fact, maybe that's just a 1 and not a half. Anyway, 14 out of 25 would be a fail, if extrapolated to the whole exam (though this may be my weakest section even in the B2 exam). I'm not totally unhappy with that - and I will try another C1 practice exam.
The other section I tried from this same C1 exam was in the Leseverstehen. A different type of fill-in-the-blanks exercise to the B2 one I'm used to - this one (Aufgabe 3) is multiple choice. Not too much to say about it except that I got 7 out of 10. Not bad.
Overall, I feel like I am between B2 and C1 right now in lots of areas. Perhaps not in speaking (I have no idea of the required level), but in other areas, probably. However, I won't be able to say that with any real authority until I get that piece of paper from the Goethe Institut saying that I am *at least* B2!
More work will be required...
What else? Still listening to podcasts, I've watched the German Biggest Loser (pretty funny!) and I met up with my German speaking friends at work this week, but not last week due to me having too many meetings on the only available day :-( I felt very awkward at the start this week, but I warmed up quite well. I think I needed a bit of warmup time, but something else that seemed to help was making sure I kept saying little words of agreement while the other person was speaking like "ja", "genau", "stimmt", "das stimmt", "natürlich", etc. I think this is important because otherwise I'm just sitting there silently listening a lot, sometimes getting lost, and then at the end I feel like I need to say something more than just a single word to show my agreement. I need to make sure I keep doing this in future conversations, including the exam.
And since I know a few people who read this will probably be doing a Goethe exam soon, let me end by sending out my best wishes to all of you and good luck for your final week/s of preparation!
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Written expression exam practice
Just a quick update. The last two nights I've managed to do a practice question from the written expression section of the Modellsatz currently available here. In terms of content, I think it's going fine. In terms of correctness, I think it's currently just passable. In terms of time, it's not going great :-) The first time I did this type of practice, I did it all on my computer and just made it. It actually never occurred to me that it would be a written exam, despite all information I had already read which stated that very clearly. Just a case of wishful thinking really.
So, I've been getting that familiar writing cramp I used to experience back in University exams. I can't say that I've missed it at all! The only good news is that I did indeed manage to finish my answer tonight within the 65 minutes allowed, including time to make a neat copy (that takes me 20 minutes!). Although I let the neatness of my "neat" copy slide drastically when I was running out of time :-)
I've sent both answers off to one of my German-speaking friends for some comments, but since they are on their honeymoon, I'm not expecting an answer any time soon! I might post my answers here at some stage in order to elicit some feedback from you readers out there, but I don't want to put it up as an example of how to do it well because, even once most of the mistakes have been corrected, I still will have no idea whether the examiners would like them and what marks they would assign.
This is one of those times when I would like to have done an exam preparation course, because then I would get some directly relevant feedback that I'm currently lacking. At this stage, I think I can only do my best, keep practicing, and get some small modicum of feedback once I get my results for the actual exam!
If anyone can point me to a link with examples of the B2 exam's written section (and the oral exam too would be great!!), please let me know in the comments.
So, I've been getting that familiar writing cramp I used to experience back in University exams. I can't say that I've missed it at all! The only good news is that I did indeed manage to finish my answer tonight within the 65 minutes allowed, including time to make a neat copy (that takes me 20 minutes!). Although I let the neatness of my "neat" copy slide drastically when I was running out of time :-)
I've sent both answers off to one of my German-speaking friends for some comments, but since they are on their honeymoon, I'm not expecting an answer any time soon! I might post my answers here at some stage in order to elicit some feedback from you readers out there, but I don't want to put it up as an example of how to do it well because, even once most of the mistakes have been corrected, I still will have no idea whether the examiners would like them and what marks they would assign.
This is one of those times when I would like to have done an exam preparation course, because then I would get some directly relevant feedback that I'm currently lacking. At this stage, I think I can only do my best, keep practicing, and get some small modicum of feedback once I get my results for the actual exam!
If anyone can point me to a link with examples of the B2 exam's written section (and the oral exam too would be great!!), please let me know in the comments.
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