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!