Passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam: a post-mortem

Hallo Leute!

Sorry for the long, long delay in posting this. It's been a busy year with family health issues and becoming a father for the second time!

A brief update on what I've been doing with regards to German: I have continued with my weekly German chats, kept up (somewhat infrequently) with my German-speaking pen-pals and have continued to read German books and listen to podcasts on a wide variety of topics. What I haven't done, pretty much since passing my exam, is any concentrated German study. I'll discuss my plans for next year in a post soon! I read "Das Parfüm" which is a great book. My understanding was lower than with "Der Beobachter" because the vocabulary is just much larger and I wanted to enjoy it without stopping to look up words. I did add some words along the way to my Anki list, but I tried not to worry too much about it. I understood the story more than 99% of the time, so my enjoyment was undiminished by whatever words I couldn't figure out on my own. The second book which I just started recently is called "Das Todeskreuz." I picked it up while I was on holidays at a bookswap. I'm finding it to be very well written and easy to read. It's also set in my former hometown (well, for six months at least!) of Frankfurt which is a nice bonus. It's nice to be able to pick up a book by a native author and just to be able enjoy without having to strain!

Anyway, since I achieved my goal in April last year of passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I want to reflect back on what I needed to do to get here, partially for my own benefit in planning for the future, but mainly to hopefully give other people heading towards a similar goal some useful pointers.

Let me start by looking back at the planning I did way back at the start. I wrote the following plan on the 21st of November, 2010:


***
German Learning Plan - 21/11/2010
Goal: To reach B2 and pass either Goethe B2 or ZDfB
Resources:
- Assimil Deutsch Ohne Mühe(German with Ease)
- http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html
- Goethe Institut
Rough Plan:
- Complete Assimil in 5 months (1 month review, 4 months to complete and review all lessons in Phase 2)
- Watch all Jojo episodes and follow them without subtitles
- Listen to the news on DW once or twice a week. This includes translating the text in Google Translator Toolkit to build up news specific vocabulary. Use the original and translations to know what is being said. Use the original + audio (both tempos) to get used to hearing German and understanding it - Assimil style.
- Use the exam preparation material supplied by the Goethe Institut. This will give an idea of what is required to pass the exams.
- Keep up with German penpals. Make new ones.
- Find opportunities to speak with Germans. Don’t worry about mistakes or not knowing much. Use the opportunities. In person might be best.
- Perhaps use the Goethe Fernunterricht courses. This is the beginner’s course.
- Listen to German songs, watch German movies.
***

How did I do on this list? I would say I did most of it in general. I definitely did NOT complete the Assimil course in 5 months! I didn't even end up doing all of the active phase (where you go back to the start and redo the lessons, this time trying to translate from English into German). Basically, I just found the active phase took too much time for me to do at the same time as doing more active lessons for the time I had available. And maybe I didn't feel the same level of benefit as from the passive phase (which, if you insist on shadowing all the speakers in every dialogue until you do each one without tripping up anywhere is actually quite far from passive :-) ).

I listened to German podcasts most days, starting mainly with the news (for which I did my own translations with the help of Google Translate initially and put them into a side-by-side parallel translation format) which helped enormously in improving my listening speed and my confidence. I eventually branched out into a bunch of different types of podcasts. There is a really wide variety of excellent podcasts in German. In fact, listening to them made me wonder why no australian radio is able to get close to the consistently high quality, wide ranging reporting that I found so easily in German radio (for example, dradio and SWR2, just to name two).

I did listen to German songs and watch movies without subtitles. This is a kind of passive confidence building exercise that I don't think had many direct benefits in terms of progress, but still, it's important to enjoy the fruits of your labours sometime! During 2012 I watched Das Parfüm, Das Boot, Der Untergang (aka Downfall with that famous scene!) and Nirgendwo in Afrika to name a few. I most definitely did not end up watching the whole "Jojo sucht das Glück" series. Basically, because it was awful :-) I still want to be able to understand more of the dialogue - that Mark guy, especially. He's a real mumbler! But I figured that if I can understand more of the dialogue from high-quality feature films, why struggle with bad acting, boring scripts, muffled sound and scruffy mumblers!

The Most Important Resources

By far and away the most important things I did were:

(a) Assimil's German with Ease, for sure. If you're a beginner, start with Assimil. I can't really comment on the usefulness of the advanced courses because I didn't get very far through my own for reasons I mention above, but the ones that claim to get you up to B2 (which I think they almost do in terms of fundamentals, but you'll need to do other work to pass the exam) are brilliant to get started. Check out the reviews on Amazon though because I've heard that some of the courses are not so good. Oh, and get used to minor typos. "New German With Ease" was full of them, but they didn't cause me any trouble.
(b) I made my own Anki list (as well as using one other big list). I added every single word I didn't recognise in "Lesetraining B2" to it and also many others that I found just reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, etc. IMPORTANT: You should know enough of the grammar to be able to look up the word and write down its basic form plus enough other information to cover most of the basic irregularities which can occur. Don't bother doing this for regular forms, of course, and don't put in every irregular form because that might be a lot! And, perhaps even more important: Include the "argument structure". What do I mean by this? See the example below.
(c) meeting up with native speakers. I managed to organise a regular weekly meeting at my work of just half an hour, and I also made a pair of awesome Austrian friends through the Couchsurfing website. I just got really lucky there because they both thought it was cool that someone in Australia would be bothering to learn German!
(d) I did as much exam prep material as I could squeeze in time for. When I was a long way out from the exam I did some B1 level material and then had a go at B2 level which showed up my weaknesses for the exam format. This lead me to buy "Lesetraining B2" which I've mentioned in many previous posts, and I did this whole book before the exam. Doing this work also really improved my B2 level vocab.

(d) only applies if you're actually doing the exam - although I think that the reading practice with comprehension exercises from "Lesetraining B2" really helped a lot just with my general reading because I added a lot of words into my Anki list at this stage. Also, it's nice to read books, but sometimes it's important to test your comprehension to really focus your mind on getting a clear understanding of what the text is saying. This helped push me past that phase of fuzzy, general understanding to having a really precise understanding of much more of what I read.

For conversation practice, Skype would be fine, but I never used it for language exchange in German. I will use it in the future to keep in touch with my good friends from Austria who've headed home now.

Argument Structure

Here are some examples of what I mean by "argument structure" for Anki cards.

"an einer Veranstaltung teilnehmen, bei/in ... mitmachen, sich an ... beteiligen"
=
"to take part in an event, to participate"

"aus folgendem Grund"
=
"for the following reason"

"im Büro"
=
"at the office"

"sich die Nase putzen"
=
"to blow one's nose"

"auf etwas warten"
=
"to wait for something"

As you can see, the idea is mainly for verbs, but it doesn't only apply to them. When I tried to learn languages when I was younger I would try to memorise all the prepositions and what they "mean" in English, and then try to apply what I had memorised following the rules in English. For anything other than the really basic examples that your beginners' textbook will give you, this will fail most of the time. This is one major reason why I don't believe it's useful to download wordlists like "the most frequent 2000 words" to start with in learning a language because the most common words are this little words that carry a lot of functions and don't have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. Even the really basic words like "der, die, das" = "the", because there will be times when English uses them where German doesn't and vice-versa. It's nice to know basically what they mean, but you will see them so often that there's no real point in making a special effort to memorise them. Just look at the phrase above for "to blow one's nose" and you'll see what I'm talking about. The other reason against "high frequency" word lists is that many of even the top 100 words will be very low on actual "content", like all these little grammatical words. The words I want to study are the ones which carry the actual content and meaning of the phrase. I'm not sure how many people out there are going to be familiar with Information Theory, but one of the results of it as applied to natural languages is that often the less frequent words carry the most actual information in a sentence.

You might know this feeling when you're learning a language. You understand all the little grammatical words, and the forms of the verbs and all that in a sentence, but sometimes there is just one word that is the real key to understanding. Yes, sometimes you can figure the meaning (if only vaguely) from the rest of the context, so it's important not to get too hung up on it, but sometimes you will just have no real idea. Words. You can't get away from learning words. Real content words are the best of all. It's great knowing that the word "die" means "the", and that "er" means "he", and that "zurück" means back, but it doesn't help much with a sentence you'll hear all the time on the news like "Er wies die Vorwürfe zurück". "He somethings the something back" would be your translation after learning the more frequent 500 words or whatever (I'm just guessing), but it's not particularly helpful in figuring out that it actually means "He rejected the accusations". My point is not that the most frequent words aren't useful, just that you will encounter them so often that one quick initial search should cover you for these permanently. The lower frequency content words are the ones that you need to add to your Anki list.

Some Mistakes

* Not speaking early enough: http://yetanotherlanguage.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/enemy-at-home-exhibition-in-museum-of.html
* Not starting with Anki early enough.
* Trying to pick up too many pre-made Anki decks.
* Trying to put every Assimil lesson into Anki (I seriously started doing this at one stage!)
* Not having good enough french to understand the more advanced nuances being expressed in "Perfectionnement Allemand".
* Spending too much time seeking out more beginner level audio when I wasn't understanding every word perfectly. Understanding takes a LOT of practice, so it's best to seek out interesting content because you will have to listen to it a lot!
* Not spending enough time with my parallel translations. After putting the effort into producing these I should have then been listening to them and reading them until I knew them cold. Each time I did actually do this I felt my understanding jump a little step up, so I really should have found the time to focus on this more.

The Big Question: How the hell do you have time?

I have a full time family, with my first daughter being born just before I started studying German in ernest in Australia. I have a full time job. And I mean a normal, proper, full time job. I don't make a living out of a self-help blog. I drive 1.5-2 hours every day to a specific location and give my whole day to an employer in exchange for a fixed income. You know, a normal, everyday, full time job. I also like to keep reasonably fit which means regular exercise with the odd bout of training for an event. I hope to make this even more frequent in the future, while still learning languages.

You might think that I had an incredibly supportive wife or something. No, we're not the Kennedys here, just a normal family. My wife expects me to do housework and look after the kids when I get home from work and on the weekends, to do house repairs and gardening on the weekends, and then spend time talking to her and watching TV with her in the evenings. Any other time on the weekends that's not taken up by family commitments (and there are plenty of these) is usually filled with an activity just of our own family. In other words, a normal, busy, everyday family. I didn't get special time off to study. In fact, on the weekend before my exam I did some big jobs in the garden which left me exhausted and with little time to study even though I really wanted to. The only "time off" I got was when I took annual leave to do the actual exam itself! And the night before the exam was almost a total write-off!

So, when does it all happen? Well, it does vary a lot, but the short answer is "whenever I can". When I go to the toilet in the morning (regular as clockwork ;-) ) my current reading material comes with me. When I drive to work I'm listening to an Assimil lesson (and shadow it) or podcasts in German (interesting material works much better than learner material, though this is only realistic after some initial study of course). And almost all of my exam preparation was done during my lunch breaks! I would just print out the exam material and the answers and go find a quiet spot to practice. For a long time my direct exam preparation was to go through the book Lesetraining B2 which I can certainly recommend as it was a great source for appropriate vocabulary and also as a way to practice the format of the reading section of the exam which started out feeling very, very weak and ended up as an area I had every confidence in. I also did some preparation at nights once the exam got closer, but not very often for the reasons listed above.

I met people to chat with at my work (it's a very multicultural place) and we still meet up once per week for our "Stammtisch". I made friends with an Austrian couple on a working holiday in Australia for a year and met up with them irregularly - mostly once a week on Thursday for probably only a total of about 15 times, though those 15 times were often more than 2 hours, and extremely helpful and fun!

Things I tried that didn't really work out

There were a few things that I spent some time on which may have been useful from some other aspects, but which weren't necessary to pass the exam, or which just probably aren't very useful:

* Gathering lots of different sources of learning material, especially beginner and intermediate podcasts. This was all just a distraction and a waste of time. Assimil was my "beginner to intermediate" springboard material. Everything else needed to just be proper podcasts on topics that I enjoyed. That was by far the best way to progress past the late beginner to early intermediate stage.
* Just listening endlessly to German radio at work. The problem is that I couldn't really focus on the content while working in English (programming). I wasn't absorbing anything, I was just ignoring it. Understanding spoken German still requires concentration and it's actually very easy for me to completely zone out while listening to it and effectively hear nothing. This was especially true early on when even the noise of the traffic while driving in summer would mean that I couldn't really follow much of what was going on in my podcasts. This has improved somewhat, but I still need a relatively lower noise environment to understand German as compared to English. Trying to listen to German audio a lot also caused some tension at home which was unnecessary considering it probably didn't provide much benefit.

There's so much more I could write about my experiences so far, but rather than look back any more I'll focus on the future and where I can go from here. I've already started on my plans for this year which I'll discuss in my next post, along with plans for how to reach my goals.

Got plans for the new year? Tell us all in the comments!