Just a quick post to let you know that rumours of my death have been greatly exagerated. I've had some downtime from new language learning of late and instead have used my time to work on a programming project in my spare time and also to read more of "Das Todeskreuz". I'm now up to page 347 and still really enjoying it, but also starting to get seriously worried about how it's going to end. The total number of pages is 516, so in about 170 odd pages the whole thing has to wrap up. I have to suspect therefore that the story's ending is going to be a little disappointing, but I hold out hope for something special :-) I've also managed to keep up with Anki for my new languages (Chinese and Latin), but not so much for German which requires a much bigger time commitment each day just because I've got a lot more words in the list.
I'll do an update on what's happening with my new languages sometime soon, but for today I'd just like to make sure I put links to the book I used to really bring my bulk of vocabulary up to an acceptable level for the B2 exam. The book is called Lesetraining B2 (link to the publisher's website) and is published in Germany by Hueber. You can also find it on here, which I've included as it might be a more stable link, and also a cheap place to buy it. The latter also seems to include the answer book which didn't come with my edition, but is absolutely VITAL, and can be found here:
http://www.hueber.de/shared/elka/Internet_Muster/Red1/978-3-19-011684-3_Muster_1.pdf
Of course, doing the practice tests available from the Goethe website, is vital:
http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/pba/bes/gb2/mat/enindex.htm
You can find examples of every test they offer there. There are also other B2 level exams from other providers and I used a few of those prior to my test to practice everything, including the speaking components which I had to self-assess, although the Goethe ones were my main ones because that was the exam I was intending to do and knowing the exam format and style of question is vital.
I added EVERY SINGLE WORD which I didn't know from Lesetraining B2 into an Anki list which has since been my one and only list I bother to study on a regular basis. I added words from all sources into it - newspaper reports, articles, etc, as well. It now has almost 3000 cards which is really 1500 double-side cards. However, since I put more than one word on each side of each card, this represents a lot more than 1500 words and phrases. Probably not far off 3000 actually. Using Anki properly was important to my success - I describe my own particular method in detail here.
For other tips, please also see my post-mortem of how I prepared for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2, as well as an earlier article I wrote with more advice specifically for improving listening skills, which helps you ensure you can hear the words you already know :-)
Post your own tips in the comments below!
