But we'll still be meeting up with our Austrian friends, and some of their friends, who are a mixed group of German and English speakers, so the opportunity will not be wasted!
Today has been a good day. I finally listened to and repeated Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 4 enough to call it finished and then I ended up with enough time to do all of lesson 5 in one half hour session. I haven't had the chance to do that for so long! I can't even remember the last time I managed to finish a whole lesson in a day given a morning and an evening commute, and time over breakfast (which I used to have before my daughter was born :-) ). So, quite a buzz.
I've also been keeping up with my Anki reviews each day, which are very easy to slip in between other things. Learning lists of words has its problems, but because it fits in so well with other tasks in the day, in tiny little 20-30 seconds chunks sometimes, then it's a great way to use time that otherwise would not really be usable at all.
Since this "aspirational goal" thing worked so well last time, I'm going to do the same again. I'll aim to finish Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 6 by tomorrow night, and hopefully get all the words that bothered me from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 into my Anki list. With other family events and going out today, that's probably good enough, but I'll squeeze in the "aspirational" goal of doing Aufgabe 4 as well. Why the hell not!
Now, off to speak some German :-)
Since my last post, I've also managed to do another lesson from Lesetraining B2 and I got the correct answers, although, again, I didn't go somewhere quiet to do it, and I was quite tired so it took more time than it has to if I'm going to pass the Goethe B2 exam! I really feel that the book is helping me to prepare for the "bookish" parts of the test, because I am learning the style of questions they will ask. It sometimes seems quite artificial to me - but that's because this time in learning a language, I've taken a different path. I did have formal courses, but I think I knew everything that the classes covered already because my workplace in Germany (who were, after all, paying for the course!) insisted that I do the beginner's class. People who have taken formal classes all the way up to B2 level will have had a lot more practice at the kinds of fill-in-the-blanks exercises that tend to make up a big part of formal exams.
The example from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 was that there was a given question, and you had to state whether the young people who had written about "leaving childhood" saw it as positive, negative or mixed. The first part was a simple multiple choice between these three options. Then there were two columns labelled "+" and "-" in which you had to write the key phrases that they said that were positive or negative. I misunderstood and thought the people who had a bet both ways should be left out, although in hindsight it's obvious that I needed to split up their statements to find one positive and one negative. Still, in an exam situation, I probably would have stuffed that up, so it's definitely worth practicing, for both the vocabulary and exactly this sort of question-style issue.
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