Good times! I've done the first test from test 14, and there are only 15 in the book. I've been doing them all in 40-60 minutes, and usually 20-22 out of 25. Generally I got 15 out of 15 in the first few questions (with exceptions in those stupid "positiv or negativ+skeptisch" type questions) and generally lose points in the fill in the blanks exercises. When I first started with easier exercises I thought I would just never be able to do them, and now I consistently get about 7, which I'm quite pleased about. I plan on trying to come up with a few tips for this type of question. I'll go back through and sort them out, but one I've noticed (which I keep missing myself) is that there's often one blank that's for a "sich". There's are easy to find because they'll occur early in a sentence or a relative clause, and may have an adverb next to them (which should hint that you don't want to try to think of another adverb!). Something to look out for...
I've also continued reading "Der Beobachter" and just got up to page 190. Another old lady just got whacked in a horrible way, and the main female character just cheated on her husband, for no real apparent reason. I'm not really enjoying the story about the main female character's family, to be honest, but I'm getting a feeling that she is somehow linked to the murderer. At the moment, they are completely disconnected from the murders, so it's a bit weird.
I've also been reading, very occasionally and in very short bursts, "Das Parfüm" at work sometimes. I'm only up to page 32, and I haven't been adding its vocabulary. Given that it's only 250 pages long, I probably wouldn't have been better off to just read it in the first place to give me that boost of having at least one full German-lanaguage novel under my belt. Der Beobachter is 650 pages long! But really, it's pretty easy reading. Lots of conversations, not complicated, a fair bit of day-to-day vocab, so it's a good choice really, and my progress has been OK.
Hopefully by my next update I'll be finished Leseverstehen B2 and can figure out what "study" type material I should focus on next. I'll probably start to focus on doing C1 level listening tests because that's an area where I would really like to bring up my comfort. I mean, I listen to a lot of German audio podcasts, and understand most of it in broad terms, and some of it perfectly, but I still think I have some work to do here to feel fully comfortable all the time. However, I think I'm close to being ready for the listening section of the B2 exam, which is why I've been thinking I'll do it sometime soon, and set a more distant goal of doing the C2 exam in another year or so perhaps.
More updates on this later...
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