Well, I finally took the plunge. With no build up in the blog, no readers will be expecting this. And to be honest, I wasn't really expecting it myself. My prep just wasn't what it had been for the B2 - that single-minded, single-language focus that I had for most of the 1-1.5(?) years of preparation to saw me pass with a high score. In fact, it would be hard to describe what I did as "preparation" at all. Since doing the B2 exam in April 2012 I have not really focussed hard on German at any stage in between. The many years since then have been filled with family, work, app development in my "spare" time, keeping fit, getting injured and studying other languages.
I did focus on German occasionally. A few years ago I decided that I wanted to be able to properly understand German comedies. The fast pace of the dialogue, usually with plenty of slang and strange situations, has always challenged me. In order to be able to enjoy these and not just mostly understand them, I had to really bring my level up. My strategy involved using Anki + Subs2SRS to learn, scene by scene, the 2017 movie "Lommbock" (the sequel to the 2001 film "Lammbock"). It seems like a strange thing to do with a comedy, but it was really worthwhile. After learning to hear the dialogue at full pace and, if necessary, what it meant (the translations were hidden on the cards), I then sat through the film again and really enjoyed it, including feeling like I could hear the words and know what was being said, not just remembering the cards. The exception to this is the young teenager character in the movie. That guy really mumbled his lines. I still find it difficult to match up his dialogue with what actually comes out of his mouth.
Last year I had in mind to prepare for the C2 exam, so I read a book off the literature reading list for 2021 and one for 2022. I really enjoyed the book I picked for 2021 ("Der Alte König in seinem Exil") but the one for 2022 ("Weitlings Sommerfrische"), well, not so much. The C2 exam lists 2 books you can read, and then there are 4 options to choose from in the main (80%) writing section, 2 of them basically variations of letters to the editor, and 2 of them variations of reviews of each of the books. The advantage of picking the literature section is that you could memorise a thoroughly corrected essay or two and then try to make it fit the exam questions as best you can. I found the book so boring that I didn't even want to re-read it so I didn't go down this path and chose to focus on one of the other two options in the exam.
Apart from reading those books (and some others), my prep last year consisted of very little. I took advice from Ashwin Purohit who achieved a very high level in German. He passed the C2 exam, but after having heard him on the Easy German channel on YouTube, I'm guessing he aced it. He speaks German beautifully, and very fluently and naturally. And from his own descriptions, he did a LOT of preparation for the exam. I took on some of his advice and expanded my list of podcasts and YouTube channels, as well as occasionally reading the newspaper, though I fell off this bandwagon pretty early on and only got back on very irregularly. I tried his advice with regards to grammar and started reading and doing the exercises in "C-Grammatik: Übungsgrammatik Deutsch als Fremdsprache". However, I found this extremely slow and also that I wasn't really absorbing all the little details. I really only seemed to have a little bit of time late in the night for it and already felt pretty tired.
I guess the main "prep" I've done really is lots of podcast listening (my understanding is pretty much 100% on these), watched more German YouTube videos and also series on Netflix. For the Netflix series, I do usually watch with German subtitles. I don't think they're totally necessary, but to get to 100% understanding I still need them in some scenes. Since my prep wasn't really what I had wanted it to be, I continually delayed signing up to the exam. I've had a few minor personal misfortunes this year - mid year I broke my kneecap which entailed a very slow recovery, then I broke my little toe which slowed down some of my rehab, followed by getting a coughing illness that went through my whole household, but held onto me for about 2 months (ongoing, actually). I missed the earleir exams and then 1 day before the deadline to sign up for the last exam, I decided to just go for it anyway, despite my lack of prep. That was 15 days before the exam! I started to prepare using the book Mit Erfolg zum Goethe Zertifikat C2. I started with the reading section and really had to practice better technique, using highlighters to be able to re-find the important information, in order to get under the target time in the test. What I didn't try was the whole section at once with a single time limit.
A few days in though I was still coughing after 4 weeks or so, so my doctor sent me for an x-ray. I took the films home and looked them myself and saw a big white patch on my left lung. After having lost my mother to lung cancer, you can imagine that I wasn't feeling too confident. My doctor sent me for a CT scan the next day for a clearer image. At this stage I basically stopped studying and was just too worried about these results to continue studying. My medical scare turned out alright in the end, though the cough continued, but it took a toll on my study and enthusiasm.
When I got back to studying, I did the listening section from a practice paper. I smashed it with 87% and so decided not to spend any more time on this section as I clearly had a bigger problem - the writing section! I rarely write in German, and when I do I'm slow and only write relatively short pieces. I don't speak much either, but I feel more confident there and decided that if I could work on my composition it should help with the speaking section for me as well. The target number of words for the composition in the written section is 350 words in an hour. I wrote my first attempt and ran out of time at less than 280 words! I was in deep trouble. Also, I had no real way of telling how good it was, so I practiced another topic, this time writing 340 or so words in the hour, and then sent it off to two of my German speaking friends for correction. This was but a few days before the exam! Luckily, they responded very quickly and I realised that I was in even deeper trouble than I thought. The C2 level is no doddle, and I had neither extensive practice in the language, having spoken almost exclusively English for the 6 months that I lived in Germany at the start of 2010 (12 whole years ago!!), nor extensive coaching (practically none) nor had I done extensive practice. Yeah, it was going to be a struggle. Still, with the feedback I got, as well as finding some Goethe approved examples of good C2 level answers for the writing section, I was able to synthesise a few notes for myself. Since the questions tended to be fairly similar, I was able to compose a whole introductory paragraph, except for minor details, before the exam itself. I took these notes with me and crammed them right before the exam itself.
I got to the test centre (the lovely Goethe-Institut building in Woolahra, Sydney) nice and early and felt fairly relaxed. Unlike my B2 experience, post-covid everyone is kept outside and must get called in. Indeed, the Goethe-Institut is now locked and opened only by appointment it seems. Also unlike my B2 experience, during which the receptionist spoke to everyone in English but I insisted on using only German, the lovely people at the institute all pretty much spoke to me only in German right from the start. On that day they only had C-level exams - two people taking the C1 and two taking the C2 - so it makes sense that they would assume we can speak German well enough to get registered and understand the instructions!
I won't go into great detail about what happened on the day, partially because I can't remember it all that well :-) We kicked off with the reading section of the exam. I felt this was going OK, but my eyes were playing up (sometimes I struggle to focus - probably time for reading glasses, but it's not consistent so I haven't pursued it) and reading was slower than normal. My sleep the previous few nights had been poor as well, which contributes to my eye issues. Still, I was reading OK. The big issue was that while I did one section faster than the required time, I did two slower and had only 5 minutes to do the final 10 minute section. I think this one is harder than 10 minutes personally, and I ended up essentially just guessing these as I ran out of time. With my last 10 seconds I saw a word in one of the ads that made me change my answer and so, apart from random chance, that single answer out of the last 10 points is the only one I was (pretty) sure I got right! I really needed to practice this reading section in one chunk, but finding a whole hour to do anything uninterrupted in my life is generally pretty impossible and when it is possible, that means doing it late at night usually.
After a short break we did the listening section. There were many technical difficulties playing this from a CD via the big screen at the front of the room. The media player kept wanting to play the tracks in random order and our poor examiner didn't know how to fix that. I tried to suggest where to look, but I don't think I could interview. At this stage I found my eyes were really struggling to focus and reading the questions felt very, very slow. I very often hadn't fully read the questions and possible answers in the short gaps (usually something like 30 seconds) and so was flying blind. I was understanding the audio fine, but trying to read the questions and listen to the audio proved impossible. When I looked back at my answers at the sections yes/no questions or the "Person X/Person Y/Both agree with the statement" questions, they all had a very obvious skew. I knew then that something had probably gone pretty horribly wrong, but what could I do about it now?
Next on to the writing section. It has a 20-point section that asks implicit grammatical and vocabulary questions. I usually scored pretty poorly at this in practice - about 8-12 out of 20 - so I just raced through and did as well as I could and tried to get some extra time for the main task (80 points) of writing a "letter to the editor" style composition. I think in the end I wrote about 430 words but I used up all the time on the writing and didn't do any editing. And, unlike most other people, I write so slowly (when I'm trying to be neat, especially) that I had zero chance of writing a draft and then a neat copy. I didn't even really have much time to scribble some initial ideas! Instead, I had to rely on being able to put together a reasonably cogent argument on the fly. I also used those crammed notes I mentioned earlier to get some good "canned" phrases for free. Considering how I had been dreading this part of the exam, I left it feeling better than expected and felt I had a chance of a low pass. The big mistake I made was that I wrote way more than needed but didn't leave myself any time for corrections. It looks like I should have left at least 10 minutes for corrections which could have made a significant difference to the result.
After lunch we did the speaking section. I felt like it went pretty well, but I completely overshot the time on my 5 minute presentation. Under stress, I couldn't comprehend what my watch was telling me and thought there must be something wrong with it. They basically cut me off about 7.5+ minutes and said it had certainly been an extensive presentation. Some of the marks are for the structure of this speech though, and since I had only got halfway(!!!) through my points, I definitely would have to lost marks there. I didn't feel like I really showed my vocabulary on the day so I knew that would count against me. After all, this is the C2 exam. They're going to expect the best!
So, enough of the exam, what results did I get? Well, about 2 weeks after the exam I was emailed let me know my results were available. Each module is out of 100 and the pass mark is 60:
Lesen: 64/100
Hören: 39/100
Schreiben: 58/100
Sprechen: 63/100
Unlike the B2 exam, for which I was reasonably well prepared, this one was always going to be a close run thing. I wasn't particularly surprised about any of my results after how things went on the day EXCEPT the listening section. I knew it hadn't gone as well as my one single practice session when I got 87%, but I certainly wasn't ready for the complete catastrophe that it ended up being. Actually, in a way I was surprised by my writing result. Considering how it had gone in practice, and how little practice I had had, to get within 2 points of passing that section was quite surprising too. I think with more refined exam technique I should have had the time to do a little editing and cleaned up enough mistakes to pass.
The good news is that I did just scrape by in 2 of the sections. The way the C2 is structured is basically as 4 separate modules, so I can now go and get certificates for the 2 modules I passed and I can re-sit just the parts I failed next year (the first opportunity is in March) and if I pass them both then, then I can receive the C2 certificate (if the exam centre can combine the results for me). This result isn't at all unexpected, so I'm glad to know that I only need to redo 2 sections. Of course, I was hoping to only need to redo one section at most, but with a bit of practice and focus on the listening section I'm not too worried about that. And with a few months to focus on the writing section, considering I got so close this time, I can hope to pass it. Sure, I would like to have had awesome prep so I'm not just trying to scrape through, but given my current circumstances in life, I'll take a pass at C2 if I can get it!
I might write some more soon about preparing to retake those two sections, and perhaps even mention some of the other language related stuff I've been doing in recent years that has taken my focus away from German.
Till next time!
