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One week to prepare for C-Test | ||
Tags: Placement Test | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4089 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 1 of 4 18 June 2015 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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I have one week to prepare for a German proficiency C-Test (OnDaF). This is an exam in which a text is given with several words missing their second halves; you have to infer the words from context and complete them, declining for gender, case, tense, person etc. I haven't been studying for long and I'm not too confident that I can achieve the B1 level I need – I can read okay (Tintenherz goes more or less fluidly with a pop-up dictionary, Harry Potter gives me trouble here and there but I can follow), but haven't had any active practice. So I'd like to cram, and I was wondering if you guys have any advice. The obvious thing to do would be reading a lot and revising grammar, but I'm also wondering about specific techniques: for instance, is there any advantage to L-R over plain parallel texts in this context? Would Scriptorium be a good idea for me, or would the time be better spent with flashcards? If anyone has done this kind of test before, I'd also be glad to hear about it.
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| rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3298 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish | Message 2 of 4 18 June 2015 at 4:07am | IP Logged |
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One week, wow. Forget extensive reading, you don't have time. If the test is as you have described it in the post above (wtih a heavy focus
on grammar), then I would: - Do as many grammar exercises as possible, make sure your declensions and conjugations are rock solid. - Find practice exams if available and do them all. Determine where your weaknesses are, and then focus intensively on those. - (Optional) smash some vocabulary lists as quick as you can (plenty available online), find any gaps you may have and make lists / flashcards (whichever you prefer, whatever is quicker for you). - If you need to practice your spoken German, then find a few language partners ASAP and get talking, an hour a day at least. Good luck with the exam. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6483 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 4 18 June 2015 at 7:15am | IP Logged |
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Write out the tables you need to memorize on paper - not for immediate cramming, but to clear up doubts immediately instead of having to look things up. Doubts shouldn't be allowed to linger - especially not if you have so little time. Or use photocopies or screen dumps from the internet to speed up the production of those reference sheets.
You can also make your own cloze drill sheets by making two copies of some text and then removing the word endings - but only after you have read each word with its ending first and asked yourself why it looks that way. And when you have removed the endings then reintroduce them, using the other copy as your key sheet. If you want to cram vocabulary then go for 'language islands', i.e. for subjects where you know all the most relevant words (on top of the central vocabulary common to all subjects). And then think/write/speak about that subject to get some last-moment active training. If you know enough relevant words for just one subject then you won't get stuck, and then you will have the opportunity to focus on the grammar in your utterances. If you get stuck because of vocabulary lacunes then you will think about vocabulary instead of grammar. PS (important): ... and don't spend the whole week reading language forums. You don't have time for that. Edited by Iversen on 18 June 2015 at 3:05pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4089 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 4 of 4 28 June 2015 at 4:44pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the good advice, guys. In case anyone from the future comes looking for ideas on how to study for C-Tests, here's a tool that also helped me immensely: http://l.georges.free.fr/tools/ctest.htm What I did was feed an unread article into it and try to solve it, then read the original both for meaning and to compare it with my mistakes. Then I took the test again, and once more in the following day. This didn't help me with vocabulary, but it strengthened my declension enough that I could do correct inferences even for words I didn't know.
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