Deutsch B1 mündliche Prüfung completed.

Waoo, i thought the speaking test would be soooooo much more harder. Now in hind sight i am glad the invigilators refused to honour my request to switch my partner to frau MONtan. As the super nervous / fidgety mother of 5kids (OMG) made me look like super man. I was cool as ice. She went on a random wild goose chase when she could have just answered the question she was asked and correctly. The invigilators had to stop her talking and digging her self deeper in the hole without actually answering the question.

section one
what is my name, where do i live etc questions were just a walk in the park. Geeez. i could answer or ask those question in my sleep. thank you König Jakob!! every day for almost two months we practiced those questions before we even started the daily lessons. The slim not so very nice invigilator (BAD COP), then asked me a question about my work. OMG i didn't understand her. i swear she mumbled the verb as i asked her to repeat it twice. My newly commissioned sweat pores dam suddenly developed a major fault. a massive flood broke through the gates as i battled to answer her without straying too far from the question asked. I brought it under control shortly after. Kool as ice!! yeah right.

section two.
i had to describe a photo of a one child family with their dog all sitting in the park. This section seem to go through much smoothly as i even cracked a joke with the larger nicer invigilator (GOOD COP). she laughed. Phew!!!

section three.
For this section myself and my co-student are supposed to speak with each other. we were supposed to discuss arranging a cooking outing with 4 other of our student mates. I started the conversation by offering to host the party at my place and that Saturday sounds like a good day to have the cooking party. so i asked her if that was okay with her. I expected her to say yeah, that is fine and move on the conversation. OOOOMMMMMMGGGGGG!!!!! she must have either thought she'd get some extra points from the invigilators or maybe totally forgot it was all fiction and i wasn't really inviting her to my place to cook or maybe she is really just bunkers. Anyway, she disagreed with me by saying she had to take one of baby girls to some….. i switched off at this point. WTF are you talking about woman?!!??? then she went on about something else which i didn't quite get. wanting to bring us back to earth, i jumped in by offering the week after my first offer. phew she took it and we moved on. How glad was i when the invigilators called a time-out.

Went back to waiting room 30 where the other guys were waiting. Elated and very relieved it was all over. Shared the question we were asked with the guys as we were the first. I was very pleased with my performance. König Jacob can take some serious pride in knowing he trained me very well. Whilst we all discussed our questions, Mrs sweet colombiana nibbled on my tattooed shoulder whilst also stroking it. I'm guessing she was so nervous she needed her man close to her to calm her down. I was the closest thing around to resemble what some deem as a man. ha ha.

hot birds

we arranged a group outing for yesterday, sunday. Out of a possible 15ish that could have come out for the dinner/drinks only only 4 of us from the school plus one (Frau Montez's husband). Such an embarrassingly disappointing turn out. So bad myself and NATmon had sweep stakes as to who would come out. ha. Nevertheless, i had so much fun with the group and i also had the perfect vantage seat to check out all the hot birds that flew past me. And there were a ton of them. First time meeting Mr montez, he is a really kool dood. I liked him instantly. i have to admit i expected him to be a knob head before today. Don't ask me why, i really do not know why. ha. Goes to show it is so much better to meet someone in person than make prejudgement based on what someone has written.

excellent deutsch practice outing for me. In preparation for my spoken test later today monday. fingers crossed all goes well....

operation Deutsch B1 prüfung success

Ha haaa. I changed the system operating language on my laptop to run in deutsch. guess i am getting more confident with my abilities.

 ...but i so didn't feel confident before my B1 prüfungs/exam on friday the 13th. which also pisstakenly started at 1300hrs. A week before i kept thinking about my friends birthday which was also on the 13th and how badly i would perform on the day. Seriously i am not superstitious, but the friday the thirteenth trepidations weighed on me like a large lorry carrying two hundred dead bodied to the morgue with only lawn mower engine under its bonnet. I carried my note books every where i went and every second i had spare on the train i pulled it out and read. i still felt i wasn't doing enough. How does one successfully revise for a Deutsch exam?? The fact that König Jakob had trained us over and over and over again, using several past mock papers was a very welcomed nervous alleviator. So i kept telling myself; i should be ready. I believed the voices 60% of the times. hence i didn't open my book even once, one day prior to the exam. What i did was to listen and read more random books newspapers and watched deutsch programs on youtube. Hitler stories were quite informative.

The orientierungs course Prüfung felt a tad less mentally challenging than this one. Maybe cos we had a definitive set of questions to learn. This time it was different. i went through my artikel table to refresh my memory with the loosely fixed artikels in my head. I am still yet to develop a system/mnemonic for the conjuctions; annoying!!

Stayed calm on the exam day. no stress on this guy, unlike Metall who called me 30mins before the start of the exam asking what time the exam started. I was totally shocked but she made it there on time. Exam room was on the fifth floor of the school. nice vantage point. i chilled out almost hypnotised by the height, looking down through the large windows onto the life proceeding. I could even recognised people on the ground.  photo from my mobile is below. looking at Nollendorfplatz Uban station.

One could tell that Stephan our exam invigilator had handled these exams before. too many times that he could do it in his sleep. He walked into the class just before 1300hrs to be met by just 4 students out of a possible 16. he knew something was wrong after checking the list and saw there was room for confusion as to the location of the exam. He went to the other school building where he found the rest of the students waiting in the wrong room.

After a 20min long nursery school style, step by step clarification on how to write our names on the exam paper. amazingly some people still managed to get it wrong.

The exam began okay, then during the listening part someone decided ask a question. Thank goodness Stephan appreciated the disturbance hence replayed the CD question. next annoying person was my nachbar/neighbour to my right. She grabbed my eraser but thought it was okay not to return it immediately. Then when she started running out of time on reading section of the test, could not seat still and became increasingly annoying by also vocalising her emotions. Unlucky for me, on monday i officially have to do my speaking test with her. OMG!!! give me strength to get through it without stuffing a rotten chicken in her mouth.

the listening sections 1, 2, 3 and 4 were actually pretty easy. Luckily.
i started to sweat after i saw the reading section. OMG!!! i knew i was in serious trouble when it took me 5 mins to read the first question and could not find the answer that went with it. 8mins passed and still no question in the reading section answered. so i left it; did the other questions in the reading section 2, 3, 4 and 5. then came back to the advertising section that made me lose brain cells. The writing section was okay ISH too. i kept it very short and sweet.

All in all, i was 70% pleased with my performance. fingers crossed that is reflected in the results too which we wont receive for another 7 weeks or more. GSUS!!! that is way too long.

try out sample tests here if you are so brave.

mock test over / bring on the real deal.

ALL FINISHED!!!. i am currently at  71.6% pass rate. wooo hooo. i actually did every question. now i can only hope the questions i got right comes out. Hence making my life easier. 

If i have to be really honest. I think the test is designed in such a way as not to put too much emphasis on being tricky. I guess they must have taken into account that the people they are asking these questions, most times don't actually understand Deutsch. Hence the options in the answers are sometimes deliberately stupid/obvious if you understand what you are reading.

/ total 98 A coloured slash means the question is just too easy and even a 2year old baby would be able to get it right. 

+ total 71 The plus sign means i got the answer wrong and have to attempt it again. I never mark the answers on the questions and/or give any hint so that it still feels sort of fresh when i next return to the question. 

|  total 81 the vertical line means i got the question right possibly after reading the questions and answers several times and/or also using the dictionary.

jewish franky excursion

annoyingly i lost my first draft of this post. hence why it is late. more write up to come....