Ah, exams. A wonderful time of year anticipated by every student. Studying marathons! Lack of sleep! Diets consisting primarily of pasta and frozen dinners! The gorgeous scenery of your own 8×10 dorm room for days on end! What’s not to love?
Exams in Germany will last about a month for me, with 1-2 exams/presentations per week and 3 papers due at the end. As a result, I haven’t traveled. This blog hasn’t been updated. And I don’t really have anything interesting to say except personal progress, which I finally decided was worth an update.
Yesterday I took the B2 Prüfung. It’s a German language test designed to see how good your language skills are, and B2 is a pretty high level–one step higher than is required for German citizenship, if that’s any indication. The exam was required by St. Edward’s as part of receiving credit for a German language course I’m taking here (long story). Although I knew it would be difficult, I thought chances were, if I worked hard enough, I could at least pass it.
I don’t think I did. And I was devastated at first.
Although I’d done countless practice tests and paid special attention to my problem areas (grammar especially), I was unprepared for the extreme nervousness that I experienced during the test. Test anxiety is a real thing and I had a bad case of it. In addition, I had the bad luck of getting a reading comprehension article about back pain, its causes, and different causes like scoliosis and osteoporosis that I probably wouldn’t have understood in English, let alone in German. Medical terminology is not my forte.
But mostly, I don’t think I was ready for the B2 test. Maybe I passed it, maybe I didn’t. The thing is, my German language skills have not been developed to be functional in an exam situation like that. I’ve learned what I know not formally, but through immersion. I’ve only been speaking German for about a year and a half now anyway, and because 100% of that has been me being thrown into situations technically beyond my skill level, I’ve progressed incredibly fast. It was necessary. And as a result, I am much better in real-life situations (conversations, asking for directions, understanding signs and newspaper articles, etc) than in the classroom.
And that’s incredible. All that, in less than two years. Yes, my grammar isn’t very good, although it is improving. But to think that two years go, the only German words I knew were “ja” “nein” and “danke,” that’s a lot of progress.
Plus, wouldn’t you want to be able to function in real life situations rather than in the classroom? I’d much rather have a discussion with someone about travel, festivals, politics, or philosophy than to be able to remember the correct adjective endings.
So pass or fail, I’ve realized that it doesn’t really matter. Like any test, it would be great if I passed. But what matters is that I’ve lived for 6 months now in Germany. I attend 3 classes in German. I’ve made German friends who don’t speak English at all. I’ve traveled all over Germany, many times alone, and never had a situation where I wasn’t able to communicate clearly. I’ve given a presentation in German which my professor really liked, and I’ve got another next week.
I’m so proud of myself for what I’ve accomplished outside of that test. And in the end, that’s the most important part. There really are two kinds of language tests: the ones on paper, and the ones in everyday life. I’ve discovered that one is simply more important to me than the other.