4 weeks in Russia: Victory – in two parts

Well, obviously, after all that stress, anxiety and cardiac shock,  I had to pass -and I did. But before that, the night before in fact, I had a lovely, relaxed evening with several  ITMO English language teaching  colleagues at the home of John Kuti

We met up at the metro station at Victory Park (Московский парк Победы), a park I highly recommend for a pleasant walk with history lessons thrown in.

It is Lent – Great Lent or the Great Fast here in Russia and so (as a complete contrast from the wonderful but very rich food I experienced last weekend (blog post at your own peril) we had ‘vegan snacks’ which turned out to be marinated tofu, a kind of chickpea/pea puréé and fresh vegetables to add to Lavash bread (kind of like tortillas), mushrooms, fresh fruit and oh – lovely ginger tea. You don’t have to be religious to follow he Great Fast and I think there is certainly merit, health-wise, in restricting yourself periodically.

Conversation flowed freely, mostly about my favourite subject – languages (and a bit of Moodle!) Alexandra had brought her 6 year old son and I experienced that entertaining phenomenon when you meet a young child, native speaker of the language you struggle so hard to master – and they speak it with no effort at all 🙂

We did a circular tour back to the metro to take in Park Aviatorov (aviators’ park) where there is an imposing fighter plane mounted on a concrete base.

I , however, was in no fighting mood when I arrived with the son at the University on Friday morning to get my results. I was as nervous as before the exams themselves. I hoped and expected I would pass – it’s just you can never be certain until you see the actual grades on the paper. So here they are!

  • Writing = 92%
  • Speaking  = 91%
  • Vocab  and Grammar = 87% (Mock horror from daughter: What went wrong? Disaster!)
  • Reading = 90%
  • Listenig = 93%

In just under a year since I did the A2 exam I have got the B1. And yes I am stopping here. No more exams. No, really  – no more exams…

One comment

  1. Thanks for coming and Well done!
    An experienced teacher can quite quickly recognise where someone is on the long climb up the proficiency scales.. so I imagine you would have had a good sense of what your own progress was like.

    The characteristics of each level are quite hard to formalise into standard tests though. I was looking for criteria for how the grading of ТРКИ is done. The most likely thing I’ve found so far is this (pdf doc) http://сертификат-русский-язык.рф/doc/B1_trebovaniyat.pdf

    It includes the information, for example, that in the part where you wrote a text you had to produce at least 20 sentences and in the monologue speaking part – at least 20 phrases. More helpful is the comment at the start that it represents the level that would require 440 – 460 hours of study to reach in total.

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