My Dutch Proficiency Exam (1): Written Part

Today's exam was about writing skills, spelling, listening and reading comprehension. Ms Laurence Mettewie was in charge of it (even if she didn't taught us the course) and was helped by Ms Ann-Lien Lievens.

We started with the listening comprehension, a test that I feared. I had good reasons for being afraid: at the end of the first semester, our Dutch Proficiency teacher, Evie Tops, gave us the opportunity to take last year's listening comprehension exam. I got 6/8 for a Flemish fragment from Het journaal (Flemish news), but I only got 2/10 for an extract from the Dutch NOS-journaal. I had to pay extra attention to it. That is the reason why I had been watching Dutch programmes throughout the whole second semester. I admit that I wasn't so fond of the Dutch accent (even though I can spoof it), but I forced myself and then I think I got used to it.

But this time would be different. We had 2 Dutch and 1 Flemish fragments. What a kerfuffle! We listened to it three times, and it wasn't really difficult to understand the message, but as to the subtleties of that long train of speech… The Dutch speak too fast. And I don't say that because I live in a region where we usually speak slower (as is the case of South Limburg, I think), but because they really do! THEY SPEAK TOO FAST! And that is the reason why I didn't know which answer I had to choose in that evil MCQ… We were provided with options that were just as good as any other… All the words were said in the report… "Which one(s) must I pick?" I thought. It was painful for me, but I had to choose at random. I had one or two chances out of five to pick the good answer…

I just hope that this listening comprehension won't ruin my overal exam: if, for any of the parts of the exam, we had a mark lower than 8/20, we had that mark for the whole Proficiency exam. A big threat, I can assure you… Especially if you think that you did quite well the rest of the exam… I really hope I got 9/20 at least, so that I didn't mess up with that exam. I would be really upset.

Yeah, the rest of the exam was pretty easy:

– the vocabulary test (2000+ words to study, and we were asked on two dozens of them, two of which weren't even in our books!…)
– the reading comprehension wasn't that tough
– the spelling test was tricky but I think I have 85% of good answers
– finally, the writing exam was made up of two main questions — writing an email on basis of the response to that email (silly) and writing a short essay on superstitions.

It was 5.30 p.m. when I got out of the lecture room. I had a little chat with some friends, then I got back to my digs. I had stuff to study for tomorrow's oral exam.