The TORFL (Day 1)

So, the last big hurdle to get over this semester is the TORFL - the language proficiency test for foreigners. There are various levels, starting with Elementary level, then Basic, then First, Second, Third and Fourth. As the level you take increases, the difficulty goes up dramatically (or so I'm told). I'm taking the level 1 test, which indicates something like an intermediate level of language skill. There are three other students taking the level 1 test, with the others taking either the basic or elementary level test.

There are five parts to the test - reading (which entails reading various texts and answering questions about them), writing (which involves writing letters, both formal and informal), grammar (this is the most important one - if you fail it, then you fail the test), listening (in which you listen to various dialogues and the questions that follow), and conversation (self-explanatory - it's the one I'm most worried about).

Today we had the grammar, reading, and listening parts of the first level test.

I honestly didn't study much at all (as always). Though in this case, it's really difficult to study much at this level - once you've got a pretty good grasp of most grammar there's only so much studying and cramming will do for something like this, when you don't really know what to expect from the test itself. So I didn't study. If I'm going to pass this test, it'll be due to the work I've done up to this point, not because of studying some flashcards or something.

So the first part of the test was, of course, the grammar section. I was fairly confident in my ability to pass this part of the test, since we'd done several practice grammar tests and I handled those fairly easily. The test itself turned out to be somewhat harder than I expected (who the hell cares about participles anyway!?), but I still did pretty well. In fact, everyone passed the grammar section (actually, its interesting how low the standards for passing are for these tests.

On the subject of failing, beyond the requirement that each student pass the grammar section of the test, there are more failure rules for the other four parts. According to what we were told in our information session, if we fail one sections, it's ok. If we fail two, we like, sort of pass but have to retake those two sections to really complete it. If we fail three parts, we're done.

Next came the listening section, which I was also pretty worried about. The first part was some discourse about Tolstoy and his first works. Though I understood the questions (sort of) I didn't think I got like, any of the answers right. The next part was also pretty difficult, but I don't remember what it was about at the moment. Then we got to the dialogues, which were a piece of cake. Which is kind of ironic, I think. I can't participate for crap in actually dialogues with people, yet these dialogues are super easy (though I imagine it might be the same for everyone). Anyway, after about 30 minutes, that part was over (to the surprise of our tester ["только 24 вопросА? - only 24 questions?]).

Finally, we had the reading section, which I was confident in my ability to pass. I'm proud of my improvement when it comes to reading from the beginning of the semester to now. Last semester in Olga's class, I had trouble reading even relatively simple texts, and if I had to read out loud or read quickly, I was up a certain creek without a certain necessary item for movement. As I expected, that part wasn't too hard, though there were a few questions that had several very possible answers.

Afterwards, we were told that everyone passed the grammar test, J asked Natasha (one of the important administrators in the program) about the reading test and apparently found out that I did really well on the listening part, which was extremely surprising. After further investigation, I have learned that did not read the spreadsheet correctly, and I actually did just "ok" on the listening part.

In all, day one wasn't too bad. I have the writing and (gulp) conversation parts tomorrow, so hopefully all goes well there.