Lesson 62 (Beginner 4A Lesson 5): Beginner 4 Test

This was harder than I thought it would be. I'm also very certain this will be the test I do the most poorly on so far.

I'm not looking forward to next week.

Honestly I wasn't happy with myself after the test. Before the test, I finally went through some of the homework for these chapters. Seeing the dumb mistakes I made right before the test probably did affect my confidence too. (My fault for not checking the homework earlier, I'll admit that.)

I was anxious in the days leading up to the test. Part of that was because I had less time to prepare. 2 weeks' notice isn't enough for me, but recall I wasn't expecting this test. For Test 2, I realised 2 weeks wasn't enough, and for Test 3 I had started preparing in advance. (For Test 1, which was long ago and in-person, the teacher—still the other teacher at the time—told us more than a month in advance I think.)

In terms of the format, it's been similar to the past tests. The test paper was sent via email this time instead of KakaoTalk. The teacher sent the instructions to the chat the day before the test, since the new students wouldn't know.

My printer decided to act up and it took me longer than usual to print. I almost joined the class late. In fact, I might have been the last one.

Listening

Listening was scary. There were something like 5 questions thereabout that I was unsure of, because I couldn't catch exactly what was being said and hence couldn't decipher what was going on. I'm not sure where I can find more comprehensible input to practice on, but listening more would be a start.

Oral

I wasn't the first person to do the oral test this time, unlike the last 2 times. I noticed the teacher started with the newest student, then the second newest student. Then it was probably 1 or 2 more students before it was my turn. My turn was about 50 mins after the start of the lesson.

This oral test was easier than the last oral test. The sentences were easier to read. The teacher had told us last week that we should prepare the describing people part for the oral test and it was exactly that, there were 2 people we had to describe from the image. The same image.

Then the third part consisted of 4 English words. You have to make sentences in Korean to say whether you could do the activity or not. Meaning you needed to have the vocab to know what the thing was, and the appropriate Korean verb for it. (There were some sports involved.) The 4 things... well, I could do all of them, but the first one was something that I could sort of do, or used to do, so I thought really hard as well. On the last one I also started second-guessing myself because it felt too easy, everything was just (으)ㄹ 수 있어요... If there was something I could not do at least I could use the 못 construct... which is used more in spoken language than (으)ㄹ 수없어요.

Finally, the last part, was also similar to something we did in class. You had to talk about what you would do if you had a lot of money. Unfortunately, I overthought this and thought it was the same as the activity in class where after you said you would do X if you had money, then you had to say what else you would do if you had X, etc. So I was hesitating because the last time the questioning went on for 3 more times after the first, but I only managed 2 with my original answer.

I thought really hard, and I was also conflicted because I suddenly had another thought about what I could do with a lot of money, of something else to buy. In the end I went with my original answer. Then the teacher asked me to say something else that isn't something to be bought. That also threw me off, and I took more time to think about some activity. I eventually settled on saying that I would travel.

Reading

My head hurt from reading 4 chunks of text. I also felt that I was reading too slowly. It's a lot of text to answer 1-2 questions below. I'm definitely not used to reading so much text in a paragraph.

I've been avoiding finding material to read, since, well, it's not been a very big problem when in the beginner class but... well, it's time to realise that I'm heading to intermediate, it's been a year, so I need to realise that I have to take this more seriously. My Korean is no longer at the beginner level, not really.

I don't know of any simple Korean books or material to read apart from some that I've seen before on HowToStudyKorean.com

Writing

The writing has 2 parts. The first part had some questions where you had to reorder the sentence based on the words and another section for joining 2 sentences with the right connectors. For some reason, I really struggled with the reordering question. And it's not even that hard, or it shouldn't be, because it's not as though any conjugation is required. The words are given exactly as they should be.

Then the second part is the essay. The essay topic, like before, was not that unpredictable as it was something that we'd actually written about before. Unfortunately, it was the one topic that required vocab that I did not really memorise and hence could not use: Name of attractions and places in my country, but in Korean. Well, that's been fixed, I've put in the words I used in my original essay into Anki. Definitely my writing speed can be improved, as usually I take far too long to do my writing assignments. For the test this time, I noted I had 15 minutes thereabout to write. And I think a lot of the time was wasted because I was slow to read.

Additionally, the amount of words we are required to write seem to have increased from last time. There were 2 pages of squares to write on too.

We were given until 20 minutes after the lesson to submit the paper. It's more generous than the last round I think? It was until 15 minutes the last time.