Lesson 85 (Intermediate 2 Lesson 12): Intermediate 2 Test

Test week, so this will just be my ramblings about my thoughts about the test. Made stupid mistakes again, but I do not think I will do too badly. But we shall know for sure next week.

Listening

I think one student came in after the first question, so the teacher replayed it. Then from then on, each question was played twice before moving on to the next question.

This was different from before, where we would hear everything once through and then the second time would be another round through all the questions again.

I think I don’t mind this, but it was a bit of having hope crushed immediately if you missed something since the second chance expires almost immediately.

The first two questions were image questions, where you had to choose the correct image out of 4. However, when I initially saw the paper, I had thought it was 4 questions, and you had to pick out of 2 options. It has to do with the layout of the page, since the separation between questions is not much more when the options belong to the same question or not. (I guess it is somewhat of an occupational hazard that I am commenting on this now.)

So initially for the first question, I had selected the wrong option, as I picked the second, but the actual answer is the third, which is on the second row. I only noticed when we went to the second question, and I was looking at the second row of pictures, when I should have been looking at the third and fourth.

For the second question, in the first round, I wrote down some key word I heard. In the second, I wrote down something else. I thought it meant product (상품), but after I looked at what I had written, they were 소포 and then 포장 from the two rounds, so I changed my answer.

The next section had the usual 4 questions and answers, and you had to pick the correct answer. There was one I wasn't sure, but I ended up guessing.

There was also the section where there is a conversation going on, and then you had to pick the topic they were talking about. That had two questions.

Then, there was a section where there is a conversation, and you pick the right option. However, the first set actually had two questions and they were from two different conversations. Initially, I got confused as I thought the second question had to be answered as well.

Lastly, there were indeed two more conversations where there were two questions asked about each conversation. The teacher did mention for these that the questions had to be answered together.

Vocabulary & Grammar

I found this very easy, and it did not take long. Or at least, it felt that way.

Reading

I also found this relatively easy. Reading long passages don’t cause my brain to hurt. And I was also okay with kind of skimming and reading fast (because I wanted more time for writing) instead of reading every. single. word. as I did last time.

Oral

I think I was maybe the 4th person to do the oral. By the time it was time to do the oral, I was pretty much at the Writing section.

The oral was pretty easy honestly, in terms of how it was actually possible to prepare for with what we have. Plus, there was no conversation part, which really helped.

There were 3 main sections.

The first was, as usual, reading the sentences out loud. In fact, they made it easy in that the ones where you actually had to watch out for the pronunciation? The words were underlined.

The first one had a date, which was August 15. 15 is 십오, but I was so focused on the 5, that I actually said 오십 (50). The teacher kind of gave me a look and asked me to read it again.

I realised that was a very… German thing to do. In German the ones and tens are backwards. 15 is “fünfzehn”, and 5 is “fünf” and 10 is “zehn”. In the numbers bigger than 20, there is an “and” between them, but the logic remains.

The second one was actually the activity from Chapter 6, p. 144. The one where you had to use V-(으)ㄴ 것 같다 to say what you think happened in the aftermath of the party. You had to say 3 things.

The first thing I said was that they ate cake, then I said they danced, and then I decided for some strange reason, in a bid to cancel the dance thing, to say that they listened to music, because the only thing they had there was a music player (stereo system?) with the CD tray open.

So, “to listen” is 듣다, which irregularly conjugates. But I was thinking in my mind of 놀다 for some strange reason. So in my mind, 논 appeared, and so I said 든 or maybe even 돈, when it should be 들은. This is hilarious if not so sad.

My takeaway from this is that I need to add the conjugation cards to review them in Anki as a sanity check. The old style conjugation cards I had were bad because they required me to think of the endings and after a while it becomes very detached from what I had to do and I hated them whenever they came up for review. Thus, I decided not to create new ones for the new grammar anymore.

At the time, I thought the solution was to have Cloze cards, but those serve a different purpose (and I did not add enough of them, anyway). So I should have the conjugation cards, but I state what I want it to be conjugated to in Korean (instead of trying to do some translation). So the cards should be easy, and ideally, that means that the SRS algo does what it is supposed to and then I also do not see them too often.

The third activity was actually sort of within my calculations. I predicted there would be something that is about directions, and I was right. I had also sort of prepared for driving directions, but this one was exactly the activity we did before, on p.168, which is for walking.

The starting point is the subway station, and then I had to navigate to 대한은행, and then after that, the second place I was told to navigate to was 서울빌딩.

For some reason, I had a brain freeze after the first one. I struggled to say the very first sentence which was to get out of the station at Exit 1. Now that I reflect, I think I said 1번 출구로 when that made no sense, and my brain was tripping on that, because I think I was wondering if it should be 에서, since you are coming out of the station. 😓 But wait, the assumption is you are inside, so I guess you head towards the exit and so it is correct to use 로? 🥴

I think part of that was also that I was not sure if I missed any instructions, specifically, that the starting point had changed.

Writing

Again, in two parts. The first was to write the answers to some questions. There was also a selection of grammar that you had to use in your answers.

The grammar actually made it easy, because I realised that there was exactly the same number of grammars and number of questions. I had some trouble with two, but that soon became one and then none. For the last one I changed it a bit, but it works.

For the essay itself, well. I only checked the essay topic after I got to writing, so it was after my oral.

The topic was the one for the writing assignment in Chapter 8, which was the homework for two lessons before. However, because I was busy, I ended up only finishing the homework the night before the test and submitted it then. It was also to my surprise that the teacher marked it and returned it to me shortly (~2 hours) before the lesson the next day. And even more fortunately, I opened up the file to check my mistakes.

I did not memorise what I had written so there were some key differences, but I still had a pretty good grasp of what I had written there. (In fact, I did review the past essays from the other chapters too, since I suspected the topic will come from there, so I did have a good idea of those as well.)

I did make some mistakes, like forgetting the word for deadline (미감일). I wrote it as 감미일 in my draft, but then I thought, hmm, probably wrong, and even noted to flip it around. But then I stared at it a bit more, then thought 감미일 was right, and wrote it as 감미일 in the actual essay.

There was also some extra conditions, such as having to use some grammar (notably N(으)ㄹ때 and A/V-아/어 버리다) and emotion words. I sort of had some trouble with A/V-아/어 버리다. I think I did write 잊어버리다 (which was also in the homework essay I had submitted) but I thought it was kind of cheating, so I ended up adding one at the end of the essay, which I think might be the wrong use of it.

Homework

• None, this is text week

Stats

• Students: 5 out of 5