I did a thing!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Preparation
3. Results
4. Writing
5. Speaking
6. Grammar and Vocab
7. Reading
8. Listening
9. Looking Forward

Introduction

Longtime readers of the blog will know that one of my stated goals for 2023 is to pass the ТРКИ 3 exam (Test of Russian as a Foreign Language - C1). To that end, I decided that I wanted to just go ahead and try my hand at it and see what sort of results I could achieve. Как говорится, почему бы и нет?

For those who aren't familiar with this exam or level, it is defined on wikipedia as:

• The Third Level Certificate (TORFL-III / C1) — Successful performance at the Third Level Certificate indicates that the candidate has a high level of language command in all communicative contexts, which allows them to conduct professional activity in Russian in areas such as Linguistics, Translation, Editing, Journalism, International Relations and Management.

One of the nice things to come out of the pandemic is the availability of taking this exam online. I found this great website which worked out perfectly. In early February, I emailed back and forth with Yulia and set a date of March 25, 2023. So I had roughly two months to prepare for the exam. The exam costs 70 euros, which is some similar amount of dollars.

The exam also takes place over a period of 7 hours. I started at 9am my time and finished at 4pm. As you can probably imagine, I was quite tired at the end of this marathon.

Preparation

With a firm deadline set, I sat down to come up with a plan. I knew that my three biggest weak points were (and are!):

• Speaking
• Writing
• Grammar

For speaking, I mostly just talked through the different exercises with an italki tutor and worked on intonation with my usual teacher. I knew that going from "doing literally nothing outside of chatting on discord" to "leading a business conversation" was going to be a stretch in two months, so I just tried to get familiar with what was going to be asked of me.

For writing, I wrote an essay or two per week (aka not nearly enough) and had my local teacher in Cambridge give me helpful corrections. Still made some awfully stupid mistakes on the exam, but we'll get into that later.

If you want to read through an example exam, here is a link.

For grammar I did effectively nothing. :)

Results

I won't make you wait until the end of the post to see how I did. About two weeks after taking the exam I heard back and here are my results:

1. Writing - 55% (this is, for some reason, considered passing)
2. Speaking - 60%
3. Grammar and Vocabulary - 54%
4. Reading - 84%
5. Listening - 68%

As far as I know, in order to pass, you need at least 66% on every section (with one allowed to be >=60% if all others are >=66%). So I did not pass this time (as expected) but got quite close. However, I've been told that my 55% on Writing is considered passing (I'm not sure why, maybe this percentage is incorrect), so the only section I outright failed is Grammar.

There is a feature where, if you only fail one section, you can retake that section on its own and, if you get >66%, then you pass the whole exam. So my current situation is basically that I just need to retake the grammar section and get 12 more questions correct. Seems quite doable.

Overall quite chuffed.

Writing

This section consists of 3 essays and they are essentially testing your ability to correctly write in different styles (e.g. a professional letter, a message to a friend, summary of an ad, etc.). In the example exam linked above these were:

1. Read an article discussing the political situation in the US. Summarize the information for a friend citing sources, relaying facts, and expressing your own opinions and conclusions.
2. Read an ad for a new graduate program. Summarize the information for someone interested in the program using commonly accepted shortenings (as in "for example" -> "e.g.").
3. Write an essay about the ecological situation in the world. What is the problem, the objective and subjective causes, the paths to solving it, the degree to which people are aware of it, and your personal involvement in solving the problem.

During my exam, these were of course different, but the general framework was the same. Surprisingly, I thought that the 2nd one was the hardest. For starters, I am just not very familiar with commonly accepted shortenings in Russian. But the real difficulty of the exercise is the fact that they severely limit the number of words you're allowed to use. The whole point of the exercise is to see how cleanly you can reduce and summarize a longer article (i.e. can you pull out all of the most important points). This is hard.

For the third essay, I accidentally wrote about, quite literally, the wrong problem. That is an easy fix and something that I'll be able to get some free points on in the future (i.e. actually following instructions). Don't ask me why I wrote about something else, I don't have a good answer. Дальше!

The first essay was fairly straightforward. Other than a few random grammar mistakes, I felt that this one was likely my strongest. The topic was far more benign than the political climate of the US, so my "personal involvement" was also much more muted. Still was an interesting article to read.

Overall, feeling totally fine on writing. Once I clean up some already known issues, I'll be able to pass this section without issue. I did make some horrendously silly and (somewhat) uncharacteristic mistakes on the exam (for example writing вы сделают instead of сделаете, having commas in the wrong place, wrong gender of nouns, etc.) But those are more exceptions to the rule than anything else, and I'm sure with more practice I'll iron them out.

Speaking

For the speaking section, there were quite a few different tasks that I had to prepare for. The section contains 15 questions, each of which tests different communicative abilities. These exercises include:

1. You and two friends just got done doing something (e.g. seeing a new play). They express the same opinion in different words and you have to express it again but also with different words (другими неоднокоренными словами).
2. You are talking with a friend who just made a decision they regret. They express several grievances and after each one you need to convince them that it's ok (e.g. just bought an apartment that they think is too far away).
3. Intonation tests! Given a sentence, can you read it out using natural native-like intonation to express a given emotion (e.g. anger, surprise, clarification, etc.)
4. A speech on some moral issue. Watch a short clip and give a short speech judging the characters and their actions. Express some conclusion.
5. Business discussion. Given some scenario (e.g. an employee of yours messed something up and you need to have a discussion with them about it), have a discussion with the involved parties, find out what happened, make a decision, and let them know what to do going forward.
6. Free flow discussion on some topic of your choice (e.g. social media, pollution, etc.). I guess the point of this is to see if you can actively participate in a conversation that any reasonably educated native would participate in.

I was quite nervous about 1 and 2, as you are given very limited time to come up with something novel that sounds natural and is, of course, grammatically correct. However, after taking the exam, I felt that these were actually my best sections, so that was a pleasant surprise.

3 went ok, but I didn't fully understand one of the sentences, so expressing the correct emotion became a bit of an issue for that one.

4 was terrible. I assume that I got next to no points for this one. My thoughts were scattered, I didn't express a clear conclusion, I completely lost the слитность of my words (i.e. a lot of unnatural stopping and lots of "ummm"s) and my thoughts just didn't flow. Can make a lot of progress on this one, to put it lightly.

5 actually went shockingly well, despite the fact that I have never actually conducted any business in Russian. The crux of this exercise is that the employee you're talking with tells you what actually happened, and you have to make a game-time decision based on the information you discover. Not easy, but I somehow pulled it off (I think?).

6 was awful. I somehow didn't know that this was part of the exam going in, and this is probably the one that is most easy to prepare for ahead of time. I chose social media and I have no idea why. I don't know many words in this domain and it's just generally something I don't engage with much. I just thought it would be an interesting discussion. Note to self: don't choose topics in the moment based on how interesting they might be. A little prep here would go a long way.

Overall, not bad at all. I walked away from this section thinking that it was possible that I had gotten 0 points. I really wanted to find out how strict they were with grammar and self-corrections, and it seems that the answer is not too strict.

Grammar and Vocab

Боже мой this section is tough. Because I don't really study grammar or the nuances of different words, questions in this section just prove to be far outside of my comfort zone. The beauty of this section lies in the fact that (almost) any adult native could ace it with ease, but those studying the language need to devote lots of time to mastering it.

Here are some examples of questions in English that are quite similar to what you might find on the Russian exam:

These are great at showcasing the types of questions that can be trivial for natives while being quite difficult for learners. For example, the answer to the question "the experiment ______ testing..." could also be "consisted" IF the next word were "of". However, because there is no "of", we know it can't be "consisted". Using these grammatical clues is key to solving these questions, and my intuitive feel for grammar is just not yet good enough to be able to feel out the right answer.

Despite all of that, I still got more than half the questions correct, so I'm well on my way to passing. I'm going to be devoting some (15-20 minutes) a day to true focused grammar study, and outside of that focusing on honing the language model in my head (i.e. the ability to feel out the right answer instead of memorizing rules).

The other big aspect of this section that they are trying to test is your ability to correctly pick up on the сочетаемость слов (basically like which words naturally/usually go together). So the above example of "I ______ remember putting..." is easy for natives because we only say "clearly" before "remember". This is just an example of common usage that takes time to pick up.

Overall, feel fine about the section, but it's definitely the biggest unknown for the moment.

Reading

There isn't much to say for this one. The exercises are thus:

1. Read some long form article and then answer questions about whether certain opinions align with the author's point of view.
2. Read an interview, except all of the questions that were asked of the interviewee have been removed. You need to choose which questions would elicit the given responses from the interviewee. Sounds easy, but it's surprisingly not.
3. Read three paragraphs and decide which one talks about a specific idea. In the example test, this was "in which they are talking about measures to guarantee access to information". Obviously, all 3 paragraphs are related to access to information, so this is quite a tricky question.
4. Read some excerpt from Russian literature and answer questions about it. In the example test, there was an excerpt from Alexander Pushkin (for those who aren't familiar with him, he was an early 19th century poet who more or less invented the modern literary form of Russian, often compared to Shakespeare for English).

This was my highest scoring section and it makes sense why. It's all just a pure test of understanding, which is my strongest ability in Russian. Exercise 3 is a pain in the ass though.

Listening

Also not a whole lot to say about this one, but it was interesting at least. I didn't prepare for this section whatsoever, and didn't even know what sorts of things I'd face. All of the audio was taken from real media that Russian native speakers watch/listen to. The exercises were:

1. Listen to an excerpt from a radio show and answer questions
2. Watch a short clip from a Russian or Soviet movie and answer questions about it
3. Watch a short clip of someone giving a speech of some sort and answer questions about it
4. Watch an interview and answer questions about it

When I took the exam, the audio for the first exercise did not play at all, so I had to completely guess on these questions (so 25% of the possible points flew out the window). Otherwise, I felt fairly comfortable with this section. The hardest one for me was probably the speech. It was a scientist talking about modern methods of raising children and the questions were quite sneaky in their attempts to deceive you. Had to be very precise in your understanding with what was and what was not expressed by the speaker.

The interview section also had some sneaky questions, but I think I did fine with it. I definitely did not 100% understand any of the clips I listened to though, so always room for improvement here.

Looking Forward

Overall I'm super happy with these results. Given that I'm within striking distance of all of the targets and it's only April, I feel quite bullish on my chances to pass the exam this year. I'll likely try once again sometime in July or August to see how much I've improved by them.

My biggest worry is definitely the grammar section as it is certainly the one that will require the most intentional studying, which is something I'm not a fan of. However, I've set a goal, so there is no turning back. Только вперёд!

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!