With a Sin in Half

Table of Contents

1. Monthly Stats
2. Highlights
3. Anki
4. Listening and Reading
5. The C1 Exam
6. Overall and Next Month

First, as always, before I get into the meat of the update, here are my Anki and Toggl stats.

My Anki

My Toggl

Highlights

I finally achieved my goal of passing the C1 exam in 2023. More on that later.

Anki

Terrible month for anki but I couldn't care less. I won't miss a day in December, so nbd.

Listening and Reading

I listened to 1 audiobook this month:

1. Объявлено убийство by Agatha Christie

I also read about half of:

1. Дневной Дозор

Not much to share here. The Christie book was good. Дневной Дозор is the second book in the Night Watch series (Ночной Дозор) and is already better than the first, in my opinion. Part 1 at least was fantastic.

The C1 Exam

Lots to write about in this section. In my last blog post, I wrote "Being realistic, I'll write once or twice more before the exam and then just see what happens." Turns out, that was completely unrealistic! I wrote in Russian every single day between writing that prophetic line and my exam, so that was a win on its own.

But what about the exam? It was scheduled for Nov 9, and on Nov 8 I was slated to receive the instructions and timing of everything. I opened the email with the schedule and to my surprise and, in some sense, my chagrin, I saw this:

Which says "Level: C1 - retake of Writing and Speaking." Now I had thought that I had passed the speaking exam, but in true Russian bureaucracy fashion, they put a bunch of sticks in my wheels (aka seemingly intentionally tried to hinder my achieving of this goal). When I asked why I had to retake the speaking exam as well, I was told "it's just better to retake it." The irony here being that I specifically asked if I could retake the speaking exam way back in March after I received such a poor score, and was told that it was not allowed whatsoever. The further irony here lies in the fact that I severely limited my speaking in October due to wanting to focus on pronunciation. As a result, I went into the speaking exam with no preparation and having artificially limited myself prior. I was in for a world of hurt.

Writing, however, was a different story. I felt energized, prepared, ready to take on the world and show them what I'm really made of. I wrote some of the best damn essays I've ever written (in Russian) and felt like I had nailed it. The juxtaposition between my writing prowess and absolute lack of speaking ability cast a pall over the exam to the degree that I even wrote a short poem about my experience:

Письмо - хорошо.
Говорение - дерьмо.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to translate.

So how did I actually do?

Your eyes are not deceiving you, dear reader. I barely improved my writing whatsoever since my last attempt in March, but did improve my speaking to the point where it crossed the passing threshold. So despite the fact that I prepped hard for writing and was blindsided by speaking, I still did better on the latter. There is a lesson in there somewhere, but I'm too lazy to figure out what it is.

I'm still not sure how they grade the writing exam to be honest. The difference in quality between my first attempt and this attempt cannot be overstated. My writing abilities made leaps and bounds of progress, and all I have to show for it is a paltry 6 points (I got 54% last time, 60% this time). My only explanation is that there just must be some formatting issue or something that I'm royally screwing up. Maybe my commas are always in the wrong place or my dashes aren't long enough.

And then for speaking, I'm shocked that my score not only stayed the same, but improved (60% -> 66%). I felt that my first attempt was way better, but it's possible that my ability to speak off the cuff just improved to the point where it overshadowed any prep that I had done earlier this year. Everything I said this time was freeflow, I had lots of mistakes, but something about my speech struck a chord with the examiners, and they decided to pass me. What luck that I retook both exams!

For all of that blood, sweat, and tears, I got this certificate (a physical one will be coming in 4 to 6 business months). I blocked out my name, for doxxing purposes and whatnot. So you'll have to just take my word for it that I'm крутой чел.

Less than 3 years since I started from absolute 0 learning this language that I have absolutely no reason to learn, and I've gotten the C1 certificate. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Overall and Next Month

Obviously I'm over the moon sitting on cloud nine right now with the successful completion of my main goal in Russian. I currently have no plans to take the C2 exam, but I could see myself making an attempt in like 5 years. It's just a fully different beast than all of the other Russian exams.

As for my plans for Russian? I've realized that I know a lot but I somehow don't know even more. Even with a fancy certificate under my belt, I still get tripped up on basic things, need to think about the grammar of sentences, misgender people, places, and animals, and just generally make a muck of the language. I'll continue doing mass input, and I have plans to refocus on phonetics and shadowing to try to remove some of the choppiness from my speech. The world is now, officially, my oyster (in the very limited sense of what I can choose to focus on in Russian)!

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!