"The Test"

Once again, I missed a few weeks, and though I could go back and write about everything that happened in great detail, I won't because it would be boring to write, and boring to read. I will say that Taiana turned 18 (the poster with "eindelijk volwassen"- finally grown-up- is still on the wall) and she had a great party to celebrate. Also I spent a day in Den Haag with Milja and her dad picking up my Swedish passport, visiting the Dutch government buildings, and seeing some Dutch art. And, I'm still not running with TDR, but am getting closer every day.

Saturday was "The Test." All of the hours that I spent doing lessons out of my blue "green book" that I got when I first came here, the Dutch grammar I've worked so hard to perfect, the nights I spent listening to Dutch tapes before I fell asleep, finally paid off.

Not.

There were no hours spent doing lessons out of my blue "green book" (well, maybe one, but not much more), no hard work spent perfecting my Dutch grammar, and definitely no nights listening to Dutch tapes. What there has been is countless mistakes that made me blush bright red, a varity of imitations of my "Wisconsin" accent, Swedish words that I creatively turned Dutch, several nights of poorly dreamt Dutch, physics books in Dutch, and months of hearing almost nothing other than Dutch. And I can only hope it paid off. We knew from the beginning of the year that we would have a Dutch test halfway through the year, which is why we got the blue "green book" from AFS Netherlands to study from.
In my own defense, I really didn't need the blue "green book" to learn Dutch. Now, after five months here I can get across just about any point that I want, even if I have to repeat the sentence a couple of times. The worst case scenario is that I get frustrated after the third time and end up yelling what I wanted to say instead of using a normal tone of voice, but it always works out in the end. Nobody speaks English to me anymore except for people who have just met me, but I'm not even going to get started on that because it makes me SO MAD. Phone conversations with people I don't know are also still hard, but most of the time they work out.

About the test. All of the AFS Netherlands students, whether they were from Indonesia, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, or America, had to take the test. Half of us took it last Saturday and the other half took it on Sunday. We had to go to a city called Utrecht- an hour away by train, which turned out to be an incredibly beautiful city. The test started out with a 100 minute reading test. The instructions, the text, and the multiple choice questions were all in Dutch. When I first started the reading test I panicked a little right away because the first thing I saw was a packet full of text about all sorts of complicated subjects. Once you started reading though, and trying to answer the questions, it turned out that you didn't have to know the exact meaning of most of the hard words to be able to answer the questions. The difficulty of the words did make it harder to focus on the text, but overall I think that the reading part of the test went okay. After the reading test came the real hard part.
I was expecting the listening test to be easy, because listening tests aren't hard. Though I guess that my experience with listening tests doesn't go much further than my English class here, which definitely should be easy for me. The subjects of the interviews in the listening test were so boring and complicated, I can't even remember most of them. I know that the first one was about a lady who made jewelry, that one wasn't too hard. Then, there was one about a woman who gives driving lessons to people who have to drive company cars- or something like that, I know that part didn't go very well. The last one I can remember was supposed to be a lesson in higher education about caulking (sp?). Really, where would I ever have learned the words about that in Dutch? Besides the fact that the subject of all the questions in the listening test were hard, it was hard to focus for a full 70 minutes. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it went well, but I'm really not confident about the listening test- or the reading test for that matter.

Sometime this week the results from our tests come in the mail. There's no real consequences if you don't pass the test except that you have to take another one in a few months. If your test results are in the best top three, then you get to take another harder test (yay! who wouldn't want that?) that is apparently the standard Dutch test for immigrants, or something like that. I know for sure I won't be in the top three, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I passed, because I will be extremely embarrassed if I didn't. Milja says that it's okay as long as I did my best, but she always says that and it's something we generally disagree about. So, if my best wasn't good enough to pass the test, I'm still going to be embarrassed!

And the rest of you are all keeping your fingers crossed for me too, right?