De Sproochentest – Test Day

Today was the big day – the day I took the spoken part of the Sproochentest. A little background: the test is 2 parts, oral and listening. The oral part is 10 minutes long. You have to answer questions about a theme for 5 minutes, then describe a photo for 5 minutes. That’s it. 6 months of studying for a pretty subjective 10 minute test. (I am not a fan of subjective.) Then the listening part, which is in December, requires you to listen to a few news/radio clips and answer multiple choice questions about them. If you get more than 50% on the oral part, you pass the test and your score on the listening part doesn’t matter. If you get <50% on the oral part, they average your 2 scores togeteher and if that is more than 50%, you pass. 

So today I took the oral part. After last night’s tutoring session, I was pretty freaking nervous. I did not do well. I was nervous and didn’t make any sense. I spent the rest of the night reading over questions, looking up words, practicing answering questions out loud, to myself, in my room, until 2 a.m. Part of me knows that it’s a language, and if I don’t know it by now, no last-minute cramming will help. But part of me also feels obligated to put is as much work as is humanly possible so that, if I don’t pass, I can for sure know that I worked really, really hard to fail. (I do not know why this is comforting.)

So fast forward to today: I got up at 8, chatted with Joe, ate breakfast, took a shower. Very boring everyday things. I fretted over what to wear. I had planned to wear my favorite grey romper, because that’s a thing that exists, but decided that trousers for women is very non-conforming, and went with a merlot-colored skirt and shirt, with matching hat. Cute, feminine, and if I fail and decided it’s my unlucky outfit, I won’t be burning my gray romper because I love it so much. I kind of felt like, with the dark hair, lipstick, and purple shirt, I looked like Ursula from the Little Mermaid in her human form, but I decided to just go with it. 

Test time. I walked the 0.8 miles to the test, where I arrived about 45 minutes early and sat in the waiting room reading my own writing in Luxembourgish. Even though it’s a Luxembourgish language test, the guy who sits at the check-in desk refused to speak anything but French, which was challenging. He seemed to kind of enjoy it. I waited and I watched as people came in and out. 10 minutes is a very short test. One blonde lady went in, and it seemed like she was out in like 8 minutes and walking very fast. I was like, omg I hope I don’t get the same person she had. Other people waved goodbye and said Äddi, and sheinen Dag to the guy who only spoke French as they left after their tests, clearly a bit more confident. I sat there in the waiting room, quite nervous, and also, having quite a difficult time with my inner voice.  It’s not a nice person sometimes. I’m reading my little book of my own writing, trying to solidify words and phrases and my brain is like, “how arrogant do you have to be to think you can come pass a language test with native speakers from only taking online classes and never staying in that country. You are a fraud and you know it and they’ll know it soon enough”.  So you know, there’s that. Motivation, I guess. The voice that makes me work twice as hard to prove it wrong? I know my other anxiety friends totally get this. 

Talking About a Theme

Finally, it was my turn. I was called back. I smiled and greeted them warmly and was polite and then it started. There is one guy sitting at the table with me, with a little tape recorder, asking me questions. There is a second guy in the back of the room, listening and taking notes. My choices for topic of conversation were “My work” or “Media”. Since the test is also a bit of a culture test and you can fail if you can’t converse about the Luxembourgish radio and television programs easily, I went with my work. This is a thing that I know a lot about and one of the better topics. They don’t pick the topics themselves, by the way. They have a stack of envelopes. Each envelope contains 2 topics. So they do seem to be random. He flipped over the 2 cards and I was very relieved to see work was an option. So he asked me questions, and I answered them. My tutoring sessions were a bit more of a soliloquy, but this was more of a question and answer. The first question he asked, I was a little shaky on.  He asked “From where did you come here?” Which seemed to be not at all about work, but also, like… generally, where are you from or like, where did you come from today? So he specified “now” where are you coming from now.  Which still seemed like a weird question. So I said that I walked here from about a kilometer away, which is where I live. And he’s like, oh, so you came from home. And I say yes, from home. I guess some people come from work or shopping to the test?  It’s early in the morning and I can’t imagine many people are going to work for an hour and then leaving. But whatever…. next question. He asked a bunch of general questions. What do I do; what do I like about my job; what do I not like about my job; what other places have I worked before. He started with what is your profession. Given my chats with my tutor, she says I need to talk more, give more details, and use complete sentences. So when they say “Did you come here from home” the answer is “Yes, I came here from my house which is blue and I walked here and ….”, not “Yes”. So he said “What is your profession?” and I explained that I am a computer programmer, but that I have a degree in chemistry. It used a bit of our time and gave me a chance to talk about something I know and hopefully the test would end before he got to a question I didn’t know the answer to. 

Foto Beschreiwen

The second part was to describe a photo. He put out 3 photos and asked me to pick one. One was a festival, like the Schueberfoer. One was a bunch of people in a town square, like hanging out at cafes and 2 people in the middle tango dancing. The third one, which I picked, was 3 guys cooking. They had milk and sugar and eggs, and were putting these things into a kitchen-aid mixer. One guy was reading the recipe (I just checked and thank goodness the German word for recipe is the same for Luxembourgish: rezept). They were wearing short sleeved shirts, so I guess it was summer time. Then…. I noticed that the kitchen-aid is not plugged in. I laughed and was like “Uh, firwat benotzen si dat? Et geet net.” Which means “Why are they using that? It doesn’t go/work.” I said, it functions not and has no electric. And then we all laughed and they noticed it too. So I said “I cook a lot and take cooking courses often” to show why I would notice it. Then I said maybe they are taking a cooking course because one guy had his name on his shirt and one guy was taking notes on paper beside the recipe book. And there were lots of books around (they were binders, not books, but you tell me the Luxembourgish word for binders. I’ll wait) and they weren’t recipe books. Maybe the guy with his name on his shirt, de Julien, is the prof for this course. Then the guy was like “Time’s up”… and that was it. He told me (in Luxembourgish of course) that I would have to take the listening part in December, that I would get the results in a few weeks after that, depending on the holiday schedule. 

I had fully expected to know whether I passed or not today. I had really wanted to know whether I need to spend the rest of my time here listening intently to the RTL and trying to practice for the listening test or if I can just take a break. Or start learning French, which is the most often used language here. So…. at least the test is over. I can relax a bit from that. And I will try to not think about it until I get the results. The guys in the room are clearly trained not to give you any feedback. They smile blankly the entire time. They don’t cringe when you say something wrong and they don’t react (except to laugh at the mixer being unplugged). So it’s really hard to gauge whether you did well or not. Maybe I was saying utter nonsense the whole time and they couldn’t understand my accent and it was terrible. But…. I didn’t freeze and I just talked as much as I could. (Though I did spend the 20 minute walk back home over-analyzing every sentence, thinking oh wait, did I use the wrong form of……whatever word) But in the end, I feel like I did well. It felt like the questions they asked about my work were FAR less challenging than the ones from my teacher, which is awesome. It should be that way. She challenged me to be better than I needed to be for the test, hopefully. I guess we’ll know in a month. or 2. 

I saw on a menu that one of the restaurants downtown makes Îles Flotantt, which I feel like I may have earned at this point. (I will also have fully earned the 10 (or more, whatever) pounds I will gain on this trip.) Once my stomach decides it is willing to consider digesting food again, I’m going to go do that.