Preliminary exam for Collage - English

My name is András, I am from Hungary so my native tongue is Hungarian. I will turn to 36 this summer. I like to spend my free time with English learning. I just joined to LingQ in January. I like it very much and I think it is kind addictive in a good way. I love the statistics and the activity scores and thinks like that. It motivates me a lot.

This September I would like to start to study in a collage than I would like to acquire a BA degree. It will be a kind of Distance Learning. To make this happen I have to perform a preliminary exam. I had the opportunity to choose from 10 different classes / subjects like math, chemistry, history, languages and so on. Since I spend most of my free time with English learning it was obvious to me to apply for English exam and I did.

I have an Intermediate Level Certificate back from 2004 and this exam will be similar. In the last 2 years I spent my time with effortless English learning, like surfing internet, reading books at my level of understanding, listening podcasts and watching YouTube videos and so on. No grammar roles, no grammar books, no tests and things like that and I will not change my learning method for an exam like this.

I will continue listening and reading intermediate and advance content in LingQ or anywhere else to improve my language comprehension. I already joined the 90 day challenge and I strongly believe that it will work. I have some time before the exam; it will be in May so I have more than two months.

Why I decided to prepare for the exam as I described above? After I made my decision to chose English as a preliminary exam I checked the content of the exams from last years and it was not a good experience. I prepared for this kind of language exam more than ten years ago and that strange feeling, the stress just came back when I saw those tests. I became angry and disappointed.

Language learning is fun for me now. Why shall I change? When I saw the grammar test, the multiple choice tasks I was stressed. I love English learning and the whole process that I built in the past years but I hate that feeling with multiple choice grammar tests. I was back in the school again and I do not want to spend my preparation time like this. I will continue to use the method offered by LingQ and I will succeed. I will have only one stressful day with that grammar test and not two months with preparation. That is my resolution regarding preparation for this exam. Of course when I have something, I will share that with you.

Please share your thoughts about my challenge. I am quite sure that, I am not the only one with this issue, so do not hesitate to contact me. It might be useful to me and everyone else.

Thank you in advance,
András

How do you feel about writing and having someone correct that writing and give explanations of your mistakes? You have a number of mistakes in your post. Learning what they are and how to correct or avoid them might be useful. It would cause you to notice more grammatical detail when you are reading, for example. This would allow you to learn in the more natural way you describe but make faster and more focused progress.

Examples:

1.“Why I decide to prepare…”
Correct:
Why did I decide to prepare…
or
Why have I decided to prepare…

  1. “Why shall I change…”
    Correct:
    Why should I change

  2. The content of the exams from last years
    Correct:
    …from past years…"
    or perhaps
    The content of last year’s exam ( if you mean the exam in the year just finished)

  3. Collage
    Correct:
    College

You are pretty fluent. However, if you are going to be doing a lot of writing in English in the college classes, it would be good to polish up your grammar, and learn some tricks about using an English spellchecker.

I have taken some of these online multiple choice tests in English grammar even though I am a native speaker. I just wanted to see what they were like. I was surprised at how tricky some of the questions were, even at the beginning levels. I got them right, of course, but the person who wrote the tests I took seemed to want to make them as difficult as possible. I certainly have sympathy for those trying to learn these things as a second language.

You seem to be at the stage where you could just use a few “pointers” to sharpen up your usage. I agree with you that studying the rules of grammar is stressful and I have my doubts that such studying is as effective as learning by reading, speaking, and writing.

I am new to LingQ myself, having joined in January to study Czech. I do not have time to correct writing in English but I believe there are many tutors on LingQ who do.

I hear Hungarian is an enormous challenge to an English speaker! Czech is bad enough. I swear Czechs all spent their winters by the fire embroidering the language, adding prefixes, new endings, deciding to change a verb’s consonants in midstream, etc. I really do wonder about the psychology of a people who insist on a finished and an unfinished form of every verb. This seems very apt, especially now in a post communist country where so many bureaucratic and legal things never come to a definite conclusion. I know I will never achieve true fluency in my lifetime. I just hope to understand people and follow humorous anecdotes. It is beyond my imagination that I would try to take history or chemistry in Czech.

Good luck in your undertakings!

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Hi András,

I dare say that most people don’t know much about grammar, even in their native language! We learnt it at school and ever since apply it more by ear and intuition, rather than by firm knowledge.

You have obviously reached an advanced functional level in your English and I somewhat understand your frustration now having to go back to grammar learning!

But IF that is what is necessary to pass the preliminary exam towards your BA, then ask yourself: Do I really have a choice?

I am sure there are resources to learn grammar in a fun and interesting way!

Good luck!
Meow

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Dear KittyVPraze, thank you for your time and feedback. I think you are right and I see what you mean. I take your advice and I will try to push the grammar part harder than before.

Thank you again.
András

Hello Katze_Katze,
Thank you for your feedback. I take your advice and I will try to find an interesting way to improve my grammar to a higher level.

Thank you again.
András