B1 confirmed
17 August 2026 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've been doing an assortment of YouTube online tests (when you view one, that naturally biases the system into showing you more) over the last week or so, and they all tend to confirm the verdict that after eight months of formal study -- a.k.a. revision of things that I was supposed to have learnt in the classroom thirty years ago -- my level of Russian is approximately B1... with the usual caveats that I am spending my time listening to and reading native-level material (simply because being able to do that unassisted is sort of the *whole point*), and hence my capacity to generate any actual output is even more massively behind my ability to guess at the meaning of the input than is perhaps normal for students :-p
I did the most recent test https://test.befluent.net twice, the second time actually using the 'not sure, skip this question' option instead of my default position of taking my best guess at unknown answers, and both times got the overall result of "strong B1", i.e. closer towards B2 than to A2. But the breakdowns in the two different tests varied widely, with the first one identifying 'cases' as the strongest aspect at a 'solid B2', i.e. well above B1 level, and 'verbs' as the weakest at 'early A2', i.e. barely beyond the absolute beginner level of A1, while the second attempt, with its "don't knows", rated 'cases' as the weakest aspect at only "solid B1" and 'verbs', conversely, as the strongest aspect at "solid B2"....
The truth is that the real problem is simply with lack of vocabulary. It's not that I don't know what aspect of закрыть to use in an imperative, it's that I assumed that душно meant uncomfortably warm and automatically discarded all the three multiple-choice options that involved a request to *close* the window and took it for granted that the one remaining answer must be the correct one (it wasn't). [In fact I have just double-checked in the dictionary and душно *does* mean 'stuffy, close atmosphere'... so I have no idea why you would construct an exam question asking for the correct form of the imperative to close the window on those grounds: from memory, Закрой/закрывайте, пожалуйста, окно -- здесь душно. Maybe, as with recent weather, it was so hot *outside* that the request was to shut the window and keep the heat out?]
It wasn't not so much that I don't know what cases to use with a given verb or construction, as that I was being presented with vocabulary the meaning of which I simply didn't know in the first place. There was only one bit of grammar I had to skip because I hadn't covered it yet; I recognise past/present participles from having encountered them in real life and from having previously studied them, but until I study up on them again I currently have no knowledge of how to construct them or identify them correctly.
In theory this ought to be reassuring, since extra vocabulary is the easiest thing to master, and can be acquired relatively pleasurably simply by consuming material for entertainment and looking up the words you don't know -- which is what I'm doing anyway. (Although it does tend to be slightly off-beat vocabulary that doesn't necessarily come into exam tests: подлец, крупный план, кувалда, массовка, рыжий конь :-D)
I note that back in December I was doing a similar exercise which rated my answers at 'A1 beginner', demonstrating that I have indeed made considerable progress -- and I'm very conscious of the difference. I'm no longer fumbling around guessing answers based on a vague sense of what 'sounds right', but actively identifying what the question is designed to test, and applying the relevant grammatical rules... which may be a lot further removed from the way that actual Russians do it (in English, I can spot a grammatical mistake because it simply sounds wrong, but the logic, if any, of *why* it is wrong is far harder to explain), but is a lot more solid and comforting in terms of results!
Although given that I was able to watch an entire film in Russian a year ago (even if not a terribly challenging one in terms of dialogue), I'm not sure my ability to passively *understand* has necessarily gone up that much, if at all -- I was guessing somewhere between B1 and B2 at that point, and I'm not sure I've acquired a lot more vocabulary since. The main improvement of which I'm conscious is that I think I'm getting better at being able to understand text that contains abbreviations or errors, rather than simply being completely thrown by the appearance of a word in an unrecognisable form; I'm getting more experienced at predicting what *ought* to come next and filling it in if it is missing :-)
I did the most recent test https://test.befluent.net twice, the second time actually using the 'not sure, skip this question' option instead of my default position of taking my best guess at unknown answers, and both times got the overall result of "strong B1", i.e. closer towards B2 than to A2. But the breakdowns in the two different tests varied widely, with the first one identifying 'cases' as the strongest aspect at a 'solid B2', i.e. well above B1 level, and 'verbs' as the weakest at 'early A2', i.e. barely beyond the absolute beginner level of A1, while the second attempt, with its "don't knows", rated 'cases' as the weakest aspect at only "solid B1" and 'verbs', conversely, as the strongest aspect at "solid B2"....
The truth is that the real problem is simply with lack of vocabulary. It's not that I don't know what aspect of закрыть to use in an imperative, it's that I assumed that душно meant uncomfortably warm and automatically discarded all the three multiple-choice options that involved a request to *close* the window and took it for granted that the one remaining answer must be the correct one (it wasn't). [In fact I have just double-checked in the dictionary and душно *does* mean 'stuffy, close atmosphere'... so I have no idea why you would construct an exam question asking for the correct form of the imperative to close the window on those grounds: from memory, Закрой/закрывайте, пожалуйста, окно -- здесь душно. Maybe, as with recent weather, it was so hot *outside* that the request was to shut the window and keep the heat out?]
It wasn't not so much that I don't know what cases to use with a given verb or construction, as that I was being presented with vocabulary the meaning of which I simply didn't know in the first place. There was only one bit of grammar I had to skip because I hadn't covered it yet; I recognise past/present participles from having encountered them in real life and from having previously studied them, but until I study up on them again I currently have no knowledge of how to construct them or identify them correctly.
In theory this ought to be reassuring, since extra vocabulary is the easiest thing to master, and can be acquired relatively pleasurably simply by consuming material for entertainment and looking up the words you don't know -- which is what I'm doing anyway. (Although it does tend to be slightly off-beat vocabulary that doesn't necessarily come into exam tests: подлец, крупный план, кувалда, массовка, рыжий конь :-D)
I note that back in December I was doing a similar exercise which rated my answers at 'A1 beginner', demonstrating that I have indeed made considerable progress -- and I'm very conscious of the difference. I'm no longer fumbling around guessing answers based on a vague sense of what 'sounds right', but actively identifying what the question is designed to test, and applying the relevant grammatical rules... which may be a lot further removed from the way that actual Russians do it (in English, I can spot a grammatical mistake because it simply sounds wrong, but the logic, if any, of *why* it is wrong is far harder to explain), but is a lot more solid and comforting in terms of results!
Although given that I was able to watch an entire film in Russian a year ago (even if not a terribly challenging one in terms of dialogue), I'm not sure my ability to passively *understand* has necessarily gone up that much, if at all -- I was guessing somewhere between B1 and B2 at that point, and I'm not sure I've acquired a lot more vocabulary since. The main improvement of which I'm conscious is that I think I'm getting better at being able to understand text that contains abbreviations or errors, rather than simply being completely thrown by the appearance of a word in an unrecognisable form; I'm getting more experienced at predicting what *ought* to come next and filling it in if it is missing :-)
no subject
Date: 2026-08-18 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-18 11:48 pm (UTC)That's actually reassuring in terms of test accuracy, since it tends to confirm the original definition that I came across back in December (the point at which I decided that I wasn't going to master the language by months of mere passive exposure but would need to go back to basics and do some actual study): https://mylinguistics.com/a1-a2-b1-b2-c1-c2-language-learning-cefr/
"Under the current CEFR fluency categorization, most native speakers would fall into the C1 range and fall short of C2, especially in written proficiency" ;-D
But I suspect it also reflects the somewhat arbitrary nature of the questions and their definition of correct/incorrect, where to a native speaker's ear there may well be more than one potentially correct answer in different contexts.
Out of curiosity I tried taking a similar English-as-a-foreign-language test https://www.europa-school.co.uk/language-level-test/ and found that a number of the questions were sufficiently ambiguous to a high-level speaker that I had to resort to guessing which answer was the most likely to be prescribed in a language textbook, as opposed to which ones could potentially occur in idiomatic and grammatical English!
(And in the case of one question, the answer specified as a 'correction' was, in my opinion, less idiomatic in the specified situation than the one I gave, which was certainly not wrong :-p
The choice was between "Never did I see such a wonderful sunset!" and "Never have I seen such a wonderful sunset!", where "never did I see such a" is, in fact, the correct literary form of emphasis (just as "I do see" is a correct emphatic form, and not an error for "I see"). As so often, the more you actually know about a subject, the less black-and-white the answers to seemingly simple questions become :-P)