KER B2 to C1 study advice

Question

This year I passed the KER B2 exam and I'm now already contemplating what it would take to reach the next level ... other than time :) Is there any advice to share on the preparation from intermediate to C1 level. Any good Esperanto novel or other book that you found useful? Any particular language exposure routines or an approach that helped you a lot towards C1?

Answer 1

I think in general to prepare for the C1 you just need to maximise your exposure to the language, so reading anything, listening to podcasts and attending a lot of Esperanto events to practice speaking will help a lot. While reading, it helps to take notes of new words and try to actively learn them rather than just passively reading. Personally I found noting the words in Anki very useful for this.

For the oral part of the C1 exam I was given a photo and asked to describe the scene. Perhaps you could practice this, for example, if you are waiting for a bus you could try to describe your surroundings with a practice conversation in your head. This will help you notice any missing vocabulary.

It is definitely a good idea to do the practice exams from the website to get used to how the exam works. For the multiple-choice questions there are sometimes what seem like “trick” questions and it’s useful to get an idea of what kinds responses they are expecting. It is also good to time the exam to have an idea of how much time you can devote to each question.

Unlike other language exams that I have done, the KER exam has a lot of questions to test your knowledge of the grammar. In preparation for this I decided to sit down and read the whole of PMEG. This might seem a little intimidating because it is a very large book, but most of it is examples that you can skim past and you can skip sections that you feel you already know well. I found this very useful to discover details of the grammar that I wasn’t aware of.

On the other hand I found the exam to be less taxing than I was expecting. I also heard stories of people signing up to do the exam in the middle of the night before the exam day and passing it after having done zero preparation. Therefore if you think you have a reasonable level of Esperanto you might want to just try taking the exam without stressing about the preparation too much.