Dutch Classes

Well, I passed the A level Dutch exam at James Boswell Instituut, and can now continue onto B1. This is a good thing, since I already signed up for B1 and I think the city has already paid my tuition for it :-)

I went into (and out of) the final exam quite confident that I would pass it. I'd gotten the highest score on the written midterm. Then we found out Wednesday that half the class had failed, and I only passed by a few points. It felt like I'd dodged a bullet without even knowing it was there at the time. Sheesh. I think the main thing I learned was to stay within my realm of comfort on the written test. If I'm not sure what preposition to use, I should think of something else to say :-P

It's given me incentive to improve my study habits in B1, realizing how hard the A test was. The B1 test to advance to B2 will be even harder. Class starts in about a week - we only get a 4 day weekend between A ending and B1 starting. But after 2 weeks of class we get a 2 week vacation, which I really do feel like I'm going to need.

3 people who rarely (if ever) did homework failed the exam. One of them missed enough classes to fail on the attendance criteria of attending 80% of classes. But she also failed the exam. 2 more barely failed, which was something of a surprise, since those two had been doing homework and trying hard. It sounds like grammar was their main problem.

Dutch grammar is hard! And we learn most of the rules for it at the A level, which makes it difficult to keep all the rules straight. The dutch love to change word order in various ways depending on whether you're using a main clause, a dependent clause, a question, a modifier at the beginning of the sentence, past tense, future tense, command tense, reporting what someone else said, using a modal verb (can, shall, may, must), etc. It gets confusing. Presumably we get more comfortable with all of that in the B levels.