My German Exam
During the process to get moved to Switzerland by Cass’s company, I was pretty quickly informed that as a requirement for my visa (the family reunification B visa), I would have to enroll in a German course and attain the most basic level of speaking, which is A1, in order to stay in Switzerland for more than 1 year. I took 2 years of German in college, so I started brushing up on it using an app called Pimsleur. There are a ton of language apps out there, but I chose Pimsleur because it doesn’t just drill you on vocabulary and hope you can put it all together one day, it teaches you to speak.
I had also signed up to do an online course through the Goethe Institut. It sounds all fancy, but it turns out that the online course wasn’t really that big of a deal. And luckily it turned out that this Goethe course was on the list of courses that we were given that would fulfill the requirement for the visa application. When we were going through the process, vaccinations were new and COVID was still a problem so I wasn’t really keen on having to go to a class once I got to Switzerland to learn something that I was pretty sure I already knew. I even tried to get my “language passport'“ before we left Austin, but COVID again prevented me from sitting for the test there.
We got to Switzerland in early June last year, and you can see that Kanton Zürich wasted no time letting me know about the language requirement. However, that didn’t stop me from putting it off until much, much later. I finally signed up to take the fide test on March 16 of this year, so 9 months later. I randomly picked the fide test (others are telc, Goethe, OSD, KDE, SDS, TestDaF, etc.) based on the locations they offered to sit the exam. I had done pretty much zero actual speaking-with-another-person preparation. The fide test has 2 sections, speaking/listening and writing, and it costs 250CHF to sit them both. You can take them separately, or just take one section, but I’m not sure what they cost individually.
My test was scheduled at around 10am for the speaking/listening portion with a lunch break, then the written test at 1pm. There were 2 women who were in the test room with me. They began by asking me to tell them about myself. Then they explained that they would start by testing me at A2 level, and then decide if they need to switch to easier or harder. I feel like I looked at them like a zombie, because I’m not sure exactly what they were asking me or what I answered. I told Cass that they probably were asking me about where I lived and my answers were about riding a bicycle. Needless to say, they decided to test me at the easier (A1) level. Whew!
They gave me some cartoon illustrations and asked me to describe what was going on in the picture. “The girl’s bicycle is broken.” “She is late for her appointment.” “She calls them man to say she will be late.” And so forth. They asked some questions about my answers to try to give me hints about what else they wanted me to say about the photo. When that part was over, we did the listening test. I was given a page with 3 or 4 cartoons on it, then I had to listen to a recording. It was something like a phone conversation, or an announcement on a train. They would then ask me a question relating to what I heard and I had to choose the cartoon that was the best answer for their question. “There is a tree in front of our office building.” And then I was supposed to choose the cartoon that depicted a building with a tree in front (not a car in front, or a fountain in front).
I was a little rattled when I finished that part. I mean, in real life if you’re trying to communicate in German there is usually an option to throw in a little English when you get stuck. But these ladies were definitely not going to speak any English, so I didn’t even try. I just had to go with the flow even though I didn’t have any idea what they were saying to me a lot of the time! But I returned for the written test, and it was quick and easy. I finished it in about 20 minutes. That made me feel much better about my chances of passing.
As you can see, I passed! I achieved A1 level for speaking/listening and A2 level for writing. Turns out that I only needed to take the speaking/listening portion, but I’m glad I did both. I’m also glad I went ahead and scheduled that test when I did, because we’ve already had to start the process of renewing our visas for another year. I don’t know what my plans are for language learning in the near future. I feel like Switzerland isn’t exactly a place where you can immerse yourself to learn a language. They already have 4 national languages, and then nearly everybody knows English and jumps at the chance to speak it, so it isn’t exactly easy to find opportunities to speak German every day. But for now, I’ve got my language passport in my wallet (they included a credit card size passport too!) and I can stay here for another year!