Congratulations on completing the French A1 Reading challenge! 

 

As a bonus, I’ve included a link here to a DELF exam (Diplôme d'Etudes en Langue Française) at the A1 level. The exam includes listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to grade yourself on the last two quite so easily, but you can complete the reading and listening parts yourself.

There are 100 points in total and to pass, you need to get 50/100, with a minimum of 10 in each skill. I have just done the first half of the paper and achieved 40/50, but there are a few caveats:

 

1. Generous Marking: I didn’t use the correct way of writing the time. For example, I wrote 14:40 instead of 14 h 40. I did this several times, but didn’t mark myself down for it. Would the moderator have marked me down for this? I hope the world hasn’t become so dark, but don’t give them the chance!

2. Reading/Listening: The reading was incredibly easy for me at this level. It should be for you, too, if you’ve been following the challenge. There is no way that we have been preparing for A1, even though the books all inform us that they are indeed A1. This is a good thing. We are flying way past the A1 level. I assume we should be taking the reading test at A2, or even B1. That said, unfortunately, the same can’t be said for listening. All but one mistake was made with listening. Sometimes, I just guessed. Why does listening have to be so hard? Exposure.

3. Next Steps: Now, I’ve started my challenge in comprehensible listening; a method I’ve created to ensure that I can attune myself to the phonology of the French language and gradually begin to understand it in real-time. I’ll write a tutorial in the future, but for now, the following basic outline should do:

 

Goal: 10,000 sentences of comprehensible audio input (CAI) using the readers from this challenge.

 

1. Listen to each chapter of each book again x5 without reading along. Just listen. Listen at 80% speed.

2. Once you have listened to every book again at a slower speed, listen again at 100% speed. You’ll be amazed at how much you still can’t catch. I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now (washing up, picking up the kids from school, etc) and I’ve amassed a total of 3360 sentences (my goal is 25,000 at A1 before I will move on).

 

Good luck with the exam and see you for the A2 French Reading (and Listening!) Challenge! 

Also, if you think there is value in these pages, please share! Thank you!

 

 

Geek Corner:

A quick reminder of where we are in terms of lines of text read: 22430 lines, or almost a quarter of our second goal (100,000 lines of input). Not bad!

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