Category: English

So this is it, the final boss of Portuguese language exams: The Diploma Universitário de Português Língua Estrangeira (DUPLE) which is the highest level (known as “C2”) of the Portuguese proficiency testing system. Like all the earlier exams, it has the usual four parts: reading comprehension, written communication, aural comprehension and verbal interaction, but they’re all longer than the previous exams, so the lunch break comes after the first two sections, then there are two more, and you finish after 3PM.

Last-minute exam prep didn’t go as planned. I didn’t get through everything I intended to cram in on Tuesday evening. I tried to get to bed early but between the endless faffing and the fact that my nose was blocked, I didn’t sleep well, missed my alarm and didn’t get up till 7, by which time I hadn’t had more than about 4 hours of sleep. Oh well, never mind, at least when I finally woke up, my nose was unblocked so I didn’t have to struggle through the exam sniffing and wheezing.

The exam took place at the Portuguese embassy near Green Park. When I got there, I was surprised to find I was one of four candidates! Three is the most I’d had before and I assumed at this level there wouldn’t be many people wanting to take the test, but obviously I was wrong! Before we started, they checked our ID and made us sign a piece of paper. One of the names on the list was very, very Portuguese, which piqued my curiosity. I spoke to him later, in one of the breaks, and he said he was from Madeira but had been in the UK since he was about 8, so he needed to refresh his language skills. Then there was a fellow northerner, but a proper one who still lives up there and had come down from York for the exam. Like me, he’s married to a Tuga who refuses to speak Portuguese with him. Why are you so mean to us, Portuguese ladies? The fourth member of our crew said he’d done C2 Spanish a few years ago and, having done the boring iberian language, decided to level up his language-learning experience by doing the whole thing again but on hard mode.

Four guys, four pencils. OK, let’s see how much of the exam I can remember…

Compreensão de Leitura

Let’s see… There was a text about feeling envy for the lifestyle and the bling of richer people in different social classes. After the exam, I searched online faor some key phrases and it’s this if you’re interested. The text is easy to follow but the questions were phrased very ambiguously and there were usually multiple answers that seemed right to me, so I just followed my instinct where I needed to.

Next up… Oh my god, I was so happy! There was text by Mario de Carvalho! I just finished reading a book by him a few weeks ago so I was quite tuned in to his writing style and sense of humour, which helped a lot. Better yet, he was writing about vocabulary, so he had deliberately filled the text with interesting and unusual words, many of which were new to me, but one of them was “obnubilação” and I chortled because that’s the noun form of this word, which I noticed while I was reading the book and turned into a mini-blog! I felt like the gods of language-learning were smiling on me. I can’t find the text online unfortunately; it must be in one of the books, I suppose. I’d like to read it.

Then there was a short story by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen about someone called Monica. It came across like she was talking about an Instagram influencer, but it was written long before social media. When I went searching for it, I found a lot of people talking about it fondly. There are a few copies of it dotted about online but only in very unexpected places. Here for example.

The most annoying part of this section of the exam is the one with the paragraphs removed from a text. There is usually one spare paragraph that you have to ignore but they had made it even worse in the C2 by adding two extras. The text was something to do with pet turtles being released in Lisbon parks, setting in train a series of events culminating in some ducks being eaten by falcons. Oh lord. It was awful. I swear they could go in almost any order. After a while, I gave up, put in some random guesses and decided to come back to it.

C2 has an extra kind of question that doesn’t exist at other levels: they give you a text that has some extra words hidden in it and you have to identify the words that aren’t needed. I had done one of these on Tuesday and I was glad I had because it helped me understand that I’d been including words that could be removed rather than focusing on words that absolutely had to be removed. I’m pretty sure I got most of the marks there.

Luckily I had quite a lot of spare time when I’d finished the remaining missing word rounds, so I went back to the bloody turtles and I think made a decent job of it.

Produção e Interação Escritas

As usual, the challenge here is to cram 250 words into a space that is only really big enough for 150, and still have the result be legible. The first activity was a formal letter to the British activist Les Knight, whose cause is making humans extinct in order to save the planet. Given that we are both British, I’m not even sure why I would be writing this in Portuguese, but I suppose it would make no difference anyway since people who start organisations aimed at human extinction tend not to be very open to rational argument, whatever language you use. I had a go, but my heart wasn’t in it.

The second section had three options: AI, social networks and the changing nature of the traditional family. I opted for the third one since it seemed least likely to lead me into a rat’s nest of filthy, dirty nuance. I described how the nuclear family had come about and the critique that came out of feminism. The trickiest part was talking about how it might change in the future. You can only do that if you point to some faults in how things work now. And since exam markers have families, you run the risk of offending someone. So, I tried to keep it at arms length by prefacing it with “some critics have pointed out…” and making sure to only talk about what dads could be doing differently. Nobody ever lost points for criticising men, so I think I’m on solid ground there.

The last part of this section was the usual ten sentences that need to be rewritten. Quite a hard one, I thought.

Finished with 20 minutes spare, so I went through the essays. Twice in one case. Found a lot of errors and fixed them carefully.

Lunch

I grabbed a sammidge from Waitrose and got chatting with two of the other candidates.  I’m an introvert so I wouldn’t usually choose to spend time with colleagues; I usually like to spend the lunch break reading out loud to keep myself in the zone, but I hung out with them and we ended up speaking English. See, this is why having friends is bad.

Lovely fellas, though, both of them. They both said they were struggling a bit, especially with the Breyner Andresen story, but that’s OK, none of us have a citizenship application riding on this, so although it would be good to pass, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t: it’s been a great incentive to learn.

Lunch over, we went back to wait at the door. We met a woman who was there to take the B1 test in the afternoon. It was her first time. Another one learning a language to impress a Portuguese wife. That movie “Love Actually” has a lot to answer for.

They put us in a different room, with terrible acoustics, for the afternoon session. Great.

Compreensão Oral

This was by far the least stressed I have ever been in a Compreensão Oral test. It’s usually the part of the exam when I start sweating and blindly guessing answers, but today I felt in control, and calm.

There was a clip from a podcast called Palavras Cruzadas, featuring a crazy astrology lady. This episode.

There was a fragment of an interview with José Eduardo Agualusa about his short story collection O Livro dos Camaleões, which was very hard to follow. The recording wasn’t great, his accent is a little different, and in that room it all sounded very muddy and hard to understand. I got most of it, I think, but this was definitely the hardest one.

Then there was a piece about AIs being asked to predict whether AIs would be better at governing human society than humans are. Fuck off, Robots. Oh wait, I just remembered who the president of the USA is again. Wait, come back, robots. Please, save us, shiny metal overlords! And then there was an interview with a priest talking about the best way to console people who are grieving. That was weird because the answers to the questions were all in the first few minutes of the recording and then it ran on and on for 3 or 4 minutes with us listening to see if we’d missed anything, but there was nothing. I don’t know why they did that. Couldn’t they have just cut it off?

And… I can’t remember what the fifth recording was.

Produção e Interação Orais

We were paired up by the examiners and filmed in a small room, interacting with each other. They asked us both a few personal questions such as what was our name, where were we from and what was the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, that sort of thing. I mentioned in a previous blog that the invigilators are really helpful, and kind to the terrified candidates in the oral test: there was a good example today. The guy I was with looked blank when he was asked about his use of “dispositivos” and seemed to have momentarily forgotten what the word meant, or misheard it or something, so the Professora who was working the camera held her phone up and jiggled it as a hint, and that got him back on track.

Then we moved on to discussing images. I got a picture of an amphitheatre. It was a big one and very well preserved. I guess it was the coliseum in Rome but I’ve never been there and it seemed weird to ask about Italy in a Portuguese exam. Is there one that big in Portugal? I have to admit I’ve never heard of it. Anyway, rather than commit, I said that there would have been structures like this in a lot of places because the roman empire spread over the whole of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa and went on to talk about the influence of Latin on the languages of Europe, most obviously the romance languages but also in English and even in celtic Fringe languages, where you wouldn’t expect it. It was a good speech and I felt really pleased when I stuck the landing. Unfortunately I’d spoken much to quickly, so the camera lady made a sort of rolling hand gesture to indicate I should carry on to fill the remaining time. Shit, I’d already done everything I’d planned. Sudden mental gear change. Luckily, I was in pretty good form so after a couple of seconds of awkwardness I got straight back into talking about how they were making a sequel to gladiator and how the original actually had some real historical figures and… Yes, it was a bit of a lame follow-up, but I think they could see I was capable of talking well and hopefully they’ll make allowances for nervous ad-libbing.

The smart move, of course, would have been to talk about património monumental. That’s a big theme in the cultural part of the test spec. Unfortunately I just didn’t have the vocabulary at the tip of my tongue, so I didn’t dare lock myself in to 4 minutes of that.

Finally, we did a dialogue where we were given an outline of a script: you’re members of the same family and you have inherited a piece of land. There are 7 possible things you can do with it, and here are the stages you have to go through in the discussion.

The other chap was supposed to get the ball rolling, so he started saying we should just sell the thing because it was a hassle to look after it. I came back with a suggestion that it would be good to help plant more trees after the fires had destroyed so many, so maybe we should plant sobreiros and start a cork business. Horrible two seconds where I couldn’t remember the word “cortiça” but I recovered. He then said nah, too much work, let’s just sell it and go off to the beach to drink beer. I said that sounded good, but I still wasn’t on board, so instead suggested we try and rent the land to a solar panel company. That way we meet both our objectives, avoiding work while simultaneously helping save the planet with green energy (debatable, but never mind). It was a great dialogue. Unfortunately I made a slightly lame ending, saying “Então, estamos em… concordância”. What? Who talks like that? Oh well, never mind, it still went well, I thought.

My dialogue partner spoke really well: slower than me (good strategy) and with a good accent, nice nasalisation, and I’m sure he got a good mark.

Aaanyway, that was that. Said our goodbyes and I went off for a wander before hopping on the train. I stopped at a posh cafe and ordered a coffee and a macaroon. A Portuguese couple sat next to me and I felt weirdly like I wanted to order in Portuguese, which would have confused the waiter. In the end, I confused them even more by forgetting to pay! I had to email them and say sorry, send me the bill. I don’t know why I bothered because they’re right opposite Harrods and they probably make a fortune selling millefeuille to Saudi royals, but you’ve got to do the right thing, so I did.