I mentioned a while ago that I was starting the Say it in Portuguese CAPLE Exam Prep course. I thought it would be worth taking a really focussed course to try and get myself match fit instead of winging it. In case anyone is in the same boat, thinking of taking it for a future exam, here’s what it’s like:
The course took place over 4 weeks because that’s how long I had from enquiring to the date of the exam. Following an introductory meeting, Cristina offered a range of three options, based on what I said my weak points were. There were different levels/prices, depending how much support I wanted and I went with the middle one. I won’t say what the prices were in case it’s a trade secret, but I’d definitely call it very good value.
As you might already know, there are four sections in the exam*, and I felt reasonably comfortable with the reading comprehension but decidedly iffy about some of the others, so the really important stuff for me was in the form of four weekly drops of one sample paper from the written part of the exam and a recording and set of multiple choice questions from the aural comprehension section. I completed them in my own time and emailed them back. Very detailed feedback would then arrive the following day for me to work through.
On Fridays we had an online meeting where we’d go through some of the homework feedback and also did a simulated parts 1 and 2 of the “produção e interação orais” exam format. Mistakes made in the meeting would prompt more feedback via email, including actually recording the lesson and doing a step-by-step feedback recording that I could listen to and hear my mistakes.
Cristina does other courses and she’s also host of one of the earliest portuguese podcasts, so she’s an experienced teacher, but I think I was one of the early adopters on this specific DAPLE course, and there were a couple of teething troubles – a few typos in the questions – which I fed back and will no doubt have been corrected by the time the next person takes the course. In the post-exam debrief, I also suggested she might change the order the aural papers were given in, since I think the first one was a real past paper and the later ones were close simulacra. They were very good recordings and sounded almost exactly like real exam questions, but the questions were a tiny bit less ambiguous and tricksy, so I thought maybe it would be better to start with those and finish on the real past paper.
The course definitely boosted my confidence and helped me approach the exercises in a more controlled, less panicky way. Yeah, the exam could have gone better, but it could have gone worse too, and it definitely would have if I hadn’t done the course! I would definitely recommend it to anyone planning on taking a CAPLE exam, especially if you’ve never taken one before and are not familiar with the format.
Yesterday was the day of the DAPLE (C1) exam. Usually when I do one of these exams I write it up straight away, but I’ve left it till the next day because I was feeling a bit miserable. It all went a bit piriform, I’m afraid. Let’s take it step by step:
I arrived at the embassy half an hour early. Better than half an hour late, I suppose, but they don’t open the gates till nine. No exceptions. Even when their own staff arrived the secrity guy wouldn’t answer the buzzer till nine sharp. I was in need of a wee, and I had a congested nose, so being out in the cold did not help at all. And then a brazilian and a…. venezuelan(?) guy arrived and started speaking spanish. I tried to ignore them. I don’t need to hear spanish today, lads!
When we were let in, she showed my to a nice reception room – much nicer than the noisy, echoey office the exams have been held in previously. I was the only student there, so I was just sat at a table, with the invigilator about fifteen feet away at a different table. My face was bunged up, I had to breathe through my mouth a lot of the time, and I had to keep blowing my nose noisily.
The Compreensão da Leitura went well. 90 minutes, 60 marks. There were some extracts from articles about modern life: an overview of the work of António Damásio and a missing paragraph exercise based on a story about how portuguese kids coped with remote learning during lockdown. The missing paragraph thing is quite annoying: it soaks up a lot of time for only 5 marks. I was worried that I was behind schedule but of course it was fine: The last 40 marks are fill-in-the-blank questions, which are much quicker than the ones where you have to read the text, so you don’t have to be strict about hitting one mark every minute and a half. It was definitely challenging, but I had done the preparation and I reckon I got most of the marks.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie.
Next came the Produção e Interação Escrita. 90 minutes, 3 exercies. I found myself getting writer’s block at first, suddenly doubting my spelling of almost every word. I wrote a formal letter to the local council, telling them they shouldn’t close the library, recycling as much from the question itself as I possibly could.
Next up was a discussion stemming from this article from the Expresso (the section beginning “O problema não é a ansiedade dos jovens quanto o futuro…”). I decided to branch off in the middle and talk about George Bernard Shaw’s novel “Back to Methuseleh” which takes as its premise that if you could only extend the human lifespan to hundreds of years then everyone would suddenly be incentivised to really work at dealing with entrenched, long-term social problems. This seemed like quite a fun diversion: the trouble with always having to write about environmental issues is that it can feel a bit preachy, so I was glad I made it more interesting. Generally, if you bore the marker they are less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. With hindsight, I think I might have confused some of the plot points with “The Trouble with Lichen” by John Wyndham, which is also about extending human life, but never mind; I doubt the marker will have read both, so I think I’m pretty safe.
The third of the three exercises was the usual mechanical rewriting of sentences into different forms: passing direct to indirect speech, switching in and out of subjunctive and using gerunds. I’ve done a shit-ton of fiddly grammar exercises lately in Qual é a Dúvida: about a hundred pages of them, in fact, so I felt really confident about my answers. Done, dusted, 5 minutes left over, so I skimmed the first and second texts, strafing the errors. Some really stupid ones! Probably saved myself about ten lost marks there.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie.
Hey, well, it’s all going well so far right, as the optimist said as he fell past the thirteenth floor.
Next up was squeaky bum time: the Compreensão do Oral, which is always everyone’s least favourite. It’s 40 minutes and 25 points. I have done six of these for practice recently and was starting to feel quite confident, so I just tried to stick to my new system and keep a cool head. I couldn’t though – I felt like I was swimming around in a sort of soup of words. And the questions were really ambiguous too, For example, there was a passage about the rehabilitation of the Iberian Lynx (I can’t find the exact recording but here’s a podcast that deals with the same situation). At one point he talks about a kind of rabbit called the Coelho Bravo which he said was essential to the Lynx because it was so specialised that the Coelho Bravo was “almost its only food” but he didn’t say what else it ate. The answers included one that just said it was “essential” and one that said it was essential because it was the lynx’s “only food”. I didn’t like the first because it’s not specific enough about why the rabbit is essential, but the second seemed to be overstepping the mark so I played it safe and stuck with the first.
Then there was one about wolves in portugal (I’ve listened to an audiobook about them, but it didn’t help much I’m afraid), a section from this interview with the author of a book called “Adeus Futuro”. The invigilator told me afterwards that even she couldn’t answer the questions for this section (cool cool cool cool cooooool).
And finally an interview with friend of the blog Marco Neves. I’ve read one of his books, actually had another of his books on order at the time, and I once did a course he taught so I have a pretty good idea of the way he thinks. And Ainda bem, because the fourth question in the section was about a specific word – I can’t remember what it was but it began with “des” and the question was about whether the des- was there to reinforce the root word or contradict it. I didn’t catch it the first time around so I listened out for it really carefully the second time and I swear, dead ass, as the young folk say, that he didn’t bloody say it. I mean, I know he must have, but I didn’t hear. I made an educated guess, but I dunno. I was gutted. I’ve been scoring 17-20/25 lately and I’d be surprised if I got 15 in this. Horrifying.
Break. Water, toilet, blow nose, eat a square of chocolate, suck a menthol sweetie, say, when asked how I am, that I just want to die.
The final part of the exam is the shortest, but it’s quite nerve-wracking because it’s recorded on video: Produção e Interação Orais. 25 minutes, and you’d think it would feel like hours, but it doesn’t, it feels like about twelve seconds. With hindsight, I wish I’d written some reminders to myself on a card about controlling the rate at which I speak, and slipped it into my backpack. so I could have read it before that part of the exam and refocus my thoughts before the real thing.
Again, I’d spent quite a bit of time preparing for this and I had developed an apresentação which I hadn’t memorised but reckoned I could use all or part of in talking about myself. Weirdly, though, she didn’t really give me much room to expand on my answers. It was just Where were you born, where do you live now, how long have you lived here, how long have you been learning portuguese and a few other things. I even got cut off if I said too much. Gutted! I’d been prepared to give my silly discussion of running in the park, talk about the books I’ve read and maybe even get into talking about the comedian I’d seen on the previous evening, but I didn’t get a chance. My answers were fine, but I thought this would be my chance to shine and it wasn’t.
Me trying to finish my Apresentação before embrassy security throws me out in the gutter
The next part of the interaction is a visual prompt and I was handed most boring picture in the world, with two men and a woman sitting at a desk and almost no other objects visible in the shot. I talked about meetings and how a lot of work meetings were happening online now, and how I quite liked that as an introvert. I did some light-hearted banter about what it’s like when you’re trying to write an email and someone says your name but you have no idea what they are asking you because you weren’t listening. Not exactly comedy gold but it was reasonably grammatically correct. I suspect there were a lot of Umms in there though. I hadn’t quite filled the time, so she gave me a follow-up question: did I think there was a gender pay gap in the workplace. Oh shit, I thought, was that what I was supposed to talk about? Women in the workplace? Oh well, I started saying it depended on the specific company and that in my industry, social services, women were really well represented in senior positions, but that was as far as I got because we hit the time limit again. Probably just as well, really, I don’t normally want to give pat answers so I think I would have got into lifetime earnings after that and come a cropper on the vocabulary.
Lastly, we had to do an interaction about starting an export business. Normally, you’d do this with another student but since there weren’t any, it was me and the invigilator, with a third person taking notes. Why did they need to take notes when it was all on camera? I dunno.
The scenario was that I wanted to export olive oil and she had to persuade me to export cork instead. Wha’? What do I know about the relative profitability of those things? I didn’t really follow the sequence properly and kept fighting my corner even though the script said I was supposed to agree with her in the end. I finally took the hint but I was in the middle of saying that my wife has lots of bags but she doesn’t have one made of cork, so I turned on a dime and said that, now I thought about it, maybe I’d but her a nice cork bag. Except I started a clause with “talvez”, and the subjunctive circuits of my brain creaked into action, creaked to a halt again and I remember really clearly hearing myself entone in slow motion… “de…ver….ia…” and knowing it was wrong but just feeling so out of control at this point that I didn’t even try and correct myself. Feck.
They stopped the tape and asked me if I felt it had gone well and I said no, definitely not and I stood up. They asked me some more things while I was gathering my pens, stuffing menthol sweeties into my mouth, nose and ears and wriggling my coat on. I coudn’t even string a sentence together. At one point, I turned to them both and said “Juro que falo melhor do que…” and then couldn’t even think how to finish the sentence. Oh well, the recording had stopped so whatever.
I had lunch in Comptoir Libonais, then home, where I watched a movie and had some more nice food. First booze in months, too, but I’d earned it. Nose still streaming. Finished the rest of the menthol sweeties. Oh and there was a parcel. It was that Marco Neves book I’d ordered. God is mocking me.
Well, I guess it could be worse. There were some real low points but it could be a lacklustre pass. I’m not even pausing, I’m going to set my sights on DUPLE in May and start work now. I know I’ve said this many times before, but I absolutely have to talk more. I’ll never get there if I can’t talk naturally.
Here’s another letter. This one is written in a slightly less formal, less stylised way than the last one, but still fairly formal. I’m rewriting it in order to pick up the corrections. I’ve written it as me from the future, which is why I claim to be retired, fully fluent, etc.
Exmo Senhor
O meu nome é Colin Lusk e sou inglês mas tenho dupla cidadania portuguesa como consequência do meu casamento com uma portuguesa.
Somos reformados mas estamos à procura de um novo projecto ao qual podemos dedicar uns dois ou três anos da nossa “terceira idade”. Portanto, ficámos muito entusiasmos com as notícias oriundas de Angola. Segundo um artigo publicado no jornal Público, foram descobertos, no Sul do país, restos de uma aldeia que é capaz de iluminar o nosso entendimento da vida dos seres humanos mais antigos que já conhecemos*. Fizemos uma pesquisa e descobrimos que o projecto precisa de voluntários e de estagiários para apoiar o trabalho dos arqueólogos e dos historiadores que estão a fazer a maior parte do trabalho lá no planície.
A minha mulher era enfermeira e conselheira** e eu era consultor de informática. Acho que temos competências que podem ser úteis no sítio para salvaguardar a saúde dos trabalhadores e para manter a infraestrutura informática.
Além das nossas competências, falamos várias línguas: francês espanhol, italiano e inglês. É claro que falamos português também. Ela é nativa e eu consegui o nível C1 com a classificação de “Muito Bom” em Novembro 2023 graças a uma professora ótima. Portanto acho que não haverá problemas com a nossa interação com os outros membros da equipa de trabalhadores.
Anexo os nossos currículos.
Sem outro assunto e agradecendo antecipadamente a sua atenção.
Colin Lusk
*I originally wrote “dos quais já sabemos”, thinking of them as subjects of an objective study that we would know facts about, but that seems not to be the right way to go!
**Not Aconselhadora. That word does exist but it’s not what you call a counsellor.
I can’t tell you how hard it was not to make a reference to how much I enjoyed bridge and the music of Crackdust.
Environmental issues come up a lot on the produção e interação escrita section of the exam. This is about whether or not you separate your rubbish. Rewriting to make the corrections stick on my head.
Costumo contribuir para a recolha diferenciada de lixo. Comecei muito cedo, nos anos oitenta. Naquela altura não havia opções de diferenciar lixo doméstico mas eu era membro de um grupo chamado “Os Amigos da Terra” que mensalmente arranjava uma camioneta que seria estacionada no parque de estacionamento para que os moradores do bairro pudessem reciclar papel e garrafas.
Mais tarde, fiquei desiludido. Perdi a minha fé em Deus e no futuro, portanto deixei de fazer qualquer esforço para aumentar a sustentabilidade do nosso pequeno planeta. Mas ao longo dos anos o meu otimismo voltou. Quando a minha esposa deu à luz a nossa filha, este sentimento cresceu cada dia mais.
Por isso nos dias de hoje, presto muita atenção ao que deitamos fora: vidro, plástico, papel, baterias, metal* e mais. É tudo capaz de ser reutilizado ou reciclado. Para além disso, livros e roupas podem ser vendidos pelas** lojas de caridade; e borras de café, cascas de batatas folhas e saquinhos de chá tornam-se ração para a minha pilha de compostagem de estimação!. Mas fico convencido de que uma recolha diferenciada, ainda que seja necessária***, não é suficiente. Temos todos de prestar mais atenção ao que compramos e ao que desperdiçamos no nosso dia-a-dia. O nosso modo da vida é que tem de ser sustentável.
*Thanks to my terrible handwriting, the corrector read this as “metas”. I like the idea of having a special recycling facility for finish lines.
**I originally wrote this as ‘vendidos nas” but that seems to have conveyed idea that i was planning to sell them to the charity shop, which would be a bit rubbish!
***Bit risky having this adjective so far from the noun it’s modifying. I got the concordância wrong!
I have been practising Compreensão do Oral tests recently. They’re th hardest part of any CAPLE exam because even if you have read the answers, you still find yourself having to parse each one while trying to listen to what the recording is saying. This is nigh on impossible, and so it’s easy to drop marks.
What I’ve been finding works really well is to use the minute to scan each answer and underline one or two words that act as key words for the whole thing. That way, when the speaker answers the question, you only need to look at he underlined words. If its more ambiguous, maybe it’ll need more work, but over all, I find I can answer without wasting so much time, which means I don’t end up feeling left behind and panicky.
I find it works pretty well. I’m not getting perfect marks or anything but I feel much more in control and I am definitely going to use this in the DAPLE exam itself.
Formal letter – I’m rewriting this with some pointers. This text will probably still have a few errors in it because I’m typing it on a phone from terrible handwriting and referring to someone’s else’s notes at the same time. I hope it won’t be too terrible though, and the somos to make me think about the mistakes, so if there are a few typos, well, tanto faz.
Exmo Senhor
Venho por este meio pedir a sua atenção urgente no assunto do estado dos prédios na minha rua.
Quando eu e a minha família* mudámos de casa para este bairro, or prédios tinham paredes e portas de cores harmoniosas**. Ao longo dos anos, perderam a sua beleza. Ficámos envergonhados qia do convidámos os nossos amigos para jantar connosco em casa onde estamos rodeados por um amontoado de riscos, assinaturas e desenhos multicolores. Onde havia azulejos, hoje encontramos um quadrado vazio onde os azulejos desapereceram.
Considero isto um flagelo e um atentado à propriedade privada. Falamos com os nossos vizinhos que concordam, quase todos.
Por isso, encontrar-se anexado a esta carta uma lista de assinaturas. Todos nós pedimos que estabeleça uma sistema de segurança. Quer consistia em câmaras de vigilância, ou de agentes de segurança privada, as facínoras*** que cometem estes atos de vandalismo devem saber que não vamos tolerar seu comportamento.
Tendo estabelecido lei e ordem, mande uma equipa de empregados para pintar os prédios, encher os vazios e concertar as vidraças.
Para além disso, pedimos uma devolução dos custos do manutenção porque parece-nos que não foram bem gastos os últimos anos.
Sem outro assunto e agradecendo antecipadamente a sua atenção, subscrevo-me****
Colin
xxx
* This is a pretty bad start, actually, because the letter I’m supposed to be writing is meant to be on behalf of a residents group and I am whiffling on about my family here and don’t even remember to mention the group till much later because I hadn’t noticed that bit. Oh well… Never mind, but note to self: read the bloody question first, not half way through!
**Not a word I use often but I used Mr Bennett’s top tips and recycled a lot of words from the questions here and I’m the following paragraph.
***Bit of a strong word, this, but I was channeling Mel Smith’s energy from this sketch.
**** The opener and closer are off-the-shelf phrases to use in formal letter but there’s nothing to tell you how many kisses to put at the end so I’ve just guessed.
Corrected letter from a C1 DAPLE exam paper. It’s a letter to the president of the local council about CCTV cameras being used to combat graffiti. The argument I’m making is sort of stupid, but there are no ponta for being right. Oh and my handwriting is shit so she might not have caught all the mistakes so… You know… Caveat emotor and all that!
Exma Senhora Presidente
Venho por este meio explicar a minha opinião sobre a recente decisão de autorizar câmaras de vigilância no centro comercial.
Embora entenda as razões dadas para apoiar a decisão, parece-me improvável que este método sega o mais eficaz.
Antes de mais um estudo feito pela universidade de Londres em 2017* demonstrou que a taxa de sucesso é muito baixa. A maioria dos jovens participantes na cultura de graffiti usam ou capuzes ou bonés. Muitas vezes usam ambos. Além disso, os crimes** têm lugar durante a noite. Claro que estas circunstâncias juntas resultam em poucos criminosos presos.
Por isso tudo, as câmaras não representam um bom investimento***. Seriam um desperdício dos nossos impostos! Antes, sugiro um aumento do número de agentes de polícia ou, se não for possível, agentes de segurança privados****. Se bem que está alternativa sega mais cara, é mais eficaz. Ainda por cima, a população da nossa cidade sentir-se-ia mais segura se houvesse pessoas reais ao seu redor à procura de criminosos, de qualquer tipo, não só artistas de graffiti.
Com os melhores cumprimentos
Colin Lusk
* Nota do autor que não faz parte da carta: claro que este estudo não existe, mas se este carte fosse verdadeira, eu teria feito uma pesquisa adequada à situação
**The marker said this was a bit strong, but I’m middle aged and crime is crime and they should string ’em up by their goolies.
***I originally said they represented “bom valor” but that doesn’t seem to be a thing.
****I think my natural instinct is to make “privada” concordant with “segurança” but it seems to be the agents who are private, not the security.
Well, I had that exam prep lesson with Cristina from Say It In Portuguese and it was really helpful. We did a dummy “interação oral” test and gave me good feedback about what I’d done wrong in some written work, along with some advice about how to avoid stupid mistakes by – say – writing in an illegible scrawl. I’ve booked a few more over the next few weeks to get some more practice in. I’m determined to get a “very good” mark for a change.
Oof, well I’ve finished working my way through the exam paper. That aural comprehension part remains an absolute bastard. The DAPLE paper is like the rest I’ve come across: it doesn’t leave you much time to read, some of the answers seem purposely ambiguous, but I just about held on. But the fifth section has really long, detailed sentences. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how it’s possible to answer them all. I’m going to take a prep course from the Say it in Portuguese site that I mentioned a few weeks ago to try and hone my technique. I suspect that best strategy is probably to look at the later questions in each group and make little one-word notes about each, because by the end you’re more likely to be lost so you’ll be glad of the help. Then do teh same for any long questions so you don’t have to try and parse them while the person is talking. Maybe there’s something to be said for not even trying to answer the questions on the first reading; just make notes about what the person says and then use that in teh second round…? I dunno, that feels like a high-risk option though. Maybe divide the answers in half and try to answer the first half in the first reading and the second half in the second reading?
I’ve had a bit of a crisis of confidence recently, but it’s been quite useful in prompting me to reexamine my routine and make some changes.
I’ve been feeling for a while that, as much as I was enjoying the portuguese writing subreddit, I wasn’t really challenging myself very much. I tend to write the same kinds of things and yet I was making a lot of the same mistakes. Not only that, but the fact that it takes an hour or so each day means that I didn’t really have time for much else. Recently, some of the teachers have taken a well-earned break from correcting. There aren’t really enough to keep up with the number of students and so it seemed like a good time for me to withdraw, let some newer learners benefit from the experience, rather than hog it all for myself. Maybe I’ll go back to it later but for now, I think it’s time for a pause.
In the meantime, what I’ve decided to do is focus much more on book learning. I’ve been doing a couple of hours of grammar exercises in “Qual é a Dúvida” per day, just trying to get the nuts and bolts of the language right and firm up some of the things I’m still crap at.
I also – and I know I’ve said this a thousand times before – need to spend more time talking. It remains the achilles heel of my language learning. I’m an introvert anyway, so my smalltalk game is pathetic, even in English. When I try to speak Portuguese it’s even more stilted and unnatural. Actual, proper lessons are called for!
I’d like to do the DAPLE exam (that’s the C1, advanced diploma) in about 5 weeks but the experience on the podcast a few days ago has really shaken my confidence.
Luso 