I found out yesterday that I passed my Spanish phone test. The change in score moved me 34 places higher on the list, and I'm currently ranked in the high 20's. My highest rank yet.
In the week following the test, I had convinced myself that I had failed. So happy to have been wrong about that.
My test felt like it went ok, but I thought it could have gone better. I talked non-stop, like a teenage girl, for 25 minutes. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I counted that as a good thing. On the bad side, I often couldn't understand my interviewer. Her accent was difficult for me, as well as her velocity. I guessed a few times at what she had asked. She didn't stop me in my answers, so I just hoped that my responses were somewhat close to what she'd asked. Also in the bad camp, was that I was too nervous to analyse what tenses I'd used and which ones I should try to use before we hung up. I didn't end up using complex sentence structures. I was really wound up so I forgot to say things like, "If I were Obama, I would...., in order to....", which would have shown a knowledge of the conditional and subjunctive tenses.
So after 11 tough weeks in Xela, Guatemala, and nine hours of lessons over Skype with Betty, a teacher from Oaxaca, Mexico, I got the passing grade. I'm very happy to have passed, but I'm also just thrilled and relieved to be done with studying and worrying about the test.
Guate was tough on me, mostly because of my fear over the upcoming exam. It made it hard for me to allow myself to do anything but study. Any time I socialized a bit with other students and travelers, I felt like it was at the expense of studying, and that I was endangering my result. I was there with a goal, and unfortunately that goal wasn't to have a lot of fun with other travelers. I didn't want to have the regret of knowing I could have done more. It was an exhausting experience.
This wasn't the type of attitude that allowed me to enjoy my time in Guatemala, but thankfully, it was the type of attitude that allowed me to pass the Spanish test.
