Italian has been on the back burner for quite a while due to other priorities (eg. Russian), but I thought I should get to LingQ Advanced 1 before my three-year anniversary of starting Italian on LingQ back in February 2022.
Reaching LingQ Advanced 1, my stats were as follows:
| Note | ||
|---|---|---|
| Known Words | 29,880 | |
| lingQs | 55,348 | |
| lingQs learnt | 16,616 | |
| words read | 5.22M | (1M of these were extensive reading while listening to Harry Potter. Not including receiving text messages in Italian) |
| hours listened | 1,187 | |
| hours of speaking | 146 |
I estimate my total time with Italian to be somewhere between 1,500-2,000 hours.
Accordingly, upon reaching the milestone of Advanced 1, I took the reading and listening sections of a C1 exam I found online (the same place I got the B1 and B2 exams from).
https://eclexam.eu/sample-test-italian/
Both the reading (45 minutes) and the listening (35 minutes) included two exercises each - one multiple choice and one short-answer, each consisting of 10 questions.
I got the following results:
Reading: 75%
Listening: 95%
So it seems that for me, I could pass C1 comprehension exams after getting LingQ Advanced 1. Even though I moved away from primarily studying on LingQ, I tried to run most of my reading through LingQ afterwards just to mark words as Known. I have continued to update my stats accordingly.
However, I honestly felt this exam wasn’t easy and I had to concentrate hard. Both the two reading and the two listening sections seemed content which a native speaker would encounter. The first listening exercise was an interview with a famous Italian who spoke with a strong Roman accent, for instance.
Perhaps I was a bit rusty and should’ve done a little more practice before, to bring the language back to the forefront of my mind, but I don’t think it would’ve done too much necessarily.
For me, from passing the B1, B2, and now C1 comprehension exams, sure, I’ve come a long way in the language, but it still just feels like this incompetence with the language won’t go away. The level of automaticity you need to reach real competence in a language just takes so long. Sure, I can watch movies, listen to native podcasts, read some books, and have full conversations with people in Italian, but there’s still many missing words and it requires so much more concentration than in my mother tongue. The path to automaticity is a very long one.
After taking this C1 comprehension test, it’s kinda disappointing seeing my level. I thought that C1 comprehension in Italian would’ve felt more competent than I currently am. So even after completing a C1 comprehension test, there is still a long way to go.
Comparing to my stats from 27 months ago reaching LingQ Intermediate 1 and passing the comprehension sections of the B1 exam, and 23 months ago, when I reached LingQ Intermediate 2 and passed the comprehension sections of the B2 test:
| Intermediate 1 / B1 comprehension | Intermediate 2 / B2 comprehension | Advanced 1 / C1 comprehension | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Known Words | 6,700 (old level) | 13,224 (near old level) | 29,880 |
| est. total hours | 300 - 400 | ~700 | 1,500 - 2,000 |
| words read | 0.75M | 1.5M | 5.2M |
| hours listening | 157 | 474 | 1,187 |
| hours of speaking | ≤5 | 22 | 146 |