The Migros Klubschule thinks I am at the beginning of C1 (which is the “advanced” level). Which is very flattering — but also does not seem entirely accurate. On May 30th, I did another “Einstufungstest” (placement test) and it came back as end of B1/beginning of B2. So it’s a big jump/improvement in 3 months, and that’s why I’m wondering whether I have not noticed a big improvement, or the results are off.

Estimating the effort: I did 9 hours of private lessons in the past 3 months, somewhere between 5 and 10 hours of homework (grammar/writing), one movie entirely in German, more listening and speaking than usual (thanks to MuKi Treff meetings and travel during school holidays) — let’s say 5 hours, about the same amount of reading (childcare and financial paperwork). So that’s at least 25 (fairly intensive) hours, which is almost equivalent to a semester of studying, if I was attending a course at school.

Cool, so it seems like there’s been progress and all that chipping away at German has been adding up. The exact “level” does not matter as much — keeping it up does!