TOPIK

Guess what? I signed up to take TOPIK (finally)! It's in less than 2 months!

Well.... I haven't been studying very hard before, and definitely not now either. Yeah I know, it's no good. But the motivation is low. So..... I thought about making a chart of the mock TOPIK scores I have taken up to this point to see how much I need to score on the writing portion in order to get to the next reasonable level.

                            Test Date     Reading        Listening        Writing (need points to level) 

47th TOPIK        10/13/19       52                ---                        ---                  

52nd TOPIK       5/16/20         58                56                        6 (L3) / 36 (L4) / 76 (L5)

64th TOPIK        8/30/20         56                68                        26 (L4) / 66 (L5)

47th TOPIK        12/28/20       68                68                        14 (L4) / 54 (L5) / 94 (L6)

36th TOPIK        8/9/21           70                64                        16 (L4) / 56 (L5) / 96 (L6)

41th TOPIK        9/4/21           74                68                        8 (L4) / 48 (L5) / 88 (L6)

37th TOPIK        10/15/21       60                58         

78th TOPIK        10/16/21       64                80                        28 - Level 4  (172 total)            

Looking at the data, I've definitely improved... but I've plateaued. Well, I definitely think I know more than before, because I probably got to the other scores by purely guessing. I actually know what the problems are saying now. However, because I haven't been reading Korean and speaking for a while, I'm not as confident as before, so I take my tests much slower than before.

From the results, I think getting to Level 5 is very possible. The easiest two questions already count as 20 points. I can probably get at least another 20 points from the remaining two essay questions. The problem is to try a bit harder to get the style of essay they want to see. It is impossible to get to Level 6 at this point unless I REALLY try to get A TON more vocab down and more confident in my reading skills that I'm not missing any questions from #1-40. 

So what now? 

1. Memorize more vocab! I think definitely continue to make up essays from the TOPIK questions like what I was doing before to practice getting the vocab in my mind.
2. Read A TON more articles. I need to get my reading comprehension up! So I can understand the article usually, after I read it twice. But that's too much re-reading! I need to read it first time and understand it right away.
3. Listening more understanding! I think I'll take out the TOPIK listening transcripts and listen along. I probably just didn't pick up some pronunciation and sentence structure up well because I wasn't used to that way of saying that word or the sentence pattern. But I think listening to it a few more times with and without transcripts would help me a lot more.
4. Look up essay prompts to get as close to the model answer as possible. 
5. Plan to take a MOCK every 2 weeks until the test day so I can monitor my improvement. The goal is to get to 76 points per section. That means about 3-6 more questions correctly.
6. Analyze which TYPES of questions I'm getting the most incorrectly, and find test taking techniques for them. 
7. Analyze Yeji's correction to my writing and try to avoid them in the future.

Alright. Fighting!