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Jerom wrote:I passed my CAE exam in 2012 I believe, being 0.2 points short of a CPE degree. I'm probably at CPE level right now with relative ease.
Posting lots on forums like agecomm was extremely beneficial for my english, aswell as spending many hours listening to english youtubers. Those enabled me to get my english close to native level I believe. The only aspect Im lacking in is speaking, since I practice that relatively infrequently. Something to improve on in the future.
Congrats on passing the CAE! I once wanted to take the CAP, but eventually I balked at the idea of paying for an English cert.
I took my degree in English, I mean we studied our subject matter in English only. And before that I had already accumulated extensive knowledge of English (especially vocabulary), though my sentence structure wasn't quite as good as that of a native speaker.
Eventually, I worked in an international institution for a few years, where we had to write law amendments and reports. Our working languages were English, French and German. So I was mostly working in English, but I could manage using French too, and German, to a small extent.
During the last years, I've been mostly using English every day, so eventually my mind switched to English as my primary language. As a result, sometimes I struggle to speak my native language or to remember some idioms from Romanian. Now I also mostly think in English, so there's that.
I still have moments when I'm mentally lazy and I write in a broken English, using cobbled together sentences and stuff like that. But when I manage to focus I think I can get close to native level. Though, obviously, I'm not living in an English-speaking country, so my speaking skills are a bit disconnected from my reading/writing skills. I need to spend a few years in an English-speaking country to get verbal fluency too, as well as an accent closer to the native one.
My biggest problem in english is still and will probably always be the spelling. But to be quite honest, my spelling in Dutch is lightyears behind the rest of my skills in the language or just skills on almost all subjects. I've spend years trying to improve the spelling and trying to remember as many things as I can, trying to be extremely careful when writing essays and stuff, but till this day my essays, even when I proofread them multiple times, end up having a small collection of spelling errors. I think it's about two per page, and more like five per page in english.
iNcog wrote:My university also offers that Tofel thing for like €50 but I'm not paying money to certify that I can speak English fluently.
For me the biggest advantage of having such a certificate is that you can put it in your CV and don't have to prove otherwise that you know English pretty well, as it's commonly respected.
I had created a thread about TOEIC/TOEFL tests a year ago (viewtopic.php?t=561) and as benj89 told me, it was actually ez. I hit 975 out of 990 (TOEIC). It's supposed to be C2 level, but I'm not sure it's representative of my real level in English.
Im still annoyed with my countless spelling errors but today I had a test about history of science where I had to write lots of long answers. That fortunately made me aware that I cant spell shit in dutch either.
In that case my english skill is relatively better than I thought.