So I went to Bristol, a city that lies across the water from my beloved Wales, to my A2 Catalan exam. It was a lovely day (see the pic!) and I felt really confident. As the exam was in a different city, in a university I had never been to, I was quite glad to find it easily - Bristol University's maps are really good! We arrived early (I was with a friend who was also taking it) and waited for the teacher to arrive. And then we started:

Listening: For some reason I really struggled on this part. I've listened to hours and hours of Catalan radio and yet I just couldn't separate the words or make out the sentences. Hmm, so I'll need to work on this, but perhaps it was the whole getting into it problem whereby at first it's difficult to get into the groove etc.

Reading: I've never really had any problem in reading Catalan, it being so similar to Spanish and all. Plus, I try to read newspapers in Catalan every week, so this seemed pretty easy. Although ambiguous questions can be REALLY annoying!

Speaking: Ah, the oral, the thing that most people fear (including my friend, he was so nervous)! But it seemed to go OK, I mean it was only A2, so I only had to say some things correctly and have a modicum of variety in my sentence patterns and tense use etc. So i'd say this was pretty good.

Overall? A good day, but I hope that the listening section doesn't mess it all up. But we'll see, and sometimes you have to make errors to realise where you are going wrong, and only then can you fix it. I've learnt a lot, but there's more work to do! Vaig apendre molt aquest any, però he de fer més!