A little apprehensive as to whether I did enough work ! It would be good to be in touch with someone before the event,
Hi - I don’t quite know what you’re looking for or if I can help, but I took the A2 in Vilamoura about 18 months ago and B2 at the same location 6 months ago. If you want to bounce any question off me, I’m happy to try and help. I understand from friends, the acoustics in Faro aren’t very good.
One reason for us choosing Vilamoura, but not much you can do about that now - and anyway, they’re not great at Vilamoura either. I think we are following a similar route to you. We’ve just clocked up 5 years and as soon as we receive the last few apostilled documents from the UK (hopefully next week) we’ll be putting in our citizenship application.
Good luck
BarryB
I thought I had better post some additional info here just in case it helps anyone in the same situation. OK, so I did the A2 Exam yesterday in Faro, I was a little uptight about it because it’s quite a few ‘decades’ since I last did any kind of exam. The people organizing were friendly but wouldn’t speak English and all the instructions on the length of time available for the different parts were all given in rapid and fairly quiet Portuguese.
The first part is a multiple choice (various examples online) which is reasonably straightforward but requires a style of thought and logic that you have to get into; otherwise, it’s easy to apply too much initiative and think that there are two potential answers from some of the options given.
For me, the reading of the text and the answers to specific questions about the text was straightforward probably very much due to the help of ‘Practice Portuguese’ and the excellent audio/videl resources, podcasts etc that I have been enjoying greatly.
The last part of the morning was written text and I missed some of that due to not understanding the amount of time available, I thought I had more time and went back over my first part and double checked it whereas I should have just got something down in writing. My bad. My advice would be to go through everything and do all the bits you find most simple and quick then go back and do the harder stuff that needed a bit more thought. Next time !!
Then came the comprehension part where an audio track was played and we had to answer questions on what we heard - a disaster for me and I think for many there because the sound system was terrible and all the sound ‘muzzy and distorted’ so this was less of a Portuguese test and more of a hearing test. I could work out one word in four or five so had to guess the answers to most of the questions based on the way the prospective answers were phrased and their likelihood of being correct. Not very easy and if I got some right it would be down to ‘best guess’ rather than anything else. Probably the fact that we get such crisp, perfect pronunciation from Rui and Joel made it even more of a contrast to have to listen to distorted sound over an ancient PA system. The source file was mp3 but I cannot imagine how they managed to spoil it so much.
Some hanging about after that as the timing for each named candidate’s oral part was posted on a board during the morning, they paired us off, and even if I had been with a specific person that would not have mattered as the pairing was their selection.
Luckily I managed to meet my ‘pair’ and we had half an hour in a quiet space to find out a little about each other and to chat and prepare a little prior to the actual oral interview which I would suggest to others was a good move, the interview was filmed and recorded.
This was mostly describing to the professor and to each other the content of pictures we were shown - as well as talking a little about where we lived and what we did in our free time etc. The people were ‘sympatic’ and smiley and were certainly not there to trip us up or do anything other than check that we were able to string together some understandable conversation. So oral part fairly simple really for anyone using the resources here.
Overall I left with the feeling that the fact that we had all put ourselves through the process on our own time and initiative was appreciated by the organisers and they were there merely to see that we were all able to make a reasonable job of communicating with others and integrating into Portuguese life.
Not sure if I passed because of the timing mess up with the written work and the horrible audio comprehension session - I am told I will know on 25th March ! Vamos ver !
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Thanks for posting all these details. It will be helpful for others about to take the test
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