After six months of grueling study for the B1 Italian language exam required for citizenship by marriage, the exam is finally behind me. If the test is ahead of you, do make sure you read to the end, as I want to save you from the same grave mistake I made (you’re welcome).

For those of you just joining us, I detail my quest for EU citizenship in the post "How to Break Up with a Nation." The journey has been rife with frustrations, obstacles, realizations, and resolutions. It's my most personal post to date, this said by a woman who has written a memoir. 

For reasons laid out in that post, in December of 2022, I decided to abandon my quest for French citizenship and instead go for Italian. As the wife of an Italian citizen—even one as thinly connected as Keith is to his Italian great-grandfather—Italian law says I'm entitled to citizenship myself. Though I have extra hoops to jump through. Or one hoop, really, but a major one. 

To apply for Italian citizenship via marriage and get my own maroon passport emblazoned with the EU crest like the rest of the family, I have to submit a certificate saying that I passed the B1 Italian-language exam, indicating intermediate language competency.

I took a break from writing novels to focus on studying, throwing myself into the process whole hog, as they say (or maybe, whole prosciutto?). With the exam in June, I had six months to prepare. I briefly flirted with taking a course, but after living in Italy, my knowledge base is so strange—my vocabulary is rich compared to my spotty ability to conjugate in tenses I’ve never had to use while shopping or chatting with neighbors in the street—I decided I’d be better off putting together my own course.

Preparing for the B1 Italian Language Examination

Besides, I like the independence that comes from cobbling together my own path. So every day these last six months, I worked from workbooks designed to prepare students for the exam,  Pronti per il Test and Percorso CILS Cittadinanza. They were both useful for learning and solidifying grammar points (pronouns, articles, tenses, and vocabulary), but I found the former more closely reflected what was on the actual exam. More on that below.

To attune my ear for the listening portion of the exam, I watched Italian movies/ TV shows and listened to podcasts like Coffee Break Italian (fabulous for grammar as well) and Podcast 100% in Italiano. I used Duolingo and Busuu language learning apps, which made reading and hearing the language a little more instinctive. Oh! And every day I read in Italian, mostly my little Italian novellas for students. 

The part of the exam that scared me the most was the verbal section. My language is functional, especially in restaurants, but spotty. Plus, I clam up under pressure. Like when I’m on the street and someone asks me a question and in answering I realize I don’t know a word, or, I don’t know, WHEN I’M ACTUALLY BEING EVALUATED. Plus, like many language learners, I’ve realized that dulling my language anxiety with Barolo only works in situations where you can whip out your wineglass. Not appropriate in an examination.

There are loads of ways to sharpen your speaking Italian—through classes or there are apps that can connect you with a teacher to speak with—but I opted for Tandem, which I learned about via a Facebook group for Americans pursuing Italian citizenship. Tandem connects native speakers who want to learn each other’s languages. You make a profile, state what language you want to learn, and sit back because people start pinging you to communicate. You begin with text communication, or you can do voice recordings. There’s a translation feature built in (though if you want to use that more than a couple times a day, you need to upgrade from the free version). People are mostly there to practice speaking though, so soon enough people will be asking you to set up calls, which again, happen via the Tandem app. I quickly, and to my horror, learned that some people use the Tandem app for services not listed on the company website. That is, I got way too many people calling me “bella” and commenting on my beautiful smile. Blech. But the good thing about Tandem is that when you talk to someone, you give each other public feedback. So I only responded to people who had great, and non-lecherous, reviews. 

I talked to one guy where I didn’t feel a good enough sense of connection, but the other three I’ve not only kept, we’ve migrated over to Facetime or What’s App (better video quality, and also if I hop onto Tandem for a moment, I’ll get too many pings). We send each other messages several times a week, and we have chats almost every week, so I practice speaking between one and three hours a week. I thought it would be a strict half the time in English and half the time in Italian (which it was with the guy that was super nice, but I didn’t quite match with), but with my bow-hunter friend in Friuli-Venezia, my mom of three friend in Vicenza, and my air-force law student friend in Naples, we mostly just blur the two languages. Later, when I’m recalling a conversation to my family, I’ll forget what language we were speaking at any particular time. Which actually feels like it doubles the practice. Even when I’m speaking in English, I’m thinking for an Italian speaker. 

Reflecting on this patchwork model, I’d say each element had its importance, even Duolingo (it was in the community board that I learned that the word "qualche" (some) is always followed by a singular noun, i.e. qualche volta, which looks like "some time" , but is really "sometimes". But Duolingo alone wouldn’t have cut it, Busuu was excellent for learning specific vocabulary, like flight-oriented vocabulary when I needed to write a review of an airline as part of the exam.

While every aspect of study served its purpose, the most powerful tool for me was flashcards.  As I watched movies or used apps, when I hit vocabulary or grammar rules I didn't know, I took a screenshot. The next day, I'd make flashcards of that content. Whenever I ran anything through Google Translate, I took a screenshot, and turned those, too, into flashcards. When I worked in workbooks or spoke to friends on Tandem, I made notes. Then I turned those notes into flashcards. The last week before the exam, I turned over every spare moment to going through those flashcards, putting them into piles based on correctness. These cards included concepts like "rules for when to use ne" and "conventions for addressing letters from very formal to very casual”, as well as vocabulary.  I worked until that "don't know it cold" column was empty and then I'd do it all over again. 

What a comfort to walk into the test with a rubber band around the flashcards, snug in my purse like validation that I’d done the work and was ready for battle. 

Taking the B1 Italian Language Examination

The B1 exam takes place several times a year in dedicated locations (each location may or may not offer the test each time). My closest testing site was Washington, DC, so I drove up the night before to stay with a friend. I debated staying at a hotel where I could focus on going through my study materials over and over, but ultimately I decided—much as I forbid my kids from studying the night before the SAT's—before the exam the best thing to do is build confidence and stabilize the psyche. And my greatest stability comes through connection. So I stayed with the very friend who went with me to my failed meeting at the French consulate. We laughed until we cried, remembering that debacle and how thoroughly the French do not want me.

The next morning I allotted 60 minutes for a 20 minute drive, but I prefer that as panic-prevention when I inevitably can’t find a parking garage. I checked in with the woman at the front desk (who spoke to me in English) and smiled at the children arriving for Italian summer camp. Wow, what resources are available in a city! 

The test began promptly at 9:30, and I mean promptly. So the guy that called at 9:25 and said he was almost there, the test began without him. 

A proctor ushered the five of us test-takers into a conference room and seated us around a large table where we found packets waiting for us. Once in the room, I'm pretty sure the whole test was proctored in Italian. I can’t say for sure because my heart was beating so fast, it impaired the laying down of memories. I do remember asking, "Cominciamo?" (shall we begin?) at one point, which suggests I felt the need to speak Italian even when not taking the test. The proctor said “Si, si!" and we all opened our books. Turns out none of us had gotten the memo that after we checked our identifying information and taken a photo of our unique tracking number, we could open our packets (if you are interested, here is the reported structure of the exam, though it was incorrect, which I’ll tell you about later). 

The sixth tester entered the room about ten minutes in. Luckily, he sat on my deaf side (did you know I have a deaf side?) because he proceeded to eat corn nuts THROUGH THE ENTIRE TWO-HOUR WRITTEN PORTION. Seriously, every couple of minutes he'd reach into his satchel, rustle around in a crinkly bag, and then began the crushing sound of a corn nut crumpling, followed by a fainter few munches. Then the cycle would repeat.

I can't believe anyone would bring any food into the exam (it's only two hours, then you get a break before the listening portion), but corn nuts? It seems like the most ludicrous snack imaginable for a testing situation. The rest of us hardly sipped water. I hate to generalize about so many people all at once, but you know the corn nut eater was a guy, right? Even if I didn’t say it? I know, I know, not all, or even most, guys are that clueless about the presence of others. I’m sure all of you men out there would be as appalled as I at the corn nut muncher.

Afterwards, when I told the story to my husband and daughter, Keith loudly proclaimed NOT ALL GUYS WOULD DO THIS but then more quietly admitted, “but I can’t imagine any woman eating corn nuts in an exam ever.” To which Siena and I laughed and laughed. 

In any case, that first two hours was made up of reading short passages and then answering multiple choice questions, longer texts to evaluate reading comprehension, a text with words missing that you had to supply from three options per missing word, and a short section on pronouns where you had to write in (not multiple choice) the correct pronoun to complete a sentence. Both books prepared me well for this (Pronti probably did a better job, as it tested pronouns constantly in every single section), as did all the reading I did which made it all flow pretty easily.

The last part of that two hour stretch was writing, where we had to pretend to answer a post-flight survey, write an ad to sell an object of our choice, and write a letter. In some versions of the test that letter is formal, for instance writing to a school administrator about a child's gluten allergy. And in some, it's casual, like in a practice test where I wrote to a friend about a trip to an agriturismo. I had practiced this by studying the prompts in my two test prep books and the old tests I found on-line, and writing letters in Google Translate to evaluate how I did and how I could improve. Thank goodness, all that work made this part pretty easy. At least it felt easy.

After we all finished this two hour section and some of us had espresso (there are advantages to taking an exam at an Italian cultural center), we trooped back in to listen to audio recordings for the listening portion of the exam. Luckily, Sig. Corn Nut put aside his favorite snack for this part.

I was particularly worried about this listening portion because the test prep materials conflicted with each other and with previous exams. I’m spelling it all out here because I’ve fielded many questions since my exam, so I know a lot of you out there are waiting for my blow-by-blow so you can best prepare for your own turn at the conference table.

The listening section begins with a series of dialogues and you have to answer a multiple-choice question about each dialogue. But each test prep book had different numbers of dialogues, so I didn’t know how many to expect, nor did I know how many times I would hear them and how much time I’d have to answer the questions. Why this isn’t spelled out in the test prep books, I have no idea. 

Here’s how my test in June of 2023 went: There were four dialogues that we listened to, one right after the other. Then we had a minute to look over the four questions, one per dialogue. Then we listened to the dialogues again. After the second round we got another minute or two, then went straight into the second and final round of four dialogues. 

It would be far, far easier if you heard a dialogue and then answered the question and then listened to the second dialogue. It is HARD to hold four dialogues in your head to wait for the act break, so it becomes difficult to resist reading the questions as you listen to the dialogue. But if you are reading, you are not listening, and you miss the material you need to actually answer the question. Practice helps here, as you’ll learn what your best strategy is—maybe closing your eyes and not reading the questions until after you’ve heard each set of four dialogues, or scanning them quickly to create a frame before listening. You do you.

My second reason for worry was this next section where you listen to a recording and then respond yes or no, indicating if a specific phrase was said in the recording. This is incredibly challenging because if you are waiting to hear a phrase and you don't hear it, you don’t know if that’s because a) you missed it (or misheard it), or b) if the answer was “no”, it’s not in the recording. What terrible test construction! Yes, it tests if you can discern Italian words from sound-alike words, but wouldn’t listening comprehension do that, without getting all these false negatives? All the old tests I took included this section, as did the Pronti per il Test book, though the CILS book did not. Given that all the old tests I found were from 2018 and earlier, I had to hope that the CILS book had it right, and it was no longer part of the test. 

Or at the very least, it was still part of the test, but in the format that matches Pronti per il Test, where a man and woman switch off lines, so if a woman concludes her sentence, you are cued that the phrase should have been in that line, so you can answer yes or no and move on to listening for the next phrase. (Gosh I hope this makes sense, it will when you start studying).

When it’s all a single narrator, like in the old exams, you can be waiting to hear "ascolti ancora gli uccelli" which isn’t in the track, and meanwhile the track is going on without you and you've missed the final ten questions.

Well, I am here to tell you that the test DOES include this section AND it is a single narrator. Ugh. Not only that, you only hear the track a single time. Lucky for me, I somehow was able to read three phrases at a time and listen for all of them, so if the first wasn’t said, but then I heard the second, I could note “no” and then “yes”. In any case, while I still think this is a terrible way to assess language proficiency, I do think I nailed it. 

Thank goodness for those old exams or I would have been thrown for a loop. The one thing to note as you go hunting for old exams on-line, in the old days (I think 2017 and before) scoring was done differently, such that there was a penalty (-1) for a wrong answer. Lucky for us, they’ve changed it, and now you get zero for a wrong answer, same as a skipped one, so guess away! You’ve got nothing to lose. Unless they change it again, and here’s hoping they don’t.

The final section is another recording, often an interview, that you hear twice and answer questions about. This would have been easy enough, but the proctor came in at this point, as this section was listed in our guide as 20 minutes long. The test is actually 30 minutes long so we were NOT done. I suspect this interruption meant some of us missed content. But, as I said, we listened to the track twice, so it wasn’t the end of the world. At least not for me, hopefully not for anyone else. It’s not like she walked in munching corn nuts.

All in all, I’d be surprised if I didn’t pass the reading and writing and listening portions. While there were a few questions I stumbled on, most of these were questions I would have scratched my head about in English as well because they involve inference and often you can infer things two different ways (i.e. one reading comprehension question asked if Maria’s friend helped her find her phone. Well, she thought of calling the phone, but does that count as helping? I can read too much into these things). But even if I missed all of those, you only need 60% to pass and I feel pretty good about it. It felt easier than any practice test I’ve taken, mostly because I’ve taken so many.

As the proctor came in to pick up our packets, she asked, in Italian, if anyone wanted to go first for the verbal part—perhaps they had somewhere to be? The woman to my right, who I suspect lived in Italy for some period of time with her Italian-speaking husband, given how easily she rattled things off like that the heater had just gone off (which took me a beat to understand), instantly volunteered, followed closely by the guy who I think also was married to an Italian-speaking spouse— given the ease of his smile as he answered, “un pochino” (a little) when I asked in Italian if he was nervous—and myself. The other three people looked back and forth to each other, so either they didn’t care when they did the oral portion, or they didn’t understand the question.

The first woman got materials to peruse before her oral exam, while the rest of us milled around. When she went in for the interview, the guy in front of me was handed the materials. He flipped through them briefly and then stood around, waiting. The woman and the proctors were having a gay old time, as far as I could tell by all the laughing. She passed for sure. 

Then the guy went in, and I got handed the materials in the form of two pieces of paper. One had a picture of a guy in a too-small sweater with a caption that read, in Italian, that I had given a sweater to a friend as a gift but it wasn’t the right size. I was to pretend the examiners were the friend, offering instructions for how to return it, including directions for how to take the bus to the shop. Ah. This is what the test description and breakdown meant by “role play”. 

The second was a photo of a baby and a dog with instructions that I would have to describe the photo. 

I would like to tell you that I spent the next 10 minutes working through how I would manage these, including rehearsing vocabulary and verb tenses and moods (Italian doesn’t just have tenses, it also has moods—for instance the subjunctive, a construction you use after any phrase akin to “I think that”, “I believe”, “It could be”, etc. The subjunctive isn’t tested on the B1, but I’d planned to throw it in, mostly because I figured I needed any point in my corner). But in all honesty, I literally just stared at the wall. 

I’d practiced talking a lot. I practiced three times a week with my Italian friends from the Tandem app, I practiced sample interview questions in the car as I drove all around and the entire two hour drive to DC, and I practiced with sample tests). It had gotten to the point that I was actually less nervous for this part than the rest of the exam. As long as I didn’t try to get fancy, I could say pretty much anything and I knew it. I could even say it with a subjunctive mood!

What I did not practice was the verbal portion after three hours of intense testing while trying to beat back a migraine.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the migraine? Yes, I woke up with it. I struggled for some time with whether or not I should take my meds, but those meds often make me groggy to the point that I’d stumble telling someone, in English, how to make a sandwich. I couldn’t take that chance. So I hopped myself up on Advil and caffeine and hoped for the best. 

All this to say that I did not use my 10 minutes wisely. Instead, I spent those ten minutes trying to remember what I was doing there. I just wanted to go home. If only I could remember where that was.

I got called in and thus began the interview portion. I didn’t really know what “interview” meant, but it means exactly what you’d expect. You talk about who you are. Now, again, I’d practiced yammering about myself and could talk about how when I was young I wanted to be a lawyer, but as I got older I discovered how being a lawyer involved arguing and that didn’t feel right for me. So I became a psychologist, which I loved because it allowed me to work with people, instead of against them. And how I discovered a love of writing late in life, and shall I tell you about my nine books set in Italy?

Friends, not one word of that stump speech stuck in my head. I felt the words drifting over my shoulders like confetti, but I couldn’t catch hold of any of them. 

Instead, I literally said how old I was, that I had three children, and what their ages are. The examiners nodded, unsure of how to respond to such imbecilic information. I went on that I was a psychologist and a writer and my books are set in Italy (may or may not have said that part correctly). Then I added that I cook a lot, and I finally hit a groove. No surprise, I suppose, that it was talking about cooking that allowed me to find my footing. I grinned and said that in fact, I just made gnocchi on Sunday for Father’s Day. One of the examiners (there must be two present for the verbal portion) asked if I made them for my father or my husband, and I said my husband, my father lives in Arizona, too far away to cook for. They laughed and said I could send a photo, and I concurred. The laughter died away and I asked if there was anything else I should add? They said no, and moved on to the photo of the baby and asked me to describe it. 

I just really didn’t have much to say. What can you say about a baby with a dog? I said it looked like the baby was about eight months old (so I did manage to throw in the subjunctive, though neither examiner looked remotely impressed), I described his hat and shirt. I said the dog was looking at the baby, but I wasn’t sure if the dog was real or….or…. I couldn’t remember the word for a stuffed dog. Finally, I said “un cane stuffato.” Sounded right, both of their faces remained impassive, so I’m not sure what to make of the fact that later I looked it up and “stufato” (one f) means “stewed”. 

Stewed dog. 

I may or may not have told the examiners that a stewed dog was looking at the baby. 

O dio mio. 

Now, later, in desperation, I did find images of stuffed animals that were described as “stuffato” but not that many, so at this point I’m hoping it could mean stuffed in some dialect. The advantage of Italian is that if you use a weird word, there is a chance it’s a real word in some version of the language. At least I hope that’s an advantage. 

Stumped for more content, the examiner suggested I comment on the balls, so I did, both their number and color and that the baby had one in its mouth. Quiet. The examiner then prodded me by asking if I thought the baby was at home or at “nido”. Nido is affectionate slang for nursery school, more formally called asilo. I’m not sure if I would have known it without living in Italy, so hopefully I got points for saying probably at home, since there was only one baby, and at nido there are many babies. 

The examiner then said, plus there’s a dog, and I laughed, yes, definitely no dogs at nido. Then she held the paper close to her, saying unless the  dog was indeed “finto” (fake). At which point I yelped, “finto!” like, “that’s the word I was looking for”, which probably ruined any chance I had of them dismissing stuffato as dialect.

The role play went much the same (only, as far as I know, no weird language errors). I expressed sorrow about the sweater and gave basic bus directions, the examiner asked follow up questions, including asking if I had the scontrino, the receipt, another word I may not have known if not for living in Italy. I said, “Si, si! Ce l’ho!” (while miming looking in my pockets) which means “I have it”, though I might have used a less fluid construction if not for living in Italy where shopkeepers always ask if I brought my own bag.

Anyway, I answered all their questions, I made at least one (possible/probably) oddball mistake, but my real error, in my book, is that I didn’t do my best. I stammered and I paused and the words DID NOT ROLL. So I’m not sure if I did enough.

For the oral portion, you only need 50% to pass, but I don’t know how it’s scored. Maybe you miss 50% just for confusing a fake dog for a stewed dog. 

I’ll know more in a couple of weeks. But this is Italy, remember, so who knows? Apparently, at the November test, it takes months to score because of the holiday. Part of my job as a citizen-in-training is to understand that and say, “boh.” What are you gonna do?

If I don’t pass, I feel sure I’ll pass next time. I’ll be less anxious going in about my ability to do the reading/writing/listening portion, which hopefully will translate into less energy used and more spark available for the verbal portion. You used to be able to just retake the failed portion, but no longer. If I have to retake it, I have to retake the whole thing. 

I liked my self-study because I could work it around my life and dig into parts I know I’m weaker at.  But if I don’t pass, I’ll likely to take a course. Mostly to keep me practicing without the frenetic pace of the past six months. I don’t think I have the energy to give my life over to studying like I did for the first half of 2023. Also, I have books to write! Unmasked in Aramezzo is waiting in the proverbial wings!

If I do pass, obviously I’ll be thrilled. Plus, I told Keith he needs to take me to Italy to celebrate. I’m so eager to use all this language and language confidence I’ve gained these last six months. I’m trying not to get ahead of myself, but I can’t help imagining where we might go.

One more thing— I may sign up for the B2 exam. I’d do it at a less relentless pace so maybe for next year, but one thing this process has taught me, I achieve my goals only when I have accountability and/or a deadline. And I do want to learn Italian, I want to be better at it. I wanted it for years and my lack of doing it made me feel terrible about myself. Now, I know I have it in me to work, I am just too goal oriented to work without an end point.

Vediamo. Let’s see. If continuing to talk with my Italian friends and making flash cards from those conversations makes me feel like my Italian is progressing, I’ll do that. If not, I’ll consider taking a class and signing up for another exam. At least by the time I pass this exam (whenever that is), I’ll know my level. I’m a B1 girl—no more weird unevenness.

Let’s just see if that passing comes this month or next year.

And let’s also see if the next time around comes with corn nuts.

PS—Results of the B1 Italian Language Exam

Well friends. It did not take a month for the results to come in. It did not take two months. It took two and a half months!

Right around the seven week mark, I decided I did not want to wait for the University of Perugia to contact the DC Cultural Center and then wait for the Cultural Center to contact me saying the results were up, with a link to the website. Too many pauses, too much room for error. What if my results were already up and no one told me? So I dug around the internet until I found the spot on the University of Perugia website. I plugged in my identification information and voila—nothing. But at least I knew where to check.

I made a rule that I could only check twice a day, to avoid a day of hitting refresh, all day long. Full disclosure: I wanted to type twice a week right there instead of twice a day, but I figure you know me too well and would know that I was lying, even if you’re not here to see my cheek twitch. Twice a day. That’s exactly how obsessive I allowed myself to be.

Some days, I felt sure I passed. Some days, I felt sure I failed. Some days, I was reminded of Shrodinger’s cat. You know this one? It’s a quantum mechanics principal I find useful (the only one I know, let alone find useful, to be frank) that says that if there is a cat in a box and you want to know if the cat is alive or dead, it exists in both states until you check the box. To my mind, this means you might as well assume it’s alive. That’s how I felt about the exam. It’s alive or dead, probably best not to spend too much time pondering. 

Here is a screenshot of the page that popped up when the results were finally in, which is how I learned that Esame Superato means “exam passed”. I pretty much freaked out, as you can imagine. Another screen got me the points specifics that I want to share with you because I’m 100% sure this will prove useful for somebody. It was reading the point distribution that I realized that I did as well as I expected on the “lettera” (grammar and vocabulary and reading) with a 35/40, as well as the listening section with a 36/40, but I completely failed the written section with an 11/40.

Now, perhaps I am wrong here, but I really don’t think that’s correct. Writing was something I could easily work on, answering questions from practice exams using Google Translate to evaluate my performance, and I know my skills are right where they should be for this level—not perfect, but understandable and sometimes pretty good. In fact, when I write to people in Italy, they often think I’m far better at Italian than I am. This time, I even threw in the subjunctive mood, a grammar point that’s not even tested until the B2 or the C1. When I say I think I nailed it, odds are high that I did fairly well at least.

Yes, it’s possible it’s just graded super hard. But I think what happened was this: Cautionary Tale alert! The format of the test is you get a packet and you get a scantron (a sheet with bubbles you fill in to reflect which answer you select) which requires a pen. When I was double checking my work, I realized I’d made some errors, so I had to cross out those filled bubbles. But then I worried—were they using a scantron reader that wouldn’t be able to make out the “X” and just assume I’d selected two answers and therefor nullify that question? I asked the proctor and she looked at me a little shocked. Which is funny, can I be the first person ever to make a mistake on the scantron of the B1 exam? is there no protocol for this? I suggested perhaps she give me fresh answer sheets and I’d transfer my correct answers over since I had plenty of remaining time before the auditory section. She thought this was a good idea and gave me fresh pages. 

I filled in the scantron afresh but left my answers to the written portion of the exam ON THE SCANTRON WITH THE WRONG ANSWERS. This is all to say that I believe some of the pages they graded were blank, because they didn’t see the pages with the crossed out scantron and the corrected written portion. Which means, they only saw 1 out of the 3 written portions and only graded one of the 3 written portions. 

So my advice to you is this: BRING A PENCIL WITH AN ERASER. Note your answers to the “lettera” section on the scantron with a pencil dot (actually, I wound up changing some answers on the audio portion as well, so maybe use this strategy for both). When you double check, erase what you want to change and bubble over in pen what you want to keep. 

Luckily for me, I did so well on the other sections that despite my “gravely insufficient” writing, I passed. I got 82/120 on those three sections combined, and I needed 60% (or 72 points) to pass. 

Can we just take a moment to breathe in the irony that an author of 9 books FAILED THE WRITTEN SECTION? Yes, those books are in English, but still. Keith is mad about it, wants my score to reflect my actual abilities, but honestly, I’m so glad I passed that I find the whole thing pretty funny.

My overall score is 122/160, which is classified as “buono”. Why is it so high, given my gravely bad written score? Because—and I can’t even believe I’m saying this—I got 40/40 on the verbal section. Yes, even with my weird “stuffato” error! To which my youngest says maybe stuffato is dialect after all, and the proctors were like, “how does his American woman speak Molisan so well????” 

What can I say, practice pays off, ya’ll. I’m endlessly grateful to the friends I made on the Tandem app. Talking a couple of hours a week loosened my creaky gears and made speaking so much easier. I had messages from all three of my Tandem friends when I got out of my exam and no matter how much I moaned about my “stuffato” error, they felt sure I passed. Though they did think stuffato was pretty funny. For the record, stuffato does not mean stuffed in Friuli-Venezia, Veneto, or Naples (or Abruzzo, my friend who is in law school in Naples actually has roots in Keith’s ancestral village! What a small Boot!). I’m still betting on Molise. Or maybe Sardinia.

As for what happens now…well, I’m dying to get to Italy and use my newfound beginning-intermediate language proficiency! We’re booking tickets this week, and best of all? My Tandem friend from Vicenza is going to meet us for lunch. (Edited to add: we did get to Italy, and I got to use my newfound confidence in Italian, and my friend Liliana did come with her family! We had such a blast!)

Language is connection. Which is good to remember while you’re toiling over indirect object pronouns.

Language is connection.

P.S. It is now over a week since I got my scores, and I still haven’t heard from the cultural center. No blame here, maybe the person who does it is on leave or maybe the University only releases those emails to testing sites on a schedule, but if you take the exam and are as impatient as I am, don’t assume someone is primed and ready to email you right away as soon as the results are in. Find the website for your test (University of Perugia is here), and check yourself!

PPS It is now months, and the cultural center has still not sent a notification that my scores are in!

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