I'm close to the half-way point of my summer Italian language challenge for 2015 and I feel that so far it's been very successful. I feel like I have a very good handle on most of the grammar topics for B1 and a good deal of the vocabulary as well. I think I need to spend a little more time with vocabulary regarding health and illness. This just has not been an area of much interest for me up to this point. I've been pretty successful in increasing the amount of writing that I am doing and this week I turned in 4 assignments for correction. I need to do my best to keep that pace up in the coming weeks as well as make a full transition to not using any sort of assistance in my writing; just a pen and paper.
Despite the victory I consider increasing my written output in Italian, I have not been reviewing my lessons and I am noticing more and more that there are certain words that I am consistently mispronouncing. This has to be fixed. It would go a long way to help my fluency if I didn't have consistent issues with words that seem to come up regularly.
My 3 usual tutors have all been helping me immensely during my challenge (Laura, Daniele, and Salvatore). I've also been collecting a lot of examples of grammatical structures for the B1 level in a Memrise course.
CEFR B1 Italian Supplement - CILS TELC
I'm only about 1/2 way through with it but it already has 672 full sentences in it. I'm trying to get to the point were each grammatical structure has close to 300 or 400 examples. I suspect that it will be well over 2000 sentences by the time I'm done with the B1 specific grammar topics. I think by the time I'm ready to start specifically preparing for my CILS exam, I'll have created a corresponding course for A level Italian (a single course for A1 and A2) as well as a B2 level course. If I am lucky, this will mean that I'll have put in enough work to be able to consider sitting the C1 examination next summer.