Beating the TOEFL

Recently I needed to take an English exam to apply for grad school. There are quite a few options but I chose the TOEFL simply because it is the most famous test with most preparation material available. If you are in the same situation, you should seriously consider to take the IELTS test instead. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

For TOEFL, especially if you have not much preparation time (less than 1 week), I found out that following a few tips will help you a lot in succeeding:

1. In the TOEFL, 10 % of your success is based on your actual English skills, 90 % is based on your preparation on the specific tasks in the TOEFL. The good news: All tasks in the TOEFL follow exactly the same patterns all over again. Prepare exactly for these tasks. Don't spend even a second trying to improve your overall English skills or practicing tasks that are not part of the actual TOEFL test.

2. The TOEFL consists of four sections, Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing, all worth 30 points of your score. Focus on 2 sections you are weak in and spend most of your time practising these ones. E.g. my weak parts were reading and speaking.

3. Use the following instructions for each of the sections:

- Writing: 

This section consists of a few texts that you need to understand in order to answer multiple choice questions. Don't read the full text, you won't have time for it! Instead, read only the first sentence of each paragraph and the first and last sentence of the last paragraph. Now you will be able to understand the big picture of the text and can start attacking the questions. For each question, you usually will need to read 5-7 lines.

- Listening:

Nothing special here, just practise tons of example tasks (see my literature recommendations in the end).

- Speaking:

Most people say this is the most difficult one. It contains of 6 different questions. My personal advice here: Watch these videos made by a US teacher and you will get a decent score. There are videos for each of the 6 questions. As for preparation, write down the templates this guy suggests in his videos and master them.

- Writing:

There are extremely helpful templates that you can memorize and use in the actual test. Again, watch the videos for this. Important detail: Your essay should have at least 350 words for question 1 and 450 words for question 2 in oder to get full score.

4. Most importantly, use the right material. It doesn't make sense to practise tasks that don't show up in the acual test. The best material I found was the following. You can find it all online or in your local library.

Must have

- As so often nowadays, free online ressources tend to get more useful than official books. For the speaking and writing sessions, definitely watch these videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/NoteFulldotcom . More ressources are available on the according website.

- The Princeton Review - Cracking the TOEFL iBT 2009 Edition. By far the best book I've found, with excellent tips for reading and writing section.

-  ETS - TOEFL iBT: The Official ETS Study Guide. Some useful tips, but you'll mainly want to use this for the original practise tests. (you should avoid Kaplan's well-known book, as it doesn't use original TOEFL tasks and is therefore useless in most parts)

Nice to have

- Barron's TOEFL iBT Internet-Based Test, 12th Edition. Get the CD with 7 full TOEFL tests to practice. Note that Speaking Questions 4 and 6 as well as Writing Question 1 are NOT original, skip those questions!

- TOEFL Vocabulary AudioLearn. Might be helpful for memorizing the specific words for Reading and Listening section.

5. Stay calm. Even if you have little time, you will be able to get a reasonable score if you stick to the above advice. So no worries and start practicing today! Good luck :)

Laos Gambling & Hitchhiking

A  Story about Gambling and Losing

Since Friday I'm off to visit my good friend Yuki a second time in Laos and then take a look at Vietnam. The time with Yuki is always a great fun, this time we were at a trade fair, where Yuki and his colleages had a booth for their ODOP products.

Yuki is hungry as hell and kills his fried icecream.

Actually what I wanna talk about is one of the stalls there that catched our attention. It was a so called Wheel of Fortune, a gambling thing. Gambling is in Laos quite popular, and it used to be in Thailand too, until it was forbidden and now you will find there neither casinos nor are there any kinds of card games allowed at all.


On this trade fair there were a couple of these gambling games, mostly quite unfair for the ones who play. In avarage you would lose 50% of your money. An exeption seemed to be the Wheel of Fortune, the chances to win seemed here even, if not favorable for the players (it's hard to tell because it is handmade as you see on the picture and so the sizes of the fields are not exactly identical)




The unfortunate Wheel of Fortune.

 The rules of the game are simple: First you put any amount of money on one of the areas surrounding the inner wheel. You can put as little as 500 Kip (5 Eurocent), no problem. Then you make the wheel rotate and wait until it gets slower and is finally stopped by the metallic entity you see on the left of the wheel. Now you win or lose depending on which part of the wheel the metallic entity hits. E.g. it hits the red part and you have 1.000 Kip on red, you will get 20.000 Kip (1 x 20). If it hits one of those nice animals, crab or spider, you get the amount you put in multiplied by the number of crabs or spiders drawn on the part of the wheel.

As both Yuki and I have a weakness for all sorts of games, we started playing. Yuki always put his money on both of the animals, whereas I distributed it between red or yellow and one animal. And we lost, and lost... and lost. Yuki won the first round around 4.000 Kip and lost after that literally every round. I won in one round 20.000 Kip, but lost even more often before and after. There were other people losing money as well, but one guy won conspicuously often. He made at least 4 times 20.000 Kip and seem to be really lucky, after all. As both Yuki and I were about to lose all our cash and became suspicious about what was going on, suddenly a policeman showed up, took all the cash in the game and pulled the game master away. For a moment I was too perplex to react quickly, I was also not even sure if we actually had done something officially illegal (which was of course not).

At the moment I realized that the game was a scam and the wheel was rigged, it was too late and both policeman and game master were gone with the wind and had most likely devided the cash (I'm sure the guy had some sort of deal with the police). The other guy who won unnaturally much must have been his partner in order to attract new customers. We as foreigners were of course their main targets. Ashamed and defeated we still try to figure out how they could rig the wheel, since we had pulled it ourselves and we lost anyway. Was it a magnet, some sort of rope under the board? My tipp is that the metallic entity could be actually moved back and forth by a very thin transparent rope and if it's moved one milimeter it will change the outcome of the game and it can't possibly be seen by the human eye. This could have been done by the game master himself even though we watched him closely (he hardly needs to move). Whatever, if you have any other suggestion on how it might have worked please drop a comment!

Truck-Hitchhiking

Actually traveling in Laos is pretty easy and comfortable. However, sometimes it doesn't work out the way you planned.

After visiting Yuki in Savannakhet, I went on to the South of Loas, in a city called Pakse. I wanted to move on already the next day, so I asked the friendly lady at the bus station for a ticket to Hue, Vietnam tomorrow evening. She wrote it herself with date and time, I paid, everyting fine I thought.

Well, the next day I enjoyed a beautiful day motorcycling around Pakse to the largest waterfall in Laos (120 meter) and another even nicer one. Later in the day I watched the amazing What Phou Champasak, which is since 2001 an UNESCO world heritage side and definitely worth a trip, even if you are not into old temples.



Nice waterfall (forgot the name -_-)



Enoying Loas noodle soup with 2 randomly met people. By the way, the noodle soup in Laos is called Foe and extremely delicious. The variety in Thailand is greater though.




By ferry across the river Mekong.



Jesus, what a view! On the top of Wat Phou.

On my way back to Pakse by motorcycle. The road was aweful, I run out of gasoline and was late as well. In the end I arrived exactly on time 6.30 pm and got the next surpise...

In the evening 6.30 pm I arrived at the bus station to start over to Vietnam, but there was no bus at all and the same lady that had written me the ticket simply told me there were no bus the whole day, I had to wait until tomorrow. She was obviously sorry for it, but that didn’t help me very much. It just screwed my whole travel plans and my schedule is quite tight as 4 days for Vietnam and back is clearly not a base for relaxed traveling anyway.

So what to do next? I decided to go the whole hog and positioned myself at the street nearby and try hitchhiking. Unfortunately, it is already dark in Loas at 6.30 pm and Loas is not really the country where people go for a ride after noon. In other words, the street was completely empty. My last hope was a convoy of 2 trucks standing not too far away. And believe it or not, they were on their way to Vietnam! After a short discussion, they agreed to give me a lift to the Laos-Vietnam border for 80.000 Kip (around 8 Euro, bus was 15). Having said that we talk about a ride of more than 400 km on a Laos road this is a reasonable price and I didn't have much of a choice anyway. These guys were a little bit wary about a foreigner going alone to Vietnam and even asked for my passport but in the end we started the whole thing and I was sitting in the cockpit of the first truck between two truck drivers.

So what was the journey like? I can say it was not the most comfortable one in my life. In total, we needed more than 15 hours and the first couple of hours (in fact until 8 am next day) I felt somewhat bad about it.for a few reasons.

First, these truck drivers were quite rough persons in general. They smoked literally one cigarette every ten minutes and used the usually pretty soft sounding Lao language as if they wanted to kill some one with each sentence. One guy was quite silent and looked almost always sad or angry, the other one rather talkative and kept laughing insanely. We also had a major problem with communication, in fact I barely understood a word. Actually I don't have many language problems in Laos, because I speak Thai now fairly well and most people in Laos can speak Thai fluently. However, these two truck drivers didn't speak any Thai at all (not to mention English of course). Since Laos and Thai languages are similar (comparable to German / Dutch I guess) I could catch some phrases and words but our conversation was very limited to short small talks. I often heard the word "farang" in their conversations, which means "Westerner" so they obviously chatted about me. Would that now mean, "Let's knock this arrogant Farang out, take all cash and everything else and drop him off at the next corner?" At least it sounded like thtat, so I was a bit worried.

Second, every hour we were stopped by police or some mysterious guys and after shorter or longer discussion we had to pay a smaller or greater fee, spreading from 5.000 Kip to 50.000 Kip. So I started to wonder if these guys really transported coffee or drugs, women or anything like that.

Finally this truck was of course not quite a VIP bus and my legroom reminded me strongly on the public transport in Ghana..

Anyway exhausted by traveling I slept a good time like a baby. We also made a 3 hours break at a spot where even a hammock (Haengematte) was available.



This was my sleeping place from 1 to 4 am. It wasn't as nice as it look like though, because loads of insects kept disturbing my sleep. By the way sorry for not taking more pictures, I didn't want to offend my drivers too much.. 



On one of our countless payoff-stops. We didn't cross a village larger than 20 houses on our whole way. Mostly we were surrounded by flat land.



  Another 4 hours later, now 8 am in the next morning we reached a track spot with restaurant, actually it was more of a woodern lodge but anyway we got good soup and extremely strong Vietnamese coffee as well as Lao whiskey to start the day.

From here, it started to be more fun, because the other driver who was only 23 and could speak Thai fluently joined us in our truck. With him as translater, I leaned quite a few interesting things:

- These drivers weren't as dodgy as they seemed to me first, but actually quite friendly and fun. We became best friends, exchanged phone numbers and in the end I didn't even have to pay the 80.000 Kip fee.

 - In fact, they exported a coffee called Arabica, which is very common in the area around Pakse. Popular and expensive as well. Police and land owners keep bothering all truck drivers in Laos (not in Vietnam at all) and get them to pay, regardless if their documents are correct or not. The amount you'll pay depends on your bargaining skills, your time and your patience.
- I learned my first Vietnamese words, starting with "Doo Ma" which means as much as "Fuck your mother". However, they demanded that this phrase is not offensive at all  and everyone uses it over there.

- In the truck drivers' opinion all Vietnamese people are unfriendly and mean.

Anyways, at 10.30 a.m. we reached the border crossing named Lao Bao, drank a nice coffee and Red Bull and had to say a sad goodbye. Five minutes later I was ripped off by the ladies that exchange money, because I didn't know the exact rates, but at least I got my stamp for Vietnam and could work my way further to Hue, where I am now.

Eventually best friends: Enjoying a last coffee and Red Bull with my truck drivers.

I'm looking forward to a good shower and todays party can start I guess!