The TYS speaking session is fifteen minutes long and you sit it on your own.

Rehearsals for the parts of the exam that happen out loud.

• Five minutes, one prompt

  The independent task in the TYS: a single topic, no interlocutor to rescue you, five minutes to fill without circling back. Practise giving it a shape — a position, two reasons, a concession, a close — so the time has somewhere to go.

• Seven questions in ten minutes

  The interactive half of the TYS moves quickly: seven questions in ten minutes, on one topic you did not choose. The failure mode is a long silence while you assemble a suffix chain, not a wrong opinion.

• Role plays at TürkYet B1

  You are handed a situation — an old schoolfriend you do not recognise, a favour that needs asking — and expected to answer in character. Practise the opener, the polite refusal, and the switch between sen and siz.

• e-YADİS, with nobody in the room

  One minute to prepare a visual prompt, two minutes to talk into a microphone. Nothing on the other side reacts, so every half-second spent reconsidering an ending sits on the recording as plain silence. Practise starting on the first word and repairing while still talking.

• Narrating a past you did not witness

  An ACTFL interview raises the demand until something gives, and in Turkish the first thing to give is usually the evidential: a long anecdote told entirely in -DI when half of it was hearsay. Practise holding that distinction as the questions get harder.

Every one of these faults lands at the end of a word.

Nobody is marking your opinions. What ends up on the sheet is which endings arrived, which arrived late, and which sentence you left open — and it is the same six items week after week.

• Whether -DIK and -AcAK clauses survive under time pressure, or collapse into a string of short main clauses.
• Whether the accusative -(y)I lands on definite objects and stays off indefinite ones: kitap okudum against kitabı okudum.
• Whether verbs get the case they govern — başlamak with the dative, korkmak with the ablative, evlenmek with -(y)lA.
• Whether -mIş and -DI stay consistent, so the examiner can hear what you witnessed apart from what you were told.
• Whether the word you mean to stress is actually in the slot before the verb, rather than drifting after it where it sounds like an afterthought.
• Whether you can abandon a word mid-chain and rebuild it aloud, since a verb left half-suffixed tells an examiner nothing at all.

Not calibrated to their rubrics

Our score is not built from their descriptors and lines up with nothing on a TYS or an ACTFL certificate. Nobody here has seen the paper you will sit, and nobody here can say which band is coming. It does, though, put a clock in front of you often enough that the last syllable stops being the place where you give up.