Dear reader from the void,
In line with my words from the previous post, this is one huge thing I desperately wanted to share with the world. Ahahahah ...
A month ago, just before my birthday, I decided that I really wanted to give myself a present, something that lingers, which isn't material but holds great value. And that something was, the first step towards applying for the Danish citizenship - the Indfødretsproven. Which is very much a very elaborate and somewhat difficult form of Danish Trivia :D.
And no, it wasn't because I had been here for a fixed amount of years, nor it was right after the rules allowed me to apply having passed a determinate amount of years after I had gotten my permanent residence. And no, my birthday, like I said, isn't a round birthday ... it just happened to be a moment in my life when felt I could add the pressure of studying for a test on top of everything going on in my life. It's something that has been on my mind for several years, but I was doubting of my ability to study and do a test in Danish, and I was thinking that I will never be able to pass it.
But I have been here for 16 years in August. Can you imagine? 16 years. I was a baby when i came to study the Innovation Management masters in Herning, in 2010, and I never imagined at that time that after finishing my studies I would build my life here. I guess I am one of the success stories for integration (self proclaimed :P), having studied here, learned the language, have a job, friends, a family and can easily find my way around the highly advanced, online bureaucracy of the Danish system.
And so, with renewed faith in myself, acknowledging that I am actually capable to learn and to understand the questions of the test, I decided to enroll myself for the Nov 25th test of 2026. Giving me more than enough time to master and hopefully successfully pass the test with more than 36 points (which is the minimum to pass). Enrolling means paying a fee of kr950 . And that is separate from the kr6300 fee I will have to pay to actually apply for the citizenship after passing the test. 😅 Yes please, faint. I nearly did myself too when I learned that.
The test itself isn't exactly easy. It consists of 45 questions divided into three sections: Danish history and society (35), current events from the previous six months (5), and Danish values (5). To pass, you need at least 36 correct answers, including 4 out of 5 values questions. And the first 35 questions come from this 250ish pages PDF from the SIRI website.
The preparation page also has tests from
previous exams (there are two tests every year) which is what I started with, to get a general feel for the questions, and NO SURPRISE THERE, i didn't pass. But, the more I was doing these tests, with no preparation beforehand, i was getting better and better. And this you can see in the graph below, because guess what, I recorded my answers. And I made a
Google Sheets page just for this. Don't worry, I'll brag about my methodology in just a second, I know you're dying to read just let me finish about this graph 😝.
The more I was going through these tests, the more I was seeing patterns, repeats, and learning the correct answers that I had missed the first go round. After the first pass through all these 13 tests, my pass rate has been only 3/13. In 2020 and the first test of 2021, there were 40 questions, and the minimum to pass was 32 (just in case you saw the pass rate intersecting with the 33 correct answers from 11/2020).
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| Fig.1 - Answers gotten right after doing once the 13 available tests on the SIRI page |
So yeah,
the sheet. Me being a huge numbers nerd, after a couple of tests, I noticed that the concepts repeated. Maybe not using the exact words, but the idea was the same. And I wanted to have a way to measure my progress. And thus I exported the questions from the PDFs to the sheets, with their correct answers, and then with my answers, I grouped them into questions asking the same things via the 'Compacted Questions' field, and I started creating different pivots based on the data to measure different KPIs, to assist me in my learning journey.
- Which are the most repeated questions?
- Those i need to know basically by heart
- Are there any current events questions that became general knowledge in following years.
- Just curious :P
- Are there questions that repeated themselves which despite seeing them in multiple tests, I still fail?
- Which areas to focus my learning on and maybe even start making diagrams :D - cause I am also a visual learner :P
I told my colleagues at work that I enrolled for this. Some of them have been asking me if I took this test for years. And all of them agree that if they've been asked to take this test today, they, as real legal and born danes, they will not be able to pass this test. I found that funny, but also a testament that it's not an easy test to pass, and even when I will feel prepared, that I should still pay attention and read the question twice before answering, because maybe, just maybe, now they're asking the reverse of the question that you're thinking about. I've seen it happen more than once during my first pass of the 13 tests.
I've had all sort of funny thoughts since I started studying for the test. One of them, was to build myself an app. I have the data, all i need is the shell and the functions. And I was envisioning adding a learning section too, and maybe even an AI agent to discuss with some of the topics or wrong questions when in doubt. I wanted it all.
But first, I thought to myself, let me Google a bit. Maybe someone already thought of it. And I discovered an entire little industry I never knew existed. So many websites bragging with 1000 questions from tests, others with 3000 questions from tests, with randomized tests made from these many questions, and some costing an arm and a leg ... and others hardly anything. I admit, I was tempted. More than anything, tempted to test what they said about the number of questions they have available, when my humble 13 tests database, only has 570 questions with repeated concepts included, and only 297 unique questions. I was also thinking, maybe they have an AI doing all the possible questions for each of the chapters in the book? Maybe. And maybe they've changed the wording too. You never know. Nor I ... cause I will not pay ahahha.
And in the middle of all this googling, I found one singular website - treasure trove of information and functionalities, exactly like how I wanted my app to be. Safe to say ... no app will ever be now made by me hahahah. Because ... (hear the angels singing in choir) ...
NearlyDanish.com exists. And it's an amazing website, ran by one guy, who has been helping students pass the citizenship test for 6-8 years now, I think fully maintained from donations and kind heart. He even holds Kahoot tests twice a week starting 3 months prior to the tests. And I know all this, because I also saw some of his Youtube videos from the Kahoot tests he does with students. I'm telling you, this guy is god sent.
There is only one thing that's bugging me. Until you participate in one of his Kahoots oficially, you cannot create an account for yourself on your own. He has a section with tests from all sections of the book, and all the tests from many years ago, more than I have, having started now. But only if you have an account, you can gamify your learning via leaderboards. And me, a huge gaming nerd, I WANT THAT. And that I learned by reading his website source code, cause sure, there's no information on that precisely, and I haven't seen all his Youtube videos to see if he's explaining the process in any of them.
But I will be using the heck out of his website, until I will get on that leaderboard. And when I do, beware other students, beware. There's a new sheriff in town, and her name is Iziss aka Danish Trivia Master (blue-purple lightsaber). And yes, for this amount of work this guy has put into the website, I will also be donating at some point. Now I am thinking, what if I donate now via Mobile Pay? With a question ... will he add me to the user base of his website? 😏
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