Certificate in Russian on Level B2 (ТРКИ-2): Prerequisites?
I'm learning Russian now for three years, spending a couple of hours every week learning. When I was in St. Petersburg recently, I decided to get the B2 (ТРКИ-2) certificate within a year. I don't care a lot about the certificate itself, it's more that I like to commit myself to a goal, which helps me finding motivation for the more cumbersome parts of language learning (declensions, learning a stock vocabulary of 5000 words etc.)
Now I read on a German page (http://www.russian-online.net/de_start/advanced/trki/texte.php) that one must proof to have taken 400 lessons resp. attended language class for 20 weeks afterwards, after having taken (and passed) the ТРКИ-1 exam.
Since this is not the official website of the certificate, and I don't find this restriction on the official website (but some other indications of lessons required: http://www.russian-test.com/tests/torfl/advanced), I wonder if those restrictions really apply.
So are there such formal restrictions?

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Though I've never heard about the ТРКИ-2 exam before, I found the document that describes the requirements - http://www.russian-test.com/assets/docs/Trebovaniya_-_2_sert.pdf
And it seems like the restrictions about amount of lessons that you need to take to pass the exam are just recomendations, not restrictions. But it is possible that I am wrong.

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В Питере я купил книгу "Лексический Минимум по русскому языку как иностранному. II сертификационный уровень". Эта книга от министерство, для ТРКИ. Я каждый день повторяю несколько слов.

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А у Вас уже есть этот список из пяти тысяч слов? Сколько слов Вы уже знаете? За три года можно было бы выучить примерно две-три тысячи.

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You are probably worrying for naught :) The materials I read about the exams usually say the approximate amount of hours it takes to get ot that level in a classroom environment. For example, it is usually said that A1 takes about 70-80 hours and B1 about 300-400 hours. But no one says you should actually take classes to achieve it. Here is one more page with different materials: http://www1.pushkin.edu.ru/publ/sertifikaciya/programmy/programmy_testirovaniya_rki/13-1-0-223

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