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?