[ccy]

So how did everyone find the exam today? I thought the listening was trickier than usual and I think I got some questions in Task 5 (something about formula 1) wrong... Task 6 and 7 weren't too bad though

[goldfishgirl]

Phew, I'm glad I'm not the only one who found Task 5 quite difficult, one of my friends said he found it easy, but he's a Formula 1 fanatic.

Most of the listening was alright, Task 2 I think was pretty good, but there was a lot of guesswork on Task 1 and some of Task 3 just threw me off (the bit about trying to get to the cabins, think I got the first half but NO IDEA what he said afterwards!)

Apart from that, it went fine. I agree with you about Task 6 and 7, they weren't as difficult as I thought they'd be.

[violetwhite]

I found it surprisingly difficult

[umberella1000]

This is my 3rd time doing the AS French exam (due to retakes) and I agree that it was hard! Normally I wizz through the listening sections really quickly but I found myself taking ages and listening over and over again desperatley trying to figure out the right answers. The first half of the listening (about chocolate that you breathe in?) was ok, but the last few gaps that we had to fill in I found quite hard. What did you put in the first gap? I put 'peu' I was going to put petite but then I thought that went somewhere else :s Also the thing about the tree house cabin holiday was alright, a few confusing questions. But the hardest tasks I thought were the readings about the F1 omg that was sooo confusing!! I've never seen a task like that before!!! And the other reading task aswell was hard (I can't remember what it was about) but I started doing it, then had to leave it to make sure I didn't run out of time for the essay and then carry on with it at the end. I defo had to use every minute of the time!! It was definatley a hard paper...but maybe thats a good thing because the grade boundries might (hopefully) be lower?? hehe

[abobop]

I found this exam really hard and i'm glad i'm not the only one. I thought it was just me because annoyingly when i came out of the exam my french teacher was there telling me it was an easy paper :/ I wrote nothing worth any marks in question 7b because i had a complete mental blank and ran out of time. I also just made up some answers to question 6 and put random numbers for the one about F1... guess i'll be retaking this one!

[Supertortoise96]

I didn't like the Formula 1 question either. Some of the one about the cabins were alright, but it was just that one question. Here's hoping for low grade boundaries.

[lizzykilcoyne]

I thought it went okay, probably didn't do so well in the listening though! I was so pleased for the essay being about fashion since I chose to speak about fashion for my oral so I already had quite a bit of vocab I could use. I also received the role play about modelling! But anyway, I had to guess on quite a bit of the listening and try and use common sense to fill in some of the gaps, but the reading was okay I guess

[BeckK]

I thought the first listening was confusing, but the others were pretty easy. I filled most of the chocolate one in with common sense mostly! The formula 1 one was hard! it looked easy but nothing seemed to add up :/ and had no clue what to write for the essay+running out of time+a boiling hot room probably means i did rubbish ahh well, threw a few subjunctives in, couple of pronouns and just hope I get a nice examiner mark it

[rachie22]

Yeah I found it ok too, again used common sense for the chocolate question.

(Original post by BeckK)
I thought the first listening was confusing, but the others were pretty easy. I filled most of the chocolate one in with common sense mostly! The formula 1 one was hard! it looked easy but nothing seemed to add up :/ and had no clue what to write for the essay+running out of time+a boiling hot room probably means i did rubbish ahh well, threw a few subjunctives in, couple of pronouns and just hope I get a nice examiner mark it

And BeckK, you just reminded me, subjunctives, by the end of the paper I was sick of writing "il faut que" "pour que" etc. lol. good that you included them though

good luck to all of you, hope you get the results you all hope for

[Siena16]

I thought the listening section was horrible, and the Formula 1 reading was hard as it was quite ambiguous! I enjoyed the writing topic though, if it had been a rubbish essay title I probably would have started crying, so hopefully the writing section will make up for the listening and reading!

Good luck everyone

[BeckK]

Is anyone doing the A2 exam on the 19th?

[bakyvinnynguyen]

(Original post by BeckK)
Is anyone doing the A2 exam on the 19th?

Me, I'm so worried about the translation section...

[BeckK]

(Original post by bakyvinnynguyen)
Me, I'm so worried about the translation section...

me too, there's always one word you don't know and mucks it up. I'm a bit worried about the essay... Have two french teachers and they both mark them differently :/ I get confused on how to structure it. and it's such a long paper!

[Ella-Chizoba]

I did the AS paper and I'm doing the A2 paper next week. I've just been doing past papers, because I don't really know how else to prepare. I think it's good that it's such a long paper, because they give us prompts at the start of each section on how long we should spend on each section.

For the essay, this is a structure that I tend to go with

PLAN YOUR ESSAY BEFOREHAND. It really works!
Introduction
Put the question in context (Why are people talking about this issue? Why is it important?)
Then say what you're going to do in your essay

Body of Essay
One idea per paragraph

What is my point?
Where is my evidence?
How does this answer the question?
How can I link this to the next point?

(Keep your reader engaged and don't go off task!)

Conclusion
Sum up main points and don't introduce new ideas. Give opinion. Think about something that could be important to the topic in the future

Try and make your language sophisticated, include specialised statistics, idioms, subjunctive phrases and always go back through the essay to check for grammatical errors.
Remember you must give both points of view and then eventually come to your own conclusion

You probably all know this stuff, might come in handy though

Practice makes perfect I think. I have some practice essay questions/snazzy essay phrases if anyone wants them, just ask

[BeckK]

Thanks, that does help!
we've learnt what to put in the essays, like subjunctives and statistics but your structure seems good, our teacher keeps changing her mind on how we should best do it so i think i'll probably use yours I have some past papers to do though so hopefully that works, and cards with important/difficult vocab on them to learn from, cause that helped with my AS resit the other week

[bakyvinnynguyen]

some good points right there, thanks Ella. Apart from that, I would reckon to form a list of synonyms of words that are used frequently such as increase, decrease, worsen or something like that. That's what I'm doing at the moment and I find it quite effective as whenever I write an essay, I got loads of synonyms to use. Lastly, catchy phrases can be found everywhere in French newspaper such as Lemonde.fr, I think the vocab used in there is the most complex among other French online newspaper so better to keep a record of some idioms and phrases from the website, and the fact that there are about 12 questions to choose, it wouldn't be a really big problem though. Just out of interest, how much do you guys need for this A2 exam? for university for example?

[BeckK]

(Original post by bakyvinnynguyen)
some good points right there, thanks Ella. Apart from that, I would reckon to form a list of synonyms of words that are used frequently such as increase, decrease, worsen or something like that. That's what I'm doing at the moment and I find it quite effective as whenever I write an essay, I got loads of synonyms to use. Lastly, catchy phrases can be found everywhere in French newspaper such as Lemonde.fr, I think the vocab used in there is the most complex among other French online newspaper so better to keep a record of some idioms and phrases from the website, and the fact that there are about 12 questions to choose, it wouldn't be a really big problem though. Just out of interest, how much do you guys need for this A2 exam? for university for example?

I might take a look at that website, it's not the first time someones mentioned it My french teacher brought us some newpapers back with her from easter so i've read a few of them, i just find them boring though lol. Yeah I'm so glad there's a choice of questions That depends on my other exams, as long as i get a B and a C in those two I only really need a E or a D for this, would like something a bit better though what about you?

[bakyvinnynguyen]

kinda the same thing, I just need a low C or D for the second paper but really want to get an A so that the overall A-level can be balanced. But, yeah, do have a look at the website, you might find some killer phrases which can boost your written quality up. Do you have lots of past papers to do? Compared to other subjects like Math or Economics, I don't think we got that many papers for French, not to mention there isnt any listening file for the papers from 2008

[BeckK]

I'd love to get an A, but unfortunately french work took a back seat to everything else this year (woops!) so i'm hoping for a C possibley B, and i resat the AS last month too. We have one to do for the half term, but i don't have another lesson again before the exam so they can't look at the eassy for me :/ we've had the other past papers in sections cause our lessons aren't long enough to do the whole thing, but you're right, there's not many :/ our teacher was making us do these example exams from some text book company but they were just weird, like with questions that had no answer to 'trick you', not good.
We've been listening to french news for preperation, cause there's not many listenings, and you can do it at home, which is always good.

[Edwin Okli]

Does anyone have some vocab lists that they're willing to share? I'm just eager to learn as much vocab as possible for the exam.