French help!!

I desperately need help from anyone out there who can give me some advice...

I need to get an A in French this year, but I think I will only manage a B. Before anyone says anything, I know a B isn't bad, but I still need an A.

I am fine at oral, and that is just practice. Also, I can learn grammar. The problem I have is that I am just generally not very good at writing/reading/listening and can't find a way to improve. That is the really annoying thing about languages...there is no textbook to learn as a last resort, no last minute cramming that can be done, and we have no idea what will come up in the exam!

I really am at a loss as to what I should do. Does anyone have any advice?

Reply 1

kinkajou

I guess it'll help if you just continue to do practise papers etc! :smile:

Reply 2

Gooner

For your reading and writing skills, you could come into the soc and have a little chat. Otherwise, you need to show that you can use as many tenses as possible, with ease and fluency in your writing exam (if you're taking it at higher). So you should be able to use the present, perfect, imperfect, future and conditional, and perhaps the pluperfect and subjunctive, although the latter really is to get the highest grades, which I didn't know about until earlier on this year :smile:

As for listening, why not tune into French radio, and whilst doing that, try your best to also learn as much vocabulary as you can. It's the best way to secure yourself an A grade :smile:

Reply 3

generalebriety

Hold on, what level is this? If it's A-level, then a lot of gooner's advice is applicable (I'd still dispute the tenses thing :wink:

), but if it's GCSE, then most of it (e.g. listening to the radio) is just not feasible. Also, we can help you a lot more if we know what level you're at. There are no set boundaries for vocab and so on, but that doesn't mean we can't do our best to give you a good guide. :smile:

Reply 4

Gooner

generalebriety

Hold on, what level is this? If it's A-level, then a lot of gooner's advice is applicable (I'd still dispute the tenses thing :wink:

I based that on GCSE, just from what I did (but as I said, I didn't have a clue about the subjunctive). :cool:

Reply 5

generalebriety

The minimum requirement for GCSE is to be able to use present, future (any type of future) and past (any type of past). As long as you get that in you're fine. A-level has to show that your grammar has improved and developed from GCSE, but that doesn't mean you absolutely have to use every tense you can - in fact it's often better if you don't, as the questions they ask will guide you into using certain tenses, and if you don't feel the conditional / future perfect is sufficient to answer any of the questions, then don't try to get it in.

Reply 6

Gooner

generalebriety

Yeah, I know that, and you can even (apparently) use the wrong auxiliary to conjugate the perfect tense at GCSE, but if it's possible to get in the pluperfect and conditional (such as je voudrais...) then it makes the higher marks much more likely. I agree with you though, I'm not saying that you should try and be too pretentious and throw every tense in, but just show off enough to demonstrate that you're worth that A grade :wink:

Reply 7

generalebriety

gooner1592

Definitely, but personally I think there are much better ways of doing it than tenses. Use of "y" and "en" and other things to make it sound more fluent is much more impressive than talking in ten time frames - and besides, at GCSE just as much as at A-level, content is weighted a lot more heavily than grammar. I don't disagree with what you're saying, I just think you're heavily misrepresenting how important using loads of tenses is. :p:

Reply 8

Gooner

generalebriety

I agree there too, but still, I think that tenses are the most important part of a language - if you get a tense conjugation wrong, which I do all the time myself, it can lead to loads of problems in what you're trying to communicate, whilst the rules are quite simple most of the time, but using double object pronouns for example would be very tricky for a GCSE student (I would have thought anyways). And I suppose things like adjectival agreements need to be quite accurate too for GCSE writing exams too. Having said that though, I didn't do the writing exam, but did the coursework option so things are probably a little different :rolleyes:

Reply 9

ticos

Sorry...I should have made the level I am at clear.

I am doing AS Level French. I got an A* at GCSE, but the GCSE/AS gap for languages has got to be the biggest of all the subjects, so I am not finding it so easy this year.

Thanks for all your help, though. I am currently listening to Frenhc radio, but it is hard to know how much good it is doing.

Reply 10

quintsy

gooner1592

And OCR play by completely diffierent rules completely for the GCSE writing exams; examiners are instructed to put an L in the margin if they come across a 'lovely' word- i.e. anything which isn't your bog standard GCSE grand/petit/fantastique/amusant. I kid you not.. :p:

Reply 11

generalebriety

rachels

It might be a good idea to check out the Journaux Télévisés on France2 (the link is to the 8pm news; there are links on the left to 8am and 1pm too). If you hold your mouse over the little titles at the side you get a small block of text to explain what's going on too, sometimes paraphrased, sometimes taken word for word from the report. It's also a lot easier to pick up vocab and stuff with the pictures. :smile:

However, you say you're good at grammar and the oral - it sounds to me like you need more vocab, then. Reading and writing, to a large extent, hang on your knowledge of vocab. For this, I'd recommend picking up a cheap vocab book like this - just work through it picking out and learning any vocab you think might appear in a reading test French to English, and then (separately) picking out and learning (and practising using) any vocab you think you might use in a writing test English to French. If that involves talking to yourself in French, then so be it - I've done it for plenty of years now and it's never harmed me much. :wink:

Reply 12

james99

There's some quite good videos on www.tf1.fr as well. At the moment I'm watching a rather interesting clip called "les 30 histoires les plus spectaculaires" - random videos of crazy stuff happening around the world - much more interesting than news! :wink:

Reply 13

kellywood_5

Read an online newspaper every day, such as Le Monde, Liberation or Le Figaro. Just try to get the general gist of what's going on, but if there any words you don't know that are preventing you from understanding that sentence/paragraph/article, look them up and learn them. For listening, there are lots of online radio stations and TV channels, you can watch a few TV channels if you have cable and you can get French DVDs. Again, you're not expected to understand everything, but just practice listening out for the important bits and getting a general overview. Past papers are obviously really useful as well. If your grammar is good, it's probably a case of learning vocab for writing. I used Advanced French Vocabulary, which was really good because it has different sections for each of the main topics and some useful essay phrases at the back.