A level german

Do i need to have done gcse german to take german for a level. i am really interested in german and they didnt have the option to take it in my school

Reply 1

holybagel

Original post by tasleenrr

Do i need to have done gcse german to take german for a level. i am really interested in german and they didnt have the option to take it in my school

Whilst it is not impossible, it would be extremely difficult. Unless you want to give up most of your summer (which I would not recommend) learning German, or you already have a good background in German (e.g. one of your parents speak it, or you have been learning it in your spare time through apps, or you have knowledge of a language similar to German) it is quite tricky. A Level German assumes you have GCSE level German- this means you should already have quite a lot of basic vocab (common nouns, verbs and adjectives etc.), a good grounding in pronunciation, and some grammar knowledge- although through my experience of GCSE compared to A Level German, you learn the bulk of the trickier grammar at A Level. At GCSE, you learn most tenses, and some schools/teachers would introduce you to the case system (we were briefly, but we covered it again at A Level). If you do not know any vocab or grammar, and are going in completely blind, I do not think it is a good idea.

Are you in year 11 or year 10? If you are in year 10, you can spend the next year working through the GCSE Stimmt grammar book and the text book, use Quizlet sets and I think you should be allowed to take it. If you are in year 11, you need to assess whether you have enough time over the summer to learn a good foundation of vocab (I'd say c500-1000 words, but this is a very rough guesstimate), grammar, and listen to podcasts to get used to the language. I fear if you are in year 11, you will be too burnt out from GCSEs to dedicate sufficient time over the summer to learn this.

Sorry if this is not the motivating and positive response you wanted. You could consider doing the International Baccalaureate (IB) because it offers the chance to do languages from scratch (you could find a way to do German with this) but then you'd have to do English, a science, a humanity, maths and another subject as well.

TLDR: depending on how much time you have, it might be possible, but I cannot stress enough that you cannot just go into an A Level language completely without any knowledge of the language, because the course is not designed to teach a complete beginner. You could consider IB, if you were really desperate and this was the only way to learn German.