Have I covered enough to begin Spanish A-Level?

I don't see why not, a boy in my AS spanish has never done spanish before

Your grammar knowledge is up to the standard of AS level, so you'll have no problems reading the spanish and working out the tense and tone.

Vocabulary is just as important, but this comes with exposure to the language and to material in the language e.g newspapers like "el pais". My suggestion to improve this would be to buy a bilingual book that covers stories in Spanish and in English. To add, it would be worthwhile going to "el pais", finding something you find interesting, printing it, reading it and highlighting words you don't know as this is proactive and helps to build on the skills already learned.

You need to be able to apply the grammar you know to a speaking context and think like a linguist too - are you able to conjugate your verbs on your feet?

Thank you so much for all the responses so far! I have another question though ... how are A-level students doing with their pronunciation and accent? Are you expected to have a perfect accent? I can't seem to get the right tone/melody/whatever you call it no matter what I do, even though I pronounce the words correctly. It's a little strange, although I don't think it can be helped at this stage ...

That's awesome. How is he coping?



Yes, I do try to read the newspapers as often as I can, but sometimes it's quite overwhelming. Here where I live you can't get any access to Spanish movies (or even English movies with Spanish subs) and Spanish books are unheard of.

I still have a problem with them irregulars! I can't keep track of how many times I've been told that it's 'diría' and not 'deciría', but it's getting better, I think.

You're not expecting to have a perfect accent, but you should be able to pronounce most words correctly. Some would say that it takes years to get a 'perfect accent'.

You could get through A-level quite easily without any sort of 'Spanish accent'. In my French A-level class, hardly anyone had any sort of a decent accent (myself included).

Even at university in my Germn classes there are people who don't even attempt to put on a German accent and still pronounce lots of ords incorrectly (in most cases 'ch' and 'z'.)

I gotta be honest I think it's stupid to pick up a language at AS without having any prior knowledge of it, but you seem to know lots so you should be fine. Because the boy in my class has never done any, he does struggle with it a lot.

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Wow, reading through this thread again, a year and a half later ... I was so stupid for having doubts in the beginning. For those of you who are interested (and for those of you who will read this through once the thread gets automatically bumped up), I did do Spanish A-level in the end. In fact, I did it in 9 months because it took forever to get the headmaster to approve of me doing a language without the GCSE. It was so worth it. My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds. Looking back at the Spanish I used to write, it all sounds so silly and cringe-worthy in my head now!

For those of you still having doubts whether or not to take an A-level language (with or without the GCSE), please consider my example. It isn't too bad, honest! I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process, even though I only got to enjoy nine months of it.