GCSE German Study Group 2023-2024

Thanks for creating this- I struggle with German so much :/

Hopefully having other students to chat with here will help! What is it you struggle with specifically?

This is where you can chat with other students studying the same subjects as you and support each other as you head towards your exams

You can post any useful tips and resources that you come across, offer support to others, share your successes, or just have moan when it gets tough!

Just remember, it’s against the site rules to ask for or offer any copyrighted papers, or to take conversations off-site to do these things. Posts that break these rules will be removed.

A few possible ice breaker questions are:
What exam board are you with?
What do you enjoy most about this subject/ course?
What area do you struggle with in this subject/ course?



Good luck with the next few months. Remember, ask for help, support where you can and together we can do this!

I just find revising languages a lot harder than most other subjects like maths or sciences

Hopefully having other students to chat with here will help! What is it you struggle with specifically?

german is probably my worst performin subject, recently got mocks back and the results were as follows

reading 7 (1 off an 8 )
listening 7
writing 5 (HELP)
speaking (not done yet)

i actually dont understand how I do so bad in german, there is something incredibly wrong with my writing skills i mean i got 11/32 in task 2 which is just plain embarassing.

Anyone got general tips for speaking, mostly general conversation??

Did you get any feedback from your teacher? It could be a vocab issue or a grammar issue (though your high listening and reading suggest it may be the latter?) - if you haven't had any, drop them an email or talk to them after class if you can, try and work out what went wrong so you can target it ☺️

She annotated our papers but she said we couldn't have them back until after we did our exams [gcses] I think it's more a grammar issue and a sentence formation thing, and i sometimes panic and start writing irrelevant stuff ( q2 was about envrionment and i started talking about how we should save energy cus its getting mroe expensive and homeless people are being able to afford it less) and get 0 credit for it, i'm just not sure how to practice sentence formations...theres so many rules! i esp struggle with identifying dative and accusative + adjective endings. There are my marked speaking questions but I feel like I want to have a more versatile way or learning, like a sentence structure i can use anywhere and fill in gaps with words that are relevant

This is where you can chat with other students studying the same subjects as you and support each other as you head towards your exams

You can post any useful tips and resources that you come across, offer support to others, share your successes, or just have moan when it gets tough!

Just remember, it’s against the site rules to ask for or offer any copyrighted papers, or to take conversations off-site to do these things. Posts that break these rules will be removed.

A few possible ice breaker questions are:
What exam board are you with?
What do you enjoy most about this subject/ course?
What area do you struggle with in this subject/ course?



Good luck with the next few months. Remember, ask for help, support where you can and together we can do this!

Don't get why she's keeping your papers lmao? Apolgoes for the long reply, but the things that have helped/are helping me:
It might be worth picking up a grammar exercise book, or using websites online. Another idea is trying journaling in German - I'm not sure how you'd go about it, but personally I focus on clearly explaining what happened at school, what me and my friends did etc. - It not only helps with vocab (I'd usually have at least one 'paragraph' on a random chosen topic), but also sentence formation, as I practice a specific grammar point with every day (ex. yesterdays was genitive, so I spent half the page talking about other peoples mocks and stuff, and the day before was um...zu clauses, so I felt very sophisticated blabbing on about in order to ... 😂)
In terms of having a set sentence structure, the journaling should be able to help with forming different sentences - you could create yourself little rules for each day, say you have to have a structure which includes a subordinating conjunctive (like weil) on ever other line, and a comparative (like aber) on the remaining ones (if that makes sense lol). - If you timed this, it might get you used to working and creating the language under a time constraint without it being too pressuring (hopefully), which might help with panicking in the actual exam.

Also worth setting aside maybe 5 minutes a day to test yourself on adjective endings and the identification of the cases, I've unfortunately not yet found a way to revise these beyond good old fashioned self-testing (making a grid of the endings and filling it in, then marking) or using online gap fills (which would also test your identification of the tenses), however I can give you some patterns I've noticed within the 'categories' (der/die/das endings, ein/eine/ein endings, no article endings), which are saucepans (as highlighted in bold) of the ein/der systems

(der endings as in the endings of the article itself within the diff cases - I found it relatively easy to remember to a specific rhythm, almost song like, so I'd recommend remembering these with some sort of rhythm)

Once again, sorry for the absolute essay, but i hope it is of help somehow! 😄

omg thanks so much for extensive reply, i super appreciate it!
shes keeping our papers cus its the locked material (they were the 2023 gcses) but i guess its ok because i managed to sneak some photos from under my desk, getting a 1 in accuracy killed me inside a little LOL

ive never heard of journalling in german as a study method! ill give it a go,

i dont mean to shift the blame in any way, but i feel like a big part of gcses is the environment you're in when you learn as well as the teacher, our teacher isnt too bad, but i dont think theres been a single lesson where she isnt rushing us to get a task finished or telling us we need to stay focused !! (nobody is talking)
we're basically not allowed to have general chatter in the classroom, and its generally a very hostile environment. i have never seen some small controlled chatter as being a con, the class does it all the time in sciences and as a class grades range as 7-9s
i remember one time i was looking at my nails for one moment and she told me im not being focused and needs to get on with my work!! so as a result, the classroom is always dead silent and its so hated.

theres some lessons where people will be actually excited to get there, and german falls at the bottom of that list. for all. we literally wait outside until the last possible moment where we HAVE to go in