<p>So, I've looked through older threads, but there doesn't seem to be a particular book that everyone advocates...</p>
<p>Does anyone have any suggestions for books that have worked for them? I know it's a little hard to say, since they recently (just this past year, I believe) changed the test.</p>
<p>Let me preface my advice by saying two things:
First, my situation with Spanish is a bit different from the average student, because I was in an immersion program in elementary school.
Second, I never used a prep book in preparing for the AP exam. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I got a 5, so I must have been doing something right. </p>
<p>In class, we used the Triangulo book, which was amazing. Each of the chapters had several exercises that exactly matched a section on the AP exam. There'd be a long essay, two short essays, a presentation exercise, fill-in-the-blanks, reading comprehension, etc. I don't think it would be very easy to use if you were working on your own though, since it's a textbook. </p>
<p>I will say this: If you have a Spanish language radio station in your area, listen to it when you have a spare moment. The listening exercises on the test are often radio interviews or similar content, so you have to deal with poor auido quality sometimes. If you're DC area, our station is 99.1 (el zol, siempre de fiesta!) which you may or may not be able to get streamed over the web. I'm not a huge fan of the music they normally play, but I listen to it to keep my Spanish from atrophying. Listening to other people speak Spanish will help you a lot. </p>
<p>I have a lot of miscellaneous tips, but I'm not sure how helpful they'll be and I'm supposed to be writing college essays right now, so I'll leave them out. If you PM me with a certain area you always have trouble with, i.e. writing, reading, listening, speaking, etc, I can give you some specific hints.</p>
<p>What do you mean by "book"? Review book? If so, it's difficult to find review books for languages. Barron's is pretty good for AP Spanish prep, though.</p>
<p>To kyledavid: Yeah, I meant review book...sorry if that was confusing. I already have a book that I had to get for school (Prentice Hall) but I want to prepare for some of the test on my own, since my Spanish AP class is pretty useless. I especially need to improve my listening skills, and my book doesn't come with any CDs, since my teacher has them as a part of her Teacher's Manual.</p>
<p>Yeah, the Barron's book comes with CDs, and the listening exercises--hell, most of the exercises--are harder than those on the exam. I chose the Barron's book after lots of research on them, and concluded it was the best. REA is also good, if you can find a copy.</p>
<p>It's my first year teaching AP Spanish Language and I was wondering what you veteran students and teachers think is the best recording equipment? Should I get some sort of computer program for recording, or buy CD recorders, or just go with low-tech cassette tape recorders? We've been using micro cassette recorders in class, but they're not an option for the actual exam, I guess.</p>
<p>Gracias por los consejos, amigos.</p>
<p>Try asking the AP mailing lists on <a href="http://www.collegeboard.com%5B/url%5D">www.collegeboard.com</a> </p>
<p>They probably know better than students would what works best.</p>
<p>Yeah, Triangulo is a good book, even though my teacher never taught in that class. published by Wayside publishing.</p>
<p>profe, my teacher uses this computer program called "audacity".</p>
<p>and what's better, rea or barron's? my spanish teacher is absolute crap, it's her first year teaching AP and she has to look up all our vocab words...she doesn't even know what half the verbs we conjugate mean and we're not doing any prep for the ap exam. all we've done since the beginning of the year was present, preterite, imperfect, present perfect, future, and conditional.....haven't even got to subjunctive yet.</p>
<p>but i really want a decent ap score grade b/c so many colleges give credit for it.</p>
<p>I normally think that the barrons book is the best and it comes with CD's, which are very helpful</p>