<p>Hi guys,</p>
<p>Ive been taking the language for the past 3 yrs (AP this yr) under a teacher who's not qualified at all. I have about 2 yrs worth of serious sessions with native French teachers, but that was some time ago and they were on an on and off basis. </p>
<p>I already listen to and read off sites like TV5MONDE, but when I looked over Barrons prep book the exercises all seemed pretty hard.</p>
<p>So would someone please suggest how I can improve myself during these 5 months? What do your teachers do to help you? What do you wish you had done more practice on? How much grammar do we have to know to get a 5?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I take IB French at my school from a seemingly equally unqualified teacher. Something that really helped me over the summer was reading a children’s book, Le Petit Prince. It taught me elementary vocab and grammar. When I first started reading, I had to look up every other word. After a few chapters, I was reading through paragraphs with ease, only having to look up large words that weren’t basic vocabulary. Reading in another language, though it is time consuming and difficult, helped me immensely. With five months, you have a lot of time! Also, make vocab cards of words you notice being used a lot and speak them out loud to yourself. Finally, watch French movies without subtitles to see just how far it will take you.
In interesting way of looking at it - kids don’t learn a language and become fluent by studying grammar; they pick up vocab by immersing themselves in it. While I’m not sure I agree with the immersion approach, I did have a great deal of success when I began to read and to understand what things sound correct.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Truth be told, I can actually understand Le Petit Prince fairly well already(it’s my favorite, so :D) and I’ve tried to re-study my old notes, read articles etc over the summer. But the main problem is that I have a hard time with conjugation, and since my teacher does not EVER correct any of our work, I never know if my writing sounds like Google Translate. </p>
<p>Also, does anyone know if there would be a lot of culture-related questions on the exam?</p>
<p>Have you ever used wordreference.com? It has conjugation charts and dictionaries for a ton of different languages. It has helped me immensely! If you haven’t used it yet, I’d say check it out.</p>
<p>I don’t know how relavent this is but just so you know the barron’s book, to my knowledge, no longer applies to the changed AP French test. The College Board completely changed the test last year. I recommend getting the Pearson AP French book or the REA AP French Language and Culture book both of which should fully prepare you for the online exam. Plus, both books have online access material which I found really helpful. And for grammar review I recommend “Une Fois Pour Toutes”. </p>
<p>I may be wrong about the barron’s thing but as of October 2012 my French teacher told us that barron’s did not have a test prep book out for the new AP French test. Btw, by new I mean the first time the new test was given was may 2012. </p>
<p>I hope this helps :)</p>
<p>When I took the exam in 2011, I found the Barron’s book unhelpful. One thing I recommend reading is Eugene Ionesco’s “La Cantatrice Chauve” - I found it helpful for vocab, slang and the like. Some editions have slang explanations in English as well.</p>
<p>Also, look online for sites that talk about French culture and slang. We were tested on lots of it…</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies! But just on a side note,are there any suggested sites/books/texts for learning “proper” slang (as opposed to more local sayings)?</p>