<p>I just took the November 2014 SAT II Spanish w/ Listening and I thought I'd share my experience to help people who want to take it next year. </p>
<p>I've also taken AP Spanish Language (got a 5), and I'm taking AP Spanish Lit right now. And on top of that I've taken an outside class with Instituto Cervantes and I'm getting online tutoring. So obviously I've had a lot of prep and I'm just good with languages naturally as well. </p>
<p>I bought a review book and started studying Thursday night, two days before the test LOL. The Barron's Review Book was amazing. The grammar review was super easy to understand and I think comprehensive. I learned some new grammar really quick (like indicative vs subjunctive) and memorized like 140 words from the back of the Barron's Book with Quizlet. The vocab in that book is seriously on point, so many of the words that I studied or saw in the review book also came up on the real test. </p>
<p>The Listening is super easy. I didn't even try the picture part before the test and still found it easy. They read faster or about the same as they do on regular school tests, but nothing super intense like on AP Spanish Language. That being said I think people who haven't had that much experience listening to natives might have difficulty. Listening to songs and podcasts helps and you can do it while listening to other things. One thing that you should do when listening is to focus super hard. If you drift off even a little you'll miss words or important things and they don't let you pause or rewind the CDs during the test. So concentrate! </p>
<p>The fill-in part would have definitely been hard if I hadn't studied. You can't translate prepositions (words like to, for, by in English or para, desde, or en in Spanish) from one language to another because their uses vary. So if you're trying to study you should definitely learn por vs para and all that, but also learn prepositions that go with certain verbs (like soñar con.) </p>
<p>As for the reading, memorizing vocabulary from Barron's definitely helped. They were easy to easy-fairish, nothing terrible. But I've also had a lot of prep and read harder stuff on AP Lang. To prep I would read online stories (or newspaper articles if you want, but I think that's boring) and try to summarize the meaning of every few lines or so in English out loud. That definitely helped me when I was struggling with reading. </p>