Really scared & worried

[Luka]

I really regret taking spanish as part of my gcse option. You know why? Oral exam. I have one tomorrow and I'm freaking out. I can't absorb any of the words into my brain and I only just prepared it today when I should of weeks ago. The thing is, I couldn't face that I was gonna have to do a speaking exam so I left it till last minute. I don't really know what to do... If I don't do the exam I'll get 0 and probably fail my whole spanish course. Ugh... =( any advice guys?

 

[DeadmanWalking]

Well, since it's last minute, I'm afraid that your options are very limited at this point in the game. It doesn't mean that you'll fail, but that you don't have the luxury of being picky. Are there people in your class that you talk to, like do you have anyone's phone number in there? Maybe you could call someone up and have a group study session. If you're flying solo, then spend all of today up until "Judgement Day" studying Spanish. Try to learn shortcuts or rules that you can follow. If I were nearby and knew what you were going to be tested on, I could've and would help you learn this stuff.

 

[market.garden]

I was the same when I had to do my German GCSE. I left it till 2 days before to start revising.

Only advice I can give is to just spend a couple of hours tonight going over things again, even if it feels like its not sticking. It can be tempting to cram all through the night, but that just ends up draining you and messing up your concentration the following morning.

I used to find that things I thought I'd forgotten, or just hadn't memorised, actually came back to me either shortly before or during the exam.

 

[kilojoule]

Yes. You remind me of me I can impart to you some of my wisdoms. I did this and I did it for my equivalent of GCSE French and then I did it again for my French A Levels equivalent. I freaked out both times. I knew nothing and I needed to blag.

Here's what you do. Do the same as you do in any interview, do all the talking. Learn a whole bunch of crap off. Don't let the examiner talk, just keep your sentances flowy. So one naturally leads into another. Eg.

Hello, it's nice to meet you, I am Julie, I am 26 years old, I love spanish. I have never been to spain. I would like to go to spain. gosh it is very cold out. It would be really nice in spain. I walked to school and it was really cold, I bet the spanish kids walk to school without complaining. I run to school as fast as the wind. I don't drive. I should drive, I'm taking driving lessons. Yesterday I went to the park. I got ice cream. I like ice cream.
(Learn this kind of conversational crap of by heart and thats about a 2 minutes of it done- so long as you can loosely connect them to one another, youll be fine )

Then pick something and learn it in advance, lead the interviewer to ask you the question not the other way around. If you say you like dancing, they will ask you about dancing, if you comment on the recession, they will ask you about the recession. So whatever you say, either have a back up or be prepared to go off on a tangant about something so they cant interupt you. They don't really care if they get to ask you questions or not. They care that you *appear* to be fluent. You could know nothing! No vocab, no grammar, nothing but as long as you learn a bunch of crap and spew it out at the right time. you'll be fine {I wish someone had explained this to me for my GCSE's I got a D1 cos I knew nothing and it showed!!! But I still knew nothing by my ALevels and I got a B1 in honours