German
When starting German GCSE revision, it is so vital to learn new words regularly, and if you do this from the beginning of year 9 or 10, then you will find revision for the exams so much easier. I did daily Duolingo lessons straight from year 8 which meant that by the time I was revising for my exams, I realised that out of all my subjects, I had to revise least for German, especially the listening and reading papers. Using the AQA vocabulary list was also very helpful, since it contains everything that could be on the papers.
Listening and Reading
Learning Vocabulary
It’s important to know how to use the vocabulary list on AQA. First of all, only look at words for your correct tier (since I did higher, I made a word document with all of the vocab you need for the higher papers). It’s easy to get overwhelmed because there are so many pages of vocab, but narrow it down by deleting all the words you know and can recognise. After that, you can start learning the words regularly (e.g. 5 every day) by putting them on quizlet, or sticking them on your wall. You might not get through the whole list (I didn’t), but even only learning a third of the words helps!
Words for today
| die Verbesserung | correction, improvement |
| die Pappe | cardboard |
| kirchlich | religious |
| der Flüchtling | refugee |
| malen | to paint |
Practice Papers
When practicing using past papers, make sure to note down any words or phrases you didn’t understand. I usually wrote these words on the front of my papers so that when I was revising, I could quickly recap these words.
Speaking and Writing
General Conversation
Key Tips
- Remember to ask a question aswell.
- Learn your chosen general conversation theme off-by-heart.
- Make sure your answers have been checked by your teacher beforehand.
- To get grade 9, your answers need to include: as many tenses as possible (conditional, pluperfect, imperfect…), have at least three wow words in every answer, have a range of connectives, use varied sentence structures, use idioms…
TORCH33 is a way to remember the list of things that you need to include when doing writing for German GCSE revision, so this can be used for the general conversation answers and the writing paper. (‘3 people’ means that you should write about at least 3 different people e.g. My sister prefers…)
This is a document with all of my general conversation questions and answers:
