Non-Curricular languages & Obscure subjects - predictions, guesses, and discussion

antifun

Anyone doing any of the lesser known subjects?

I, myself, will do Russian. The oral went well and the aural is very easy. The written section of the paper is formidable in its difficulty, but the exam is on the 18th so I'll have a ton of time to prepare.

Jijsaw

I don't do any "obscure" languages but I would have loved to have done Japanese or Russian but I live out in the middle of nowhere and so have no one to teach me. I was going to do Japanese but it would have involved getting up every Saturday at 7am and driving an hour to sit in a community centre for 3 hours- not the most fun.

What is involved in the Russian paper?

Hinaro

Doing Lithuanian.
Not a very thought out decision, just something I threw in in case something nice comes up. Going through the past papers, I'm feeling slightly nervous... but ah well, I'll be grand

No idea what to predict, just advising people to look over grammatical rules and stuff. It's one of the last exams so no need to be panicking quite yet >_<

antifun

Jijsaw wrote: »

I don't do any "obscure" languages but I would have loved to have done Japanese or Russian but I live out in the middle of nowhere and so have no one to teach me. I was going to do Japanese but it would have involved getting up every Saturday at 7am and driving an hour to sit in a community centre for 3 hours- not the most fun.

What is involved in the Russian paper?

It's basically; 2 comprehensions, a 60 word essay on a topic that you must learn off, and a 120 word essay in which they instruct what to write or you can choose a topic to learn off. All of this is topped off with testing your grammar.

I suppose you could bull**** on the written topics as they're mostly general, however knowing an odd phrase or two doesn't hurt.

It's not that hard. Most of the difficulty comes with learning the cyrillic alphabet, and in my opinion Russian grammar is way harder than English.

But, I'm a native speaker. I went to a Russian school in Lithuania for 4 years. I know not a word of Lithuanian.

Hinaro

antifun wrote: »

I know not a word of Lithuanian.

It's ok, me neither ._.

Nah, I think i know enough to express my points. It also seems that coming across as patriotic is an advantage, with the marking schemes favouring certain ways of writing (though that may just be my cynicism)

BlueWolf16

Lots of Lithuanians !

Doing it myself, but as a native, fluent speaker I should be ashamed if I don't get an A1.. Got a C1 last year with 0 preparation. Didn't realise writing will be so hard, my spelling was tragic on most cases. Though it's definitely very simple, just something I have to remind myself of how it's done. That being said, did only like 1 day of study all year so far, but I'll have 6 days of preparation from Business (my last 'real' exam), should be enough.

I guess being patriotic will get you some advantage, most examiners will be Lithuanians, so there's that. Not sure if it makes that big of a difference though. Good spelling and no waffling around should easily land you an A.

spurious

For Russian, a native speaker should have no problem getting an A of some sort as it's only a two year course.

The non curricular languages however, expect fluency and can be quite hard on spelling and grammar mistakes. Showing a familiarity with recent cultural phenomena and trends from the 'mother' country is good too. An A without some preparation is by no means certain for native speakers.

ecoste

Lots of people in my school doing non-curricular languages, but they think that they're super easy and aren't preparing for them at all.