How easy is Junior/Leaving Cert German?

throw_away123 · 13-06-2014 12:04PM #1

I'm a Third Year now (almost finished the JC, wooh!), and I've been studying French for the past three years, but not German, since my school's timetable doesn't offer students the opportunity to study both.

I was wondering, how difficult is Junior Cert level German? I'm heading into TY next year and would love to spend some of the abundance of time I have taking it up, and maybe doing it for Leaving Cert if I'd like....just to keep options open.

I find learning languages quite easy to piece together, especially German, having been brought up in a multilingual family. I've seen some of the stuff on the German curriculum and it doesn't seem "impossible", but then again I might be wrong.

Thanks in advance

sarbear18 · 13-06-2014 02:02PM

Leaving cert German, in my opinion, having just finished my exam today (yay) is not too bad. The thing about it is that unlike what I've been told about French, you cannot do much study for it. the oral is worth 25 percent of your overall grade but in reality it is actually worth so much more. A lot of questions which come up in the letter and the ausserung zum thema are the same as the answers you learn for your oral and this makes up another 20 percent of the total. For example today in a letter for one question, I was asked what I would like to do after the Abitur (leaving cert) and I just went on and on about primary school teaching. It is very easy but you just need to get the grasp of grammar (more sentence structure than anything) and general vocab. A lot of words look like English words which helps in comprehensions which are 30 percent and they also tell you which part of the piece you find your answer and all you do is conjugate.

At the end of the day, it's completely up to you. If you have an interest in languages I'd advise using a bit of the time that is usually wasted in TY and get out the Leaving Cert testpapers and maybe buy the leaving cert German book. It's the kind of paper which is very fair. If you write a very simple answer to a question you would get far more marks than if you wrote an answer which is using lovely vocab but very accurate grammatically. Hope this helps

spurious · 13-06-2014 04:08PM

I did both French and German. German is a little more complicated because of the extra gender, but the complication of German and its odd sentence construction made it a far more satisfying language to learn I thought.

It's a personal decision I suppose.

throw_away123 · 13-06-2014 04:10PM

Thanks

I've pretty much bombarded myself with work in music for TY as well, but just to break the monotony I wouldn't mind brushing up on French and do a bit of a new language.

I normally cop on to grammar, vocabulary, and speaking quite quickly so that shouldn't be a major problem.

Do you recommend that I start from the basic first year/Junior Cert books as a total newbie to the language, as opposed to diving into the LC course?

throw_away123 · 13-06-2014 04:11PM

spurious wrote: »

I did both French and German. German is a little more complicated because of the extra gender, but the complication of German and its odd sentence construction made it a far more satisfying language to learn I thought.

It's a personal decision I suppose.

Thanks

spurious · 13-06-2014 04:11PM

throw_away123 wrote: »

Thanks
Do you recommend that I start from the basic first year/Junior Cert books as a total newbie to the language, as opposed to diving into the LC course?

You would need to know basic grammar in any language to start the LC course.

If you know Latin, German and its grammar is straightforward.

How easy is Junior/Leaving Cert German?

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