SleepingAway

I took German 1 in my sophmore year and I really enjoyed the language. I wanted to take it again junior year but I couldn't fit it into my schedule so I was thinking of studying it next summer. Is it possible to work my way up to AP German level with that amount of time and take in in my senior year? Also are there any good AP level German texts/review books?

Peaches7893

I can only answer your last question. No, there is not a lot of prep books available. You should also know that they reformatted the test for 2012 and beyond.

pseudoquotient

it depends on how hard you study. The AP exam is quite difficult (from personal experience); you have to be able to write a 2 page essay. The multiple choice reading passages are pretty sophisticated, too. But with dedication, I think it's possible.I couldn't find a single quality review book, either.

ToxicIgnition

I took the exam in 2012 (National AP Scholar, I'm a senior now). The exam was made 100 times harder. Previously, it was describing pictures (like telling a story with comic panels), fill in the blank, listening comprehension (designed for non-native speakers), a small essay, and oral response.

Now, it's half multiple choice (listening comprehension from German podcasts for Germans, mine had an Angela Merkel speech and a reading about Greek gods), argument/critical reasoning free response, presentational speaking, and vocal response.

I tested out of German 2, placed 4th in TX for Level 3 German Grammar having only studied for 2 years, and I got a 4. Es ist unglaublich schwer, eine echt gute Note zu bekommen.

Dawnie

@ToxicIgnition

What did you do to study for the AP exam? Get special books or anything like that before doing the exam or did you just sit the test with what you knew?

Pedestrian13

Hallo--

This is only somewhat relevant, but I was wondering... I have taken three years of German now, but the class is pretty average and I am not confident that I have a thorough enough grasp on the language to justify taking the AP test, which is why I did not register for it this year.

However, next year, I am signed up to take German 4 and German 5, and these courses come along with the added bonus of being for college credit: eight University of Minnesota credits. My question is, should I even bother taking the AP German test at all then?

Especially since it seems more challenging than classwork... and my listening skills don't seem so great as far as recordings go. When the German exchange students speak in German, I find that I can usual follow most of it--unless they're trying to teach us slang as they sometimes do--but recorded voices seem harder to follow for whatever reason.

cruxclaire

Hello, I think I've come across this thread a bit too late for my answer to make much of a difference, but I took the exam last year and got a 5, as a level 3 in a non-AP course...actually, the German classes at my school are a complete joke. So self-study is do-able, but in one summer from a German 1 level...meh, probably not so much.

To Pedestrian13, I'd say go the extra mile and do the extra work it might take to pass the exam, because you'll end up having a better grasp of the language in the end, which I think alone makes it worth the time. The recorded voices are generally easy to follow on the exam, since they don't employ all that much slang, and if you look over the MC questions beforehand, you'll be able to get a sense of what they're speaking about and what you need to listen for.

To gauge whether or not you're prepared for the exam, go through the MC questions on the CollegeBoard website, listen to some Angela Merkel speeches on Youtube, and read some articles from maybe Spiegel or Süddeutsche Zeitung or some other reputable German publication (Zeit, FAZ, etc.). I think there are also the writing and audio prompts from the 2012 exam up on the College Board site. If all those go relatively well for you, you should be prepared to take it. If you want to prepare for it, just keep doing all those things (reading the articles, listening to the speeches, writing practice essays, and so on), since you're not likely to find any prep books for the new exam.