1) Did you study French every day in some form (ie. listen to a podcast, read a book or write)?
Studying French daily definitely helped me improve my skills, and I used a wide variety of French books and movies to fine-tune my reading and listening abilities. I also often listened to the SBS news channel for French, which albeit challenging to understand at first, was also extremely useful in allowing me to improve my skills.
2) When alone (with no others to practice with), how did you improve your spoken French?
The second question is an interesting one...I guess I spent the majority of my oral preparation time on actually writing out the content of my general conversation and detailed study and almost rehearsing it mentally and committing the key ideas to memory (spontaneity is key in the real exam, so I wouldn't recommend trying to memorise word for word, it's a waste of time and can easily be detected by the assessors). The big thing in the oral is to map out a path that you want the discussion to take (e.g. family -> relationships -> personal interests -> something specific about the interest -> work -> aspirations for the future) and moulding your responses to fit this path. I'm sure that a similar approach would work well for 3/4 German. Furthermore, I spent a lot of time working on my detailed study and tried to extend myself with a broad set of books, films and articles beyond the set three resources, which was something that permitted me to deepen my understanding and be prepared for virtually any possible question on my topic. Also, I would encourage you to seek out your teachers outside class time for additional oral practice - I found my French teachers extremely supportive and knowledgeable on all aspects of the exam, and they were vital in helping me understand the styles of questions to expect and in allowing me to understand how the assessors craft their questions and set up the discussion in an exam setting. Doing these types of practice exams will make the real oral seem much more manageable...I honestly ended up enjoying mine a lot and found it an opportunity to engage in a real discussion.
3) Also, how much vocab did you learn per day, and how did you go about learning vocab in the most efficient way possible? I have looked at the 3/4 exam reading texts and the vocab seems really random, so I am just worried about how I am going to be able to understand the texts without using the dictionary a lot.
As for learning vocab effectively, I would highly recommend the superb book Mot à Mot by Paul Humberstone. It has vocabulary arranged in structured categories, facilitating easy and productive learning. Furthermore, I was preparing for the SAT French exam midway through the year, so I ended up buying two reference books - the Barron's Revision Guide and the Princeton Review Revision Book, both of which contained a large volume of common vocabulary arranged by topic. In the SAT exam, you are not allowed a dictionary, so that really placed the onus on me to learn the requisite vocabulary to a high level of perfection. In the end, I ended up learning 30-40 new words each day, but of course the amount of vocab that I learnt varied on a daily basis. In the end, doing these one-percenters in learning vocab was paramount to my ultimate success, as the speed with which I could complete reading and listening exercises increased over time, allowing me to complete the exam with minimal dictionary use. On the contrary, having the dictionary was still useful, and I recommend checking it when somewhat doubtful...it's not worth it to lose careless marks when just 50 % certain about a particular word or phrase. Another excellent book that I used was called "Street French - A Guide to Idioms". This had some awesome idiomatic phrases that enriched the content of both my speech and writing, but once again, I would advise restraint...too many idioms, or misused idioms can make you sound either pretentious or incompetent. So in many ways, my practice was focused on achieving a good balance between these different aspects of my writing and speaking.
4) Also, do you have any top tips for reading and listening? And what language would you note take in for each section of the listening?
As for listening, the key is to make effective notes. This year's listening was of a high difficulty in my opinion, and with a lot of content to copy down, I really needed to make notes at high speed. I personally chose to make my notes in French the whole way through...this was much easier for my mind to process without delays in thinking. You should also develop your own abbreviations for high-frequency long words over the course of the year...this really speeds up transferring information as well. For reading, once again, I thought this year's exam was challenging, with a fair few curveballs. The first section is basically translation in my opinion. Just translate the content accurately, and base your answers on this. The second part was a bit more challenging this year...you needed to write a rebuttal to a particular set of arguments, and it required more thought. I recommend learning a wide range of connective phrases and general vocabulary - so that you can form a wide range of sentence structures to impress the assessors. Learning to summarise, reword and synthesise the main argument of content in French, and makeing sure your grammar and vocab are up to speed will allow you to achieve success on this section of the exam.
Heres a list of his questions and answers so far
Sort of an answer wiki
Feel free to copy+paste and then add on