50 in CSL - feel free to ask questions

[drake]

I'm taking CSL 3/4 in year 11 but I'm trying to achieve at least 30~

Are there any aspects that I should improve my knowledge than others? I'll be taking 1/2 next year so is there anything I should put more work in to?

i would suggest you work a lot of your oral skills and your writing skills. practice lots of essay writing for the different essay types and find which types suit you the best and focus on pumping out essays for those. with essay writing, it is important to continuously be improving your vocabulary. so make sure you are learning new and more advanced language as you are writing more and more essays - the way i learnt new vocab was through reading articles on the internet in chinese. for the oral, start getting your head around the format of the oral exam (with general conversation and detailed study). have a look at the questions for general conversation and see if you can go about answering them on the spot. as you improve through the year, try to start writing down answers to each of the questions. also, if possible, choose a detailed study topic that you are interested in. finally, see if you can learn relevant idioms! this will help both your oral and written skills.

hope this helps! thanks, drake

[Splash-Tackle-Flail]

hi splashtackleflail,

that is a very good question. probably the best advice that i got from someone during VCE chinese was that by the end of completing reading and responding, you should have copied out the entire text in your answers. it is difficult to know what to keep and leave out. one important thing is that there shouldn't be overlap between your answers in the questions. for example, in part a) if you copied a sentence from the text to answer the question, you shouldn't have that same sentence in part b). also, i don't believe it hurts to put too much information. so in regard to your photo, i believe it would be fine to add those additional sentences even though they are not in the answers. i think i did the same thing. and, from when i did it, copying the text was fine. if i could, i would change the sentence structure while maintaining the same meaning. but if you can't, copying the text should be fine!

hope that helps! thanks, drake

Thanks! my teacher actually wasn't too sure so this really helped

[InNeedForHelp]

i would suggest you work a lot of your oral skills and your writing skills. practice lots of essay writing for the different essay types and find which types suit you the best and focus on pumping out essays for those. with essay writing, it is important to continuously be improving your vocabulary. so make sure you are learning new and more advanced language as you are writing more and more essays - the way i learnt new vocab was through reading articles on the internet in chinese. for the oral, start getting your head around the format of the oral exam (with general conversation and detailed study). have a look at the questions for general conversation and see if you can go about answering them on the spot. as you improve through the year, try to start writing down answers to each of the questions. also, if possible, choose a detailed study topic that you are interested in. finally, see if you can learn relevant idioms! this will help both your oral and written skills.

hope this helps! thanks, drake

Thanks, what chinese websites would you look at on the Internet? Would you search all the characters definitions that you didn't know?

Also, are the general conversation questions on the VCAA website?

[drake]

Thanks, what chinese websites would you look at on the Internet? Would you search all the characters definitions that you didn't know?

Also, are the general conversation questions on the VCAA website?

the most important thing is to read articles that are relevant to what you are learning. so i would normally write an essay on a specific topic, and then after writing the essay, i would look up articles about that same topic online and learn any good vocabulary these articles had. i found this helped a lot, particularly with idioms. in regards to searching all character definitions, i was normally able to get a gist of what the sentence/paragraph was trying to say. i would then see if there was any idioms/advanced language/advanced sentence structures that they used and look at the meanings of those and see if i could use them myself.

for the general conversation questions, your teacher should give you a list (or if you go to XJS you will get a list). if you have friends who have done it previously, they should have a list too. however, VCAA does not give us a list. so the list that you get is the MOST COMMON questions that they could ask, but certainly not all of them. i'm pretty sure a long time ago i posted the list up, so maybe you can find that.

hope that helps! thanks, drake

[mrkebiny]

Hi drake! Thanks for answering questions, really helps.

Quick question regarding reading responding sections; for what type of questions should we ADD an extra comment or point. By add, I mean a line that isn't in the text and this might be a summation of the information, or some line of analysis.

Like the question might 'what is his attitude towards x'; whilst the text may have information on how 'he' reacted (maybe by shouting or complaining), I would then have to add something like 'therefore it shows that he was upset/angry'.

Thanks again

[Splash-Tackle-Flail]

Just another question here!

For essays, when the format is a newspaper article or magazine to say a school, but no name of the school is given. Do we make one up? Or just say at the end <学校杂志>. And if they don't give the number of the article, do we make one up as well? Also do we need to write our name (as the author) if they don't say "you are ____" ? Thanks!

[bkoh]

Hey Drake,
Thanks for answering my question before it was really helpful.
Just wondering in regards to answering the listening for questions that are like 1 mark is it still necessary to answer in full sentences and put down all information we hear or is it best to just put the information in regards to the question? as in should we put more just to be safe?

also for translating when putting answers in 'good english' how do we know when exactly to translate literally from certain words and when to translate generally to 'make it flow' if that makes any sense?

thanks again!

[drake]

Just another question here!

For essays, when the format is a newspaper article or magazine to say a school, but no name of the school is given. Do we make one up? Or just say at the end <学校杂志>. And if they don't give the number of the article, do we make one up as well? Also do we need to write our name (as the author) if they don't say "you are ____" ? Thanks!

hey splashtacklefail,

from what i remember, you do not need to make up a school name (学校杂志 is fine). however, you can make up the article number and make up a name if necessary!

[drake]

Hey Drake,
Thanks for answering my question before it was really helpful.
Just wondering in regards to answering the listening for questions that are like 1 mark is it still necessary to answer in full sentences and put down all information we hear or is it best to just put the information in regards to the question? as in should we put more just to be safe?

also for translating when putting answers in 'good english' how do we know when exactly to translate literally from certain words and when to translate generally to 'make it flow' if that makes any sense?

thanks again!

hi bkoh

yes, you need to put everything into full sentences. i'm pretty sure it says so in the instructions. but either way, i don't believe you will get marks for dot points/non-full sentences.

i think after practicing a lot you just instinctively know. translating literally is more for key words in the sentences (normally nouns). however, as a general rule, if you translate something literally, and then read it out in normal english and it doesn't make sense, you probably will need to change it. so maybe go by that method.

[Adequace]

Why did you choose to take CSL opposed to another LOTE which scales as much as Chinese but not as competitive?

[drake]

Why did you choose to take CSL opposed to another LOTE which scales as much as Chinese but not as competitive?

interesting question! well in year 7, my school required students to learn two languages and we only had three to choose out of: chinese, french and latin. at that time, i had no idea about the VCE system and how it worked. i chose to do chinese and french because i believed latin was a dead language and would have no use for me in the future. and then in year 9, my school allows us to drop one of the languages we are learning, so i chose to drop french instead of chinese because i felt that i was much better at chinese. and then, in about year 10-11, i started to understand more about the VCE system and how it worked. at that time i realised chinese was a stupid decision, but i believed that i could still get 40+ raw and the mark up would help me. so yeah, in hindsight, i would have probably chosen latin and french instead, and probably did both languages in VCE haha... but it doesn't matter much now...

[Adequace]

I have a couple more questions.

How did you manage to the workload of a LOTE in your final year, especially while taking spesh? Are you just good at maths?

What websites did you find helped you improve your chinese vocab or chinese in general?

I saw your Chinse sample guide that you're selling, the amount of effort invested in to the entire thing must've been unreal.

[drake]

I have a couple more questions.

How did you manage to the workload of a LOTE in your final year, especially while taking spesh? Are you just good at maths?

What websites did you find helped you improve your chinese vocab or chinese in general?

I saw your Chinse sample guide that you're selling, the amount of effort invested in to the entire thing must've been unreal.

hmm well to manage the workload, i tried to finish a lot of the content in the holidays. i'm relatively good at maths, so i was able to finish most of the course during the summer holidays, and spent the rest of the year tackling questions, refining technique etc. i had also finished writing my general conversation during the holidays, and half way through my detailed study. so yeah, i did a lot of things during the summer holidays. but during the year, i focused on practicing essays on literally hundreds of topics.

i didn't use any specific websites to improve chinese vocab. if i were given an essay topic, i would normally just type that in on google and find articles written (in chinese) on it. i would then read their language and learn from their vocab and sentence structures. that was the main way i learnt vocab.

hope that helps!

[Adequace]

hmm well to manage the workload, i tried to finish a lot of the content in the holidays. i'm relatively good at maths, so i was able to finish most of the course during the summer holidays, and spent the rest of the year tackling questions, refining technique etc. i had also finished writing my general conversation during the holidays, and half way through my detailed study. so yeah, i did a lot of things during the summer holidays. but during the year, i focused on practicing essays on literally hundreds of topics.

i didn't use any specific websites to improve chinese vocab. if i were given an essay topic, i would normally just type that in on google and find articles written (in chinese) on it. i would then read their language and learn from their vocab and sentence structures. that was the main way i learnt vocab.

hope that helps!

Thanks, if you don't mind answering a couple more questions

Are idioms only needed for people aiming for 40+? I'm only aiming for 35~ so I'm not too keen on remembering a heap of idioms.

Would you recommend getting a Chinese tutor to help you with your general conv. and detailed study even if you go to a XJS 学校?

[drake]

Thanks, if you don't mind answering a couple more questions

Are idioms only needed for people aiming for 40+? I'm only aiming for 35~ so I'm not too keen on remembering a heap of idioms.

Would you recommend getting a Chinese tutor to help you with your general conv. and detailed study even if you go to a XJS 学校?

hmm not necessarily. but yeah, for ~35 you probably want to know about 10-20 basic idioms (i guess).

in my opinion, i would probably get a chinese tutor if you don't go to XJS, unless you school teacher is amazing. you need a tutor that will help you with you vocab. and structure, particularly for the oral.

hope that helps!