spanish Tips for Spanish B SL?

[maynerr]

I've always been decent at Spanish, but this year it's been kick my a**. Much of what we have been doing is taking practice Paper 1s, which are almost completely reading comprehension based. Does anyone have any tips or ideas that will help me to do better on these and just Spanish SL in general?

[carpediem]

I've asked my teachers, and they said just to read. Try 20 minutes per week, at least. A little bit of reading goes a long way.

There are a couple of Spanish links already on IBS, if you're interested.

[Sandwich]

What the user above said

The comprehension paper is a tricky devil... it's very difficult to expand your vocabulary without knowing what's going to come up in the exam. The only way to do it is gradually and just hope new words seep in by osmosis. Also, it is possible to concentrate on particular areas of vocabulary - if you flick through past papers, you'll notice there are recurring themes which you'll probably also be taught about. Food and drink, Spanish (or whichever language) culture, the environment, travel and so on. You can go out of your way to check out vocabulary relating to these things.

Personally the best thing for me was to pick a topic and have a conversation about it with somebody who's competent in the language. When you don't know a word or don't understand something they say, it's a lot easier to learn it this way. However you do need to be fortunate enough to have somebody to converse with (luckily for me, a family friend was a professor of Spanish!). Watching TV in Spanish (you can watch for free online), listening to Spanish radio and so on is also useful. Try to listen to something like the News, because it'll help you recognise what they're on about (the News there is likely to be very similar to what's in the News here, and being able to guess what they're talking about really helps you pick up more stuff - also the News by default covers a wide and relevant range of issues). Finally I found that reading books in translation was really helpful. By that I mean parallel texts e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanish-Short-Stories-Cuentos-Parallel/dp/0140265414

They have proper Spanish stories with the Spanish on one page and a translation on the other page. Not only can you appreciate a tiny smidgeon of Spanish literature, but it's really useful for picking up new words and also finding colloquial phrases for your own work.

Basically obtaining vocabulary = tricky and the best way to do it is practically. If you sit down with a long list of words, I promise you that unless you've one of those magical memories, you'll struggle.