How hard is French HL?

[badabum]

I'm about to chose my IB subjects for next year. My school would put on an xtra HL French B class for me They say I am too good in French (father is French, im almost fluent but not so strong in grammar and vocab) to join the others in SL. How hard is the HL? Can the teacher be pretty flexible what to do with me? Do I have to read classical literature only or can it be also modern stuff? How did you experience your French B HL class?

[larry]

Sounds like you should be ok, HL just expects you to be able to deal with a bit more complexity in the passages you have to read for reading comprehension, and one of these will be a literature piece. However you don't need to read classical literature - it is only an extract.

Personally, the thing I found the biggest difference in was writing; the written response is worth double the marks because there's a whole new criteria, and for the writing task (paper 2) you have to write almost twice as much, and are marked much more harshly, especially for basic grammatical errors (m/f etc.)

[EricLuth]

I've considered studying French B HL as well. I don't really like this new system where you're not able to study English A2 HL. My school will probably not let me do English A HL, and I don't want to study English B HL. That puts me in the situation I have to either choose French B HL, or not study French at all.

I've studied French for five years after this semester. I am not very fluent though, and have never read a whole French book or other work. Does it sound as I should consider not studying French at all?

Edited January 26, 2011 by EricLuth