Spanish CLEP Exam

[burbuja0512]

The best preparation advice I can give you is during the listening parts, write down everything that they say. It's pretty obvious what they're going to ask afterwards, but remembering everything can be a challenge.

I'll illustrate what I mean by a fictitious example in English:

Speaker: Maria loves to travel and go to restaurants. She has traveled all over the world and her favorite countries are Brazil, Costa Rica, Italy, Spain, and Australia. However, she doesn't like to eat at restaurants in each of these countries. She prefers to go to restaurants only in Brazil, Spain, and Italy. She plans on going to China next year and hopes to enjoy their cuisine.

The questions might come up something like this:

Q: What are Maria's favorite activities?
Q: Which countries has she been to?
Q: Where is she going next year?
Q: In which countries does Maria prefer to eat?

If you don't take notes during the spoken part, you'll never remember all of this. I doubt that many people here (myself included) would even remember in English without jotting down a few notes. You don't have to understand everything that's being said, but write down what you can and if you can recognize certain "lists", you're almost guaranteed to get a question about it... kind of like the country question in the above example.

Other than taking notes, you should try to think in Spanish. I lived in Mexico for six years and when I stopped logically trying to think of grammatical rules and concentrated on what felt right, I learned how to speak Spanish. Kind of like in English... you may not always know which grammatical rule is broken, but you will know what doesn't sound right.