by: Ai Wang
Editor’s Note: @BangMandarin (帮 meaning “help” or 棒 meaning “awesome”) is a Youtube channel founded by Ai Wang, a devoted educator with 16 years of experience teaching IB Chinese in Southeast Asia. This channel is dedicated to increasing fluency and confidence in the language! Whether you’re an IB student preparing for exams or someone eager to boost your Chinese skills, this channel offers practical tips, immersive lessons, and fun cultural insights.
Most schools have completed internal assessments, and there is a little over a month left until the IB final exam. How can you maximize your efficiency in this final review stage? How can you confidently enter the exam, potentially boosting your score by several points, or even 10 to 20 points, if you are lucky?
Here are some tips, using resources from @BangMandarin, to help you prepare for your exams:
Listening
Listening is often the most challenging section for students, especially those who have never lived in a Chinese-speaking environment. In these last few weeks, I recommend frequent and consistent exposure to audio resources, ideally listening for 5 to 10 minutes daily. Videos on BangMandarin are suitable for this type of practice as they are all short and level-appropriate and topic-relevant for IB Chinese students, either SL or HL. The key is exposure: “No other trick, just familiarity.”
Regular listening practice will help you adapt to the speaking speeds of a native speaker and the pace of talking so you won’t feel overwhelmed or lose focus when listening to the exam recording. Additionally, memorizing a few commonly used words is the best strategy since the 2nd or 3rd recording requires written responses, and no one knows what specific vocabulary might appear. You would master around 180 words in two months if you learned just three words daily by heart!
Reading
The reading exam requires high concentration, especially when dealing with Chinese characters. In this final stage of exam preparations, you can reinforce previously learned vocabulary. However, the key to improving your reading performance is building confidence and developing the ability to make educated guesses. BangMandarin offers articles crafted with the most frequently used words from past papers. Please read them often to review must-know words.
Read short passages, even those just three to five sentences long at first, to boost confidence. Short texts allow better focus and an increased sense of accomplishment when you understand them. Then, gradually increase the length to two paragraphs, three, and so on. Since IB reading passages are usually between 450-750 words and typically consist of no more than six paragraphs, practicing with overly lengthy texts may be counterproductive and discouraging. Doing past papers is also necessary.
In short, focus on what you already know rather than stressing over what you don’t. Think of it like building a house: if you’ve completed half of the structure, would you rather keep adding to it, or stand beside it feeling frustrated about how slow you’ve been? Which mindset do you think will help you more on exam day?
Once your confidence is strong, you can start using educated guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar words. Use clues like radicals, sentence structure, paragraph meaning, context, or even general life knowledge to infer its meaning. When encountering an unknown word, try using clues to formulate a possible meaning before looking it up in a translation tool. This way, you’ll learn new vocabulary and sharpen your ability to deduce meaning — an essential skill for the IB language exam.
Remember, reading is not just about decoding words – It’s about applying logic and common sense. You are all experienced high school students, so you are well-equipped with the skill to guess — you just need to activate it!
Writing
Opposite to listening and reading components, writing tests your productive skills. You don’t have to have an extensive vocabulary, but you must use the words and sentence structures you already know correctly and effectively.
I suggest creating a writing checklist (I have shared some videos about this on @BangMandarin) that includes:
- Basic phrases
- Complex sentence structures
- Advanced vocabulary
Additionally, idioms and colloquial expressions are like the decorative toppings on a cake—they add finesse to your writing. Memorizing a few idioms and set phrases can enhance your essay significantly.
When crafting your responses, you can incorporate elements of Chinese-speaking cultures, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China. For example:
- Instead of writing, “I shop online,” say, “I shop on JD.com.”
- Instead of writing, “I ate beef noodles today,” say, “I had beef noodles at a Taipei night market.”
Another major challenge in the writing exam is understanding the prompt correctly. Avoid going off-topic, and make sure you choose the right text type. Practice with past exam questions. Discuss them with your teacher and peers, and compare different interpretations from others to understand why there might be variations. Finally, memorize the eight major text types to use the correct format. BangMandarin has a video about tips for IB writing that details all formats.
Final Words
I wish all IB Chinese students the best of luck! What you gain from studying IB Chinese is not just a score — it’s a wealth of skills and personal growth that will stay with you far beyond the exam. 加油！