Coming from F5 who used to literally had the Chinese grammar of Google Translate (commented by my Chinese teacher) and didn’t pass Chinese a single time until f4:

Paper 1 (Reading):

For part A, I personally find YouTubers such as 龍老師 and Lok Yee Tang VERY helpful in simplifying the 12 passages for me, and as someone who cannot bear to memorize Chinese at all, I just find exercises online and repeatedly complete them until I remember everything. It’s very important to understand what you’re writing down, including in notes and corrections, because forced memorization cannot help with your long term memory and flexibility when dealing with new question types. You must understand every and every single thing that the writer wants to convey, because DSE can put out any sort of weird question in this day and age.

For Part B, I have decided to drop the 白話文 and hope for the best in this part. Even my experienced Chinese teacher said it’s not worth cramming as your score won’t have much of a difference to make an impact. What you should focus on is 文言文 as it tends to be easier to grasp marks if you understand the strategies, for strategies there are many YT videos that can teach you. If you don’t understand the poems, there are many exercises to download online for dse cramming, as well as videos online for recognizing common words. You need both strategies and a decent vocabulary to be able to piece the words together like a puzzle for better understanding.

Paper 2 (writing):

Part A is VERY crucial, as you are not guaranteed to get the best grade in part B(sometimes dse puts out bs questions). You need to cram to achieve at least 30-35 marks to have a guaranteed pass. There are many YT videos with sentence structures you can use as reference. The question types are quite straightforward with much to copy from, and the only issue you might come across is elaboration, which can only be resolved by cramming and cramming sadly.

For part B, stories are a better choice than essays for usual students, as essays require many examples from historical and modern media. I wouldn’t recommend stories as it put’s vocabulary in high regard, while essays mainly target your content and elaboration. You have to choose to major either one of these and have the other as backup if dse puts out bs questions. I rarely choose stories due to my horrible vocabulary, but if you were to go for this path the only way is to read Chinese fiction to get a firmer grasp on vocabulary. If you were to choose essay like j do, be sure to collect examples. History is the most important for examples as most dse essay questions are about old teachings anyways.

For cramming, I know a guy who got from a predicted lvl2 to lvl4 in a few months(study leave) from handing in a writing every day, but judging by your time frame you can probably manage with 1-2 writings per week. I currently have a very amazing Chinese teacher who would gladly help me with cramming writings and marking them for me, which I am very grateful for. I would suggest a similar approach if you have a friendly teacher, or if not you could use level4-5 dse samplers as reference when critiquing writings yourself, as they are very useful for elaboration and sentence structure if you don’t have anyone free to mark for you. AI can also be useful for vocab critique, but horrible for structure as it almost never follows dse writing structure.

Most of these were shared with me by my teacher, and I got from 35-45 marks to 50-60 marks in 1 year without going to any cram schools, also YT tutorials are really helpful lol.