I had two interviews and one testtest, spread over two days (my college offered overnight accommodation for those travelling a long way). I did the test first, which was in a large lecture theatre with around half of the other applicants from across the University. The test lasted an hour and was a very similar structure to the example tests on the website.

The following day I went to the college I'd applied to, and friendly student representatives showed me to each of my two interviews. The first one was a general interview at my college with an academic from a different department (as my college didn't have anyone from the linguistics department), and the second was at a nearby college which did have a linguistics academic.

The first interview was very general and mostly focused around my personal statement. Since the interview was with an academic from a different department, some of the questions were very broad and I remember finding it difficult to judge how much they would already know about linguistics, but I think it was mostly about seeing you think on your feet about something you weren't expecting to be asked.

My second interview was with a linguistics specialist at another college. We discussed some of my personal statement and then I was given a sheet of paper with some sentences in other languages and in their English translations. This was tricky at times but I found that by talking through my whole thought process my interviewer was able to offer useful hints if I was getting stuck. We also discussed other things I'd done related to linguistics that wasn't in my personal statement - might be worth leaving something quite minor out of your personal statement in case you're asked this!

To prepare for the linguistics test I used the example paper on the Cambridge website, but also found many other similar tests used at Oxford for ab initio languages and Classics. I also used past papers from the United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO) and the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) which are all available online. IOL especially was significantly harder than anything given in my Cambridge test so if you've had a go at those you're probably pretty well prepared.

Don't be put off by other people around you telling you how they think their interviews went! It's really hard to tell and the best thing you can do afterwards is try to put it all out of your mind - everyone will have had questions they didn't answer as well as they wanted to but it certainly doesn't mean it was a bad interview!