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| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4652 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 1 of 6 27 May 2012 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello! I've been reading the forums for a few months. Sometimes I can't believe that I feel a sense of belonging here, because learning English has been so slow and so painful for me that for many years, I doubted wether I would ever be able to call myself "bilingual". Learning any other language seemed even more impossible! Now that I think of it, it's strange, because I've always wanted to be good at my native language and master it, so I should have had an interest in other languages, but I probably just didn't know how to make it work.
I realized a lifelong dream last year: I went to Paris! I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be able to be there, and found myself so lucky to experience no language barrier and be able to "seize" the culture so much more as a result! Since my next dream trip was to visit Bavaria, I thought it'd be a shame if I knew nothing, so I decided to try to at least know a little. I had taken a basic class a long, long time ago, just because I needed a class of anything at the time, and to my surprise, I found the language interesting. To me, it seems to carry a mystery which I want to solve. My first idea was enroll in a class, but I found none which suited me. I decided to do as much as I could by myself. I wasn't very ambitious, but eventually I discovered that some people could successfully learn a language without any class, and so my goal is now to be fluent by the time I will be able to go back to Europe. My target: the summer of 2013. I'm using the FSI course. I'm rarely bored by the exercises because I fully believe that every minute I put into them is worth it. I've slightly adapted the course. I know one is supposed to be able to come up with the answer "as naturally as in one's native language". However I can only put in about one hour a day, and after two weeks of active study of a single unit, it's becoming harder to remain motivated just to gain what's missing for it to be completely natural instead of learning new material. I also almost never revise anything. I've tried it and found it to be very time consuming, and again it just seems like I'm not progressing much overall as a result (and I forget some details eventually anyway). I could also probably make better use of the audio. Overall though I can follow from one unit to the next one, so it doesn't seem like I'm going so fast that it hinders my progress. I've started reading TinTin in German, which I find perfect for my level - it's mostly short sentences and everyday conversations, and knowing the stories so well in French, I can already read them for fun without a dictionary by guessing words. I recently subscribed to the Deutsche Welle channel and was surprised by the number of words I was able to recognize, because from memory this had been so much more difficult for me in English. I can understand parts of sentences here and there but not any full report/show. I quickly realized I had one problem with numbers (which I've mentioned [URL=url=http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32441&PN=1&TPN=1]here/URL]. I'm working on it and noticed an improvement. My other big issue seems to be with verbs. So many of them start with the same prefixes, they end in -en, and it's becoming a huge mix up in my mind. Also, the more I am listening to Deutsche Welle, the more I realize that verbs are almost never among the vocabulary I can recognize. Considering I'm supposed to know 177 of them through the FSI course so far (I've counted tonight), something is clearly going wrong there, lol. So I've just started using flashcards for every verb, hopefully that will help me. I plan to complete the FSI course in the next 6 months and at the same time, watch as much Deutsche Welle as I can and try to improve my listening comprehension. I've seen short and simple videos for beginners on their site, that seems a good start. I also want to start reading online articles and translate them. FSI is great, but I have estimated I will only know about 2000 words by the end. That doesn't seem quite enough, so I'm trying to gradually introduce variety. I'd also like to have a pen pal eventually, but for the moment writing in German takes me a lot of time and I'm afraid I don't have time for everything at the same time, so hopefully by the time I'm coming closer to the end of the FSI course, I'll get into it more. I'm also planning to revise all the FSI units when I'm done; I expect to be able to retain more (all?) of the details which I tend to forget right now since I will already know most of the material. I've been studying for 8 months already. I'm trying to put in 7 hours a week on average, and more when I can. I'm afraid my goal of being able to comfortably converse in German by the summer of next year may perhaps be slightly ambitious - who knows how fast I will really progress as I am right in the middle of that dreaded "intermediate" stage now! However, it's aggressive enough to give me a sense of "emergency", which keeps me on the edge an pushes me to study. I only hope this is a realistic enough goal, because to be honest, I'd be disappointed if I didn't make it, but it's not like I have anything to lose either, and what I will have manage to learn will be very worthy anyway! I'm curious to hear from the more experienced language learners: does it seem like I have a reasonable chance to reach my goal? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aodhanc Diglot Groupie Iceland Joined 6250 days ago 92 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 6 27 May 2012 at 10:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Bienvenue au forum.
I hopes some German students will be able to help you with your question. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cortical Tetraglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 30 posts - 52 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, SpanishB1 Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 3 of 6 27 May 2012 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi,
just curious, do you happen to live in or near Montreal? I grew up in Bavaria and moved to Montreal two years ago 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4652 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 4 of 6 28 May 2012 at 6:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Merci, aodhanc! :)
Cortical: yes, I live in the Montreal area. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5461 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 5 of 6 28 May 2012 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||
I know that feeling from the other side of the bilingualism fence and it often seemed like francophones I met (with a few exceptions) picked up near perfect English without much effort. Welcome to the forum.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4652 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 6 of 6 29 May 2012 at 6:24am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks! :) Oh, I struggled through English classes, in fact I hated English classes for a few years in the beginning; but nothing came that easily to my fellow classmates either. The advantage we have is that English is such a popular language that at some point, many people will want to have access to information, lyrics or movies available only in English, especially since we are geographically surrounded by it. That's what happened to me: at age 15, I got interested in a topic and most of the time could only get interesting information about it in English, so I started improving only because my interest pushed me to deal with the language more and more, not because I suddenly decided to actively improve my English. Of course, that worked better for my English than any class would have. One always has an easier time remembering what is interesting to them! Perhaps that's where the "effortless" impression comes from, but I still had to sit and study for many years previously. There are still many francophones who would struggle to come up with even just a sentence, because they never went beyond the school requirements. I suppose anglophones are less likely to meet them since they will tend to remain among francophones. I'd like to do the same with German, but it's hard to think of a topic for which there would be information available in German that wouldn't be in English, so it can't work exactly the same way. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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