g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 73 of 91 19 April 2015 at 12:21pm | IP Logged |
Via Diva wrote:
Congratulations!
I was listening to the Vorleser audiobook and just dumped it due to the low
comprehension level even though I have seen and liked the screen adaptation really much.
And it's twice as great that you're motivated enough to read books which you don't really enjoy :) |
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Maybe I didn't express myself well enough on the enjoyment thing. The book was gripping and the characters and themes stayed with me after I finished it, which are both signs of a good book, I think. But the book was not light, cheerful or fun, so in that sense, it was not enjoyable.
I am curious about the screen adaptation now, although having read the book in German I'm not sure I can handle Kate Winslet performing it in English!
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 74 of 91 30 April 2015 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
At the moment, me speaking German sounds a bit like this:
"Ich habe...bin...in...nach...Deutschland gefahrt...gefährrraarrghhh gefahren!!"
It's very frustrating and disheartening that as my comprehension skills are starting to jump ahead my speaking is actually becoming less fluent. Because rather than parroting a few ready made sentences, I'm getting a bit more creative, but at the same time every time I hear a mistake fall out of my mouth I self correct until I end up a stuttering mess.
Anyway, following the adage that if something isn't working, you should try something different, I've decided to join the dark side and give FSI German a go. All my drilling so far has been pen and paper based, so I'll see how I get on with a pure audio approach instead.
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Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4226 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek
| Message 75 of 91 01 May 2015 at 11:13am | IP Logged |
There are always German dubs, if you can get a hold of it :)
As for speaking - just don't be harsh. Yeah, there are mistakes, yeah, they make you mad (and mostly at yourself), but only speaking more is a key to fixing it somehow. Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen :)
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stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4865 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish
| Message 76 of 91 01 May 2015 at 8:07pm | IP Logged |
I know your pain. Two years ago I could watch German stuff on Youtube as if it was in
my own language, but I couldn't string together a proper sentence without at least
three spelling/grammar errors. One theory of mine is that German is generally very
clearly spoken, and hence a language that is easy to understand.
Maybe you'll get out of that phase quicker than I did if you decide to stick with FSI.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 77 of 91 09 May 2015 at 2:06pm | IP Logged |
@stifa maybe your German comprehension benefited from your existing knowledge of Germanic languages? I certainly get a lot of help from English alone (and even French helps with some words which German borrowed and English didn't). But German grammar is really quite quirky, even though my expectations of grammar have already been loosened up considerably by my experience with Japanese.
Anyway, I think my biggest problem with German right now is I'm not spending enough time on it, and the time I do spend is too much oriented towards textbooks and Anki and not enough towards listening, reading, and maybe speaking (but until my next holiday, speaking practice is going to be limited anyway).
Deep down I think I'm still expecting miracles, even though I've been doing this language learning thing for long enough now that I should know better.
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Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5001 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian
| Message 78 of 91 10 May 2015 at 2:46pm | IP Logged |
Those miracles are a tricky thing. It is not that easy to just leave the sunshine of
previous success and humbly get back to the roots and from those up to the intermediate
plateau and slowly upwards. But You'll get there! You could win the struggle with
Japanese and this is "just" German.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 79 of 91 27 May 2015 at 12:26am | IP Logged |
Thinking about the latest great HTLAL vocabulary debate, brought to mind that these kinds of debates are one of the reasons why I spend so much more time in the HTLAL Language Learning Logs than any other part of the forum now. I find it far more beneficial to read about what people are actually doing, and what actual progress they make, than to read pages and pages of debates around what people think other people ought to be doing. Watching a language learning story unfold in a log also allows me some insight into the personality of the writer, at least as far as language learning goes, which in turn helps me make a judgement as to whether I should try and use their approach/textbook/choice of native materials or not.
The way that the polarisation in this recent debate has gone, takes me all the way back to 2008 when I decided I'd try to learn Japanese on my own, with no experience of language learning beyond classroom French. Googling about how to learn kanji I found pages upon pages of debate which had polarised into apparently two camps: do Heisig OR write out each kanji hundreds of times. I think overall that internet debate has run its course, or maybe its just a case that I've matured a bit as a learner and pay it no more attention, however at the time, as a complete beginner to self study and exotic languages, it was very unhelpful and led me up a few dead ends. I'm old enough to know not to believe everything I read on an online forum, even one as well moderated as this one. But it makes me wonder about how much care I should take in my own posting.
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Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4226 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek
| Message 80 of 91 27 May 2015 at 5:14am | IP Logged |
Everyone should definitely care about being honest, I think. If to look at 6WC, this is a
classic example of a competition that requires total honesty. No one is able to check if
you have really read a book, done some grammar exercises and so on.
The problem is, however, that people aren't always objective, and if we're talking self-
study, it's hard to evaluate your level properly sometimes, you either think it's worse
or better than in actually is. But this is an estimation nevertheless.
So basically a recipe for a good LLG (in my view) is writing lively about what you do and
then evaluating the results as rationally as possible.
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