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Multiinput Germanic log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4040 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 9 of 20 23 April 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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@patrickwilken, I'm using for that a Kindle as well (the paperwhite) without looking up
anything. The word I don't know either I understand from the context, or I formulate an hypthoesis or I don't understand it at all. @Bakunin, happy to see you here :) My goal is indeed to be able to understand at a good degree most of the Germanic languages and being able to speak well some of them and I recognize that it is ambitious (probably less than studying both Persian and Chinese from scratch with too few experience in language learning). As first result of putting in the loop also the three main scandinavian languages, I can see that the excessive resemblance of those three languages (mostly norwegian and danish) makes really difficult to me that I have to deal with also German and Dutch to study them together. I therefore decided to keep Norwegian in the loop while postponing Swedish after Norwegian and Danish after Swedish, while if I keep going through all this project and I don't change my mind I will finally have the courage to restart studying Icelandic. I subscribed to the Superchallenge with German, Dutch and Norwegian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4526 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 10 of 20 24 April 2014 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't suggest you switch, but I am using the cheaper Kindle (approximately 50 Euros), with the Collins German-English dictionary. Personally I find it much easier to look up words with the cursor than with the touchscreen - and so think the cheaper version is better for language learning.
I very much like the passive-first, active-later approach to language learning, which I have been using to learn German over the last 22 months so you might want to check my log. At this point I am B2+ for reading/listening, but weaker B1? for speaking. My strategy has been to watch lots of films/tv without subtitles, but generally read intensively (so looking up words as I go). Only in the last month or so have I switched to extensive reading of paperbacks (no dictionary) and finding that I can read pretty quickly. Are you going to sign up for the Super Challenge? I did one last year and found it very motivating. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 April 2014 at 9:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4040 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 11 of 20 24 April 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting, I will read your log! B2+ for reading/listening is a very good result (I
place myself as C1 in passive comprehension in English, and it took something like 4-5 years), while speaking is a different matter and depends largely by how much you use the language everyday (and still I'm a weak B2 in English, after an year of use at work and starting from more or less A2). But also German is grammatically speaking heavier than English and this can make the process longer I would say. Did you use other resources other than texts and movies? Was looking up vocabulary your primary way to learn vocabulary? In this moment I'm delegating to Memrise the task of teach me vocabulary, while I expect to remember and recognize the vocabulary learnt during reading and listening. I'm also using Assimil, but I'm considering if I should use it only after the passive phase as a bridge from passive to active skills before to start with FSI (at least for German). I indeed as written in the other post subscribed to the Super Challenge for German, Dutch and Norwegian (+ Swedish after Norwegian) since I saw the benefit in mantaining the effort over time by participating in a challenge while doing the 6WC. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4526 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 12 of 20 24 April 2014 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks. I live in Berlin so it's been pretty easy to get access to materials (e.g., getting a library card, local video store membership etc).
Most of my understanding of German comes from reading (about 12000 pages so far - I try to read about 30 pages a day - 10000 pages a year) and movies (about 380 so far). For reading until this month I have always used a Kindle, with a pop-up dictionary, and would look up words as I went. For movies I have almost never used subtitles, just watching and trying to understand as much as I can. For the first year I also did about a hour a day of Anki cards, which were split between single words (with plural forms too) and sentences with the words embedded (to help me with grammar). Early on I read a short grammar book to get an overview of the language, but I haven't looked at it again. You really don't need to understand German grammar at a deep level in order to start interacting and understanding what you are reading/hearing - and I am hoping by interacting with the language at lot I'll get an intuitive grasp of the grammar along the way. I think I could have probably dropped Anki after 3-6 months if I had been a bit braver. I would have thought that I wouldn't learn words just by reading, but it seems to work quite well. If I were to do it again I would stop using Anki at the same time I started reading novels, which started for me after six months - though again I could have probably started sooner if I had known what I was doing. I can communicate here in German, but I am sure my grammar is pretty bad. I am going to start working on it more actively once my reading/listening skills are just a bit better. Although I can, for instance, read a normal novel now without a dictionary (e.g., Murakami), I would struggle reading a more sophisticated paper like Die Zeit. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 April 2014 at 6:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4040 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 13 of 20 02 May 2014 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Patrick, going backwards to your observations, I'm noticing with Dutch the same
trend: I struggle more to understand newspapers than a novel like De Alchemist. Do you have an estimation about the number of words you know? I know that the minimum is normally considered 3000 words, but probably we need around 10000 to be completely independent with the language, is it wrong? My sincere congratulations to have been so amazingly constant to study anki cards for an entire year! Your vocabulary might be really consistent. I'm noticing that procceding too fast I tend to forget some words (there are some that I don't know why but I forget every time. For example today I reviewed among the others the word "ervan" in Dutch. But I don't remember absolutely what does it mean!). Another problem I found is that I'm struggling a lot more to remember Norwegian's words, probably because most of them are very short: I indeed don't have problems to remember long words but with short words can be tough sometimes for me. For those reasons I decided that for the month of May I will study the more vocabulary possible for Norwegian while I will only mantain the amount of vocabulary I have for Dutch and German (at least if I don't change my mind during this month :)). I will be in Scotland for a week so for an entire week I won't study these languages. I confirm that to me the trend is: I find Dutch easier to read than German and the German easier to understand than Dutch while spoken. As a side note, when looking at some Norwegian text, it looks very Germanic but when listening some spoken Norwegian doesn't seem Germanic at all to me: it seems almost like an Asian language! (This is obviously to to my uneducated ear) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4526 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 14 of 20 03 May 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | ||
I think you need something like 3000-5000 word groups to understand 98% of speech (in English at least) and 8000-9000 word groups to understand most written text (in English). Note: this is word-groups not words, so you need to be able to recognize the different meanings within a group (e.g., beautiful, beautifully, beautifier, unbeautifully etc = 1 group). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4040 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 15 of 20 03 May 2014 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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So even more :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4040 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 20 20 May 2014 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Came back from my vacation in Scotland, I found that my week of inactivity with
Norwegian had serious consequences in remembering the exact norwegian translations for the English words. However, my understanding of written Norwegian has not been affected significantly. This because I spent 8 days learning approximately 85 words a day to have a headstart before the holydays. I made an experiment by reading a wikipedia page in different Germanic languages to test the degrees of intelligibility with the three(four with English) I'm studying right now. I noticed I can read Danish with the same understanding than Norwegian, while Swedish is much less clear, and Icelandic and Faroese even less clear. The page I used is about Norway. As a result, I list the languages from the highest amount of understanding to the lowest (at least for the specific example of the wikipedia page about Norway). - Dutch. I find this very reasonable becauase is the one I studied the most and it's the one which I'm reading intensively - Afrikaans. A little bit less than Dutch. I'm not studying this language. - Norwegian and Danish. This is a surprise for me. I have the same understanding of the two but I'm not studying Danish. They seem to be almost the same language to me. - German. I thought I was able to understand German better than Norwegian. - Frisian and Swedish. I'm not studying these two languages and my understanding of the two seem to be only slightly worse than German. - Icelandic and Faroese. My understanding in this two languages is almost non-existent. I'm not studying them. There are too many variables that can make this experiment not too much indicative of my level of understanding, of course. I had fun anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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