|
 |
Study log - currently German | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes  2 sounds | Message 25 of 70 04 March 2007 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
I must confess also!
Come on mates, we all know that's not possible. There'll always be the struggle to perfect the course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 70 05 March 2007 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||
|
One problem is that the powers that be sometimes destroy a good course in order to make it more accessible. I have a collection of old Teach Yourself's in my possession, but recently I have looked through a couple of new courses in the same series. Frankly, I am glad that I bought the old editions and sorry that I didn't buy a couple more..
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 27 of 70 05 March 2007 at 8:27am | IP Logged | ||
Another problem is the embarrassment of riches of the modern age - we have access to too many resources, which makes it easy to get tempted into working with too many courses and textbooks, instead of using just one as the shortest route to authentic materials. Edited by frenkeld on 05 March 2007 at 4:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 70 05 March 2007 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||
|
I really liked what John Pasden has to say on the subject in
this blog entry.
That quote is specifically about learning Chinese, but I think it really applies to all language learning, and many other areas of life as well for that matter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 29 of 70 05 March 2007 at 8:57am | IP Logged | ||
|
Kato Lomb states in her book that she hasn't found the magic "Open, Sesame", and that that's because it doesn't exist. I recall reading an interview with Barry Farber, where he also said he hadn't found a clear-cut method. Assuming they meant themselves, and not in general, this is particularly interesting, because one would think with the number and the variety of languages they knew, they would've figured out at least for themeselves the optimal way. Perhaps, each new language can always throw up some surprises.
So, I meant the Perfect Method in jest, of course, but it does help to find ways to avoid wasting too much time - to help keep that 'unwavering determination' all the more steady. That's why I got annoyed with myself for not sticking to the tried and true approach with Geman in the beginning - three months for where I am at right now seems too long, given that my initial goal for German is just reading skills. I am not about to give up because of this, of course - it'll simply be lessons learned for the future. Edited by frenkeld on 05 March 2007 at 2:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 30 of 70 11 March 2007 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Last night I finished the first pass, without a dictionary, through the first two chapters of the novel, about 50 pages out of 250.
I was able to follow the plot somehow, so I now plan to work though the OCR version of these 50 pages of familiar context with a pop-up dictionary. Depending on the level of retention, I may follow up with another pass, with both a dictionary and a notebook. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 31 of 70 15 March 2007 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||
|
This should be the last of the frequent log entries. The new phase is not based on a milestone of any sort, but rather on the realization that I seem to have reached a point in German where enough exposure to basic structures has taken place to start working on reading some unabridged sources on a regular basis. Put another way, I've probably reached a point where I could continue with just authentic reading sources, a dictionary, and an intermediate reference grammar, and it would no longer feel like an unnatural and unnecessary experiment.
I don't have a very clear plan, but presumably a minimum of three ingredients will be needed. One is reading novels without a dictionary - this should be a frequent and regular activity; another should be some activities where I get to look up words - this could be done with the novels themselves, surfing, readers, textbooks, etc.; finally, I'll eventually need to reread the fundamentals of German grammar with more care, and then to continue gradually expanding that knowledge. I would like to mention my first foray into using a pop-up dictionary on the OCR'd version of the first chapter of the novel I've been reading. It seems so obvious now, but it never occurred to me in the past even to just cut and paste a web page (say, a newspaper article) into a Word document. I found that doing so allows one to play interesting games. First I highlighted all the unknown words in a paragraph in yellow, while highlighting in green those that seemed not simply lexical, but related to unfamiliar grammatical features. Then I looked up unknown words, underlining those already covered, so they had both the yellow background and the underline. Then I reread the paragraph in the hard copy of the book, then went back and removed the color, while leaving the underlining, on the words that now seemed familiar - this should probably have been done a day or two later, to check how much has been retained and provide an opportunity for a refresh. There is really no end to the games one can play - I wonder if one could even create some sort of pop-up entries/annotations for individual words. Certainly a tool worth exploring some more. Edited by frenkeld on 15 March 2007 at 7:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 32 of 70 13 May 2007 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
|
German:
A couple of months ago I was getting ready to go back to my old routine of selecting a novel, looking up the unknown words one by one, recording them in a notebook, and reviewing them regularly, but then I decided to try to experiment a bit more first. The first thing I eliminated was multiple textbooks, and this proved to be the right decision. I reasoned that my study time was limited, and my memory is nothing to write home about, so multiple passes through a single textbook were more likely to have the core vocabulary stick. One can always follow up with another textbook or course later, but doing more than one in parallel just wasn't working. Having followed John Farley's recommendations in this forum, I had three excellent textbooks on the shelf to choose from: Rosenberg's "German: How to Speak and Write It", "German Made Simple", and April Wilson's "German Quickly". His recommended order was to start with "German Made Simple" and follow up with Rosenberg, April Wilson being the choice for those focused on reading. Since I was no longer starting from scratch, and because I'd already read through the first half of Rosenberg once, I decided to work through it first. I went through the second half of the book and then started from the beginning, finishing the last chapter yesterday. I have not done any of the exercises, just read the text, the grammar notes, captions under the photographs, and the jokes sprinkled throughout the text. The book is simply excellent, and there is more to be gained from reviewing it yet again, and from doing the exercises, but this will do for now. In the meantime, I kept looking for a novel that would be simple enough to be comprehensible, but interesting and well-written enough to be read more than once. Poking around Amazon.de, I was lucky to stumble upon Erich Kästner, an excellent children's writer. I bought four of his novels for children and an unabridged audiobook for one of them, Emil und die Detektive - audiobooks exist for the other three, but only in abridged form. A few days ago I finished my first (i.e., general context familiarization) pass, mostly without using a dictionary, through "Das doppelte Lottchen", the novel that well-known American children's movies "The Parent Trap" are based on; there are a couple of German movies based on that novel as well. I started on the second pass through the novel yesterday and plan to limit the use of a dictionary until the third pass, when I do plan to look up as many unknown words as I can handle - another option during the third pass would be to compare the original to the English translation I have on order, if the latter proves to be of adequate quality and unabridged. Overall, no milestones, but things are moving along bit by bit, and doing so without undue stress, so I can't really complain. Edited by frenkeld on 24 May 2007 at 7:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
