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High school German to C2 in 3 months! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5850 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes  1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 73 09 April 2010 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | ||
Das hängt vom Lesegeschmack ab. Ich würde dir empfehlen, von Zeit zur Zeit eine lokale Tageszeitung aus Berlin zu kaufen. Dann kannst du auch den Stadtbezogenen Lokalteil lesen und bekommst mehr Infos über Berlin. Korrektur: Welche Zeitung würdest du mir empfehlen? (empfehlen = to recommend) Ich selbst war nur einmal in meinem Leben (für 3 Tage) in Berlin. Das war 1987, damals existierten die DDR mit ihren Grenzposten und die Berliner Mauer noch. Die Stadt muss sich inzwischen völlig verändert haben. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 09 April 2010 at 4:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5636 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 34 of 73 09 April 2010 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ich danke dir Fasulye!! ;) Berlin gefällt mir bis jetzt aber ich muss noch die Stadt kennenlernen, weil ich diese Woche viel gearbeitet habe. Ich werde später in meinen Blog bereden :)
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| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5447 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 35 of 73 09 April 2010 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Keep up the good work, Benny, es ist sehr bewundernswert for a teenager stuck in rural Ireland like me. May I ask
two slightly off-topic questions? 1. How did you become a professional translator? (I dream of this.) 2. What server do you use for your website? I'm writing with other young people on a Wordpress site about language, culture, history etc (I'm the Irish ambassador, so to speak) at the moment, but feel it could be better. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5636 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 36 of 73 09 April 2010 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey Brian! I was stuck in Cavan and never went abroad in my life until after I had spent a year in Uni, so don't worry - a world of possibilities awaits you ;)
You can contact me directly for any off topic questions via my profile on this website or on the contact-me form on my site. ;) But to answer your questions, I have a degree in Electronic Engineering (from UCD) and after several years travelling and some brief work as an engineer in different countries, I became a translator by first getting language qualifications (similar to the German one I'm currently aiming for), and then doing an intensive traineeship in a translation company in Italy. Then I looked for my own clients. For a deeper explanation of this story, I wrote it over two posts here and here. I use Dreamhost for my website. It's not too expensive, very stable, support is answered quickly, and it's Digg-effect etc. proof. For example I got 30,000 hits from stumbleupon in one day and it held up fine. A cheaper one would probably be better for sites with less traffic than mine. I was on a cheap server for a year on irishpolyglot.com, my video blog (hosting came free with my Proz.com translators yearly subscription, but I had to pay $10 a year for domain registration). I had to transfer it after the monthly bandwidth was reached in just one hour after a link to one of my videos appearing on the front page of meneame (Spanish version of Digg). But this problem is very very rare for most sites. Note that the server has very little influence to your site being "better". That's a question of Wordpress themes, plugins and programming, and you have almost most of the same flexibilities as a self-hosted Wordpress on your free site. My theme and plugins for example are all free and them or something similar could easily be installed on your site. Sorry for going off topic to anyone else reading this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5636 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 37 of 73 13 April 2010 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||
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WEEK 3: The great input experiment *********** Yesterday I finally clicked send on a translation that had kept me indoors most of the time that I've been in Berlin. For the next 2-3 weeks I can focus my energy entirely on improving my German and writing some thoughts to help other language learners. In May I'll have to get back to working full time, but I'm hoping to get a lot done in the next weeks. So this week I am jumping straight into what I'm calling the "great input experiment". If you read what I say above or on my site, you'll see that my "language hacks" involve speaking regularly, gaining confidence, and improving from "input" directly within conversations. Of course, I have to study too, but this is an irritating side-effect of learning a language for me. I know a lot of you enjoy studying, but I don't - speaking before I was "ready" has opened my world up to so many possibilities and it's something I intend to continue doing. This has been my "learning process". However, I think my approach to gaining the input to speak a language could do with some improvement, so I am going to run several 5-7 day experiments where everything I learn (other than in two-way conversations as I socialise) will be through a particular popular input-based or computer/on-line learning system, i.e. not "social/communicative" as I usually focus on. I will review these honestly on my blog for how they augment immersion learners' speaking abilities. The first one I'm going to try may surprise you: LingQ. You may have heard through the blogvine that Steve Kaufmann and I have had some serious clashes of opinion. My only argument with him is that he be open to other learning approaches, since he has very boldy dismissed my advice as "myth" with nothing more than a casual look at titles of posts on my blog. Despite this frustration, I have no interest in criticising his approach just for the sake of it, and I genuinely want to see if there is something I can get out of it. So everything I learn in German this week will be from LingQ. I'll write an honest review of the pros and cons of this site as I see it as a learning tool for someone interested in improving their current spoken ability (its theoretical benefits over years of study are not something I am at all interested in). I will recommend my favourite tools eventually in the guide that I'm writing, with more details on how I've adapted it to my own approach and my preference will be to free or inexpensive tools. Next week I will use a completely different tool, likely Livemocha and then SRS. If you have suggestions of which online/computer tools I should use, and opinions of particular ones, especially in terms of my own priorities, I would really like to hear them!! What has been the most successful way for you to acquire vocabulary quickly and efficiently? Edited by irishpolyglot on 13 April 2010 at 10:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5672 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 38 of 73 13 April 2010 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||
A children's encyclopedia - aimed at pre-teens. The language tends to be "grown-up" enough without being overwhelming. Each article is usually short enough that you have the energy to get through it in one go. Finally, of course, the variety of topics means you get a wide variety of vocabulary. For the new words that I pick up, I try to remember them immediately, and the tougher ones I put into an SRS along with the original sentence to anchor them to some memorable context. I decided to make a video about this. Edited by Splog on 13 April 2010 at 5:27pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 39 of 73 13 April 2010 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm looking forward to reading your evaluation of various tools.
Are you planning to just allocate one week to SRS as well? SRS stands for "spaced repetition system". If you try to squeeze the "space" part of it, you get just plain flashcards but can't say you tried SRS. I would give it 5 minutes every day for 3-4 weeks (while trying out other stuff if you want) and then see what your recall is like. My favourite tool is Anki and in my log you can see that I've been consistently learning 100-350 Chinese words a week with it since January, without spending much time on it as it's not the main staple of my Chinese diet; I often skip days even. The way I set it up in order to learn the optimal amount of words with it considering my varying amounts of time is by monitoring the amount of "failed" words (the red statistic at the bottom) and not looking at any more new cards when I've reached 45-50 reds. Once I've hit that number, I usually do not spend much time reviewing those cards, because much like with the Gold List method, I'm happy for just some of them to wind up in my memory next time I go through them, and then I fill up the count again. Edited by Sprachprofi on 13 April 2010 at 5:00pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5636 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 40 of 73 13 April 2010 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's an excellent suggestion Judith!! My experiment had been criticised as pointless for SRS, but I think if I did it as you suggest I might be able to give a slightly more balanced and realistic review of it. About 3 weeks of use isn't so "spaced", but better than one week, and I still think I could draw some interesting conclusions after that time.
If you'd like to read an interesting review of the kinds of systems I'll be using, have a read of this article. I imagine my reviews will be extremely similar, just more detailed. Thanks! ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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