suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4602 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese
| Message 177 of 225 21 February 2013 at 12:33am | IP Logged |
Hey everybody! Latecomer here ^_^ After being a long-time lurker, I have finally decided to take the plunge and be more active…I hope it’s not too late to join this year’s TAC!
Since the end of my two-year German course at university (well, more like an year really) I’ve been stuck around a B1 level so I've recently started to work hard in order to overcome this “intermediate level impasse” and slowly move toward my goal of becoming someday (hopefully not too far away ;)) fully fluent.
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6085 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 178 of 225 21 February 2013 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
Of course you can join! Welcome aboard!
I think it's fine if Team Schnitzel accepts new members throughout the year. As far as I know, there's no rule saying we can't.
I'm also at that "intermediate level impasse" (in French), it's a hard plateau to overcome! What plans do you have for advancement? What materials will you be using?
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suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4602 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese
| Message 179 of 225 21 February 2013 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
Das ist wunderbar, danke schön Sunja!
Fine, 'nuff German for today XD Yes it's kind of frustrating to be neither a beginner (as I am in French or Swedish) nor an advanced learner (English and, to a certain extent, Spanish).
I've asked to join two other TAC teams, but as soon as I receive their go ahead I'm going to post a detailed “intro” log. In short: I'm current doing a part-time internship until around the end of March, once this internship is over…who knows what I'll do :/
I don't want to set unrealistic goals, given my current “limbo-like" situation it's not possible to predict if I'll be able to dedicate a constant amount of hours per day to language learning. Let's say that for now I aim for a solid B2 level. I already read some B2 material, but my degree of understanding is quite variable. Sometimes I get most of what's written, other times I have to look up a bunch of words.
At the moment I'm relying on the material provided by the Deutsche Welle, such as their podcasts “Wort der Woche” or “Top-Thema”, for vocabulary. I also began to go through some chapters from my university textbooks that we skipped at the time to keep working on grammar and vocabulary as well. I have done nothing for exercising my written composition or oral German so far, but that needs to change. I want to use my language knowledge for job purposes (aside from my sheer love for foreign languages) and an all-around good level is preferred to an uneven level, say very good writing skills and so-so speaking skills.
I'll write more about my goals/material/etc…in my learning log :)
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6085 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 180 of 225 22 February 2013 at 10:03am | IP Logged |
Hey Schnitzlers!
I just found an -awesome- tool for expanding vocabulary. Take any word and put it in this online thesaurus for German. Instant wordage! (^-^)b
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BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4622 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish
| Message 181 of 225 25 February 2013 at 6:18am | IP Logged |
@Suzukaze: Welcome!
@Sunja: Thanks for the link.
My favorite online Monolingual German dictionary is: http://duden.de/
It includes definitions, synonyms, pronunciation, frequency and sometimes for the word you've searched you'll see a number of words often used in connection with the word in question. I really like the frequency (Häufigkeit) feature. For example: If the word has only one black square out of 5 (meaning it is relatively rare), you may not want to bother trying to actually commit the word's meaning to memory, but if it shows 3 or 4, then you know you're definitely going to see it again, and therefore it will be worth the effort.
Edited by BAnna on 25 February 2013 at 6:18am
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suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4602 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese
| Message 182 of 225 05 March 2013 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the welcome BAnna! I posted my log, which can be found here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=35435&PN=1.
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stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4873 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish
| Message 183 of 225 11 March 2013 at 10:30pm | IP Logged |
Hey...almost all words I look up on Duden has 1 or 2 stars. :p
So I think it depends really... there might be words relating to your interests and so
on that might be rare elsewhere, and so on and so forth.
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suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4602 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese
| Message 184 of 225 11 March 2013 at 11:08pm | IP Logged |
stifa wrote:
Hey...almost all words I look up on Duden has 1 or 2 stars. :p |
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That's what happened to me today when I looked up words from some texts by Deutsche Welle I was translating XD
Still on the topic of frequency: another dictionary that indicates frequency (and the one I normally use) is dict.cc. It has English <> German and many other languages.
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