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Content + wordlist + anki, opinions/help | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| jingwumaster Newbie United States Joined 4668 days ago 33 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 32 18 June 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi everyone,
I want to learn German, focusing mainly on reading and listening comprehension. I don't know if I'll ever visit or live in a German speaking country, so for the time being, speaking isn't important to me. I just want to be able to enjoy literature and media in the language, maybe written correspondence as well, because I like old fashioned things like that (I'm 27). Anyway, I'm thinking of approaching it like this: 1. Find interesting novel, 2. Make word-lists out of unknown words, 3. Use Iversen word-list method to learn words initially, 4. For retention, take words from word-list and insert them into a srs program like Anki along with the sentence they appear in, in the novel, for context, 5. Repeat ad infinitum. Basically, I would work through a novel series like this to develop reading comprehension and also listen to things to develop listening comprehension. I would also start out with novels I already know well from English, which would allow me to understand more from context, since I'm already familiar with the story. I might would do this with The Hunger Games or Harry Potter series. Also, I'm especially interested in the results of those who have taken interesting material and combined it with word-list and srs (spaced-repetition-system/software) in this manner. Any opinions or advice concerning this approach will be appreciated, just keep in mind that I don't need to be able to speak this language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 32 19 June 2013 at 1:39am | IP Logged | ||
A few thoughts, which you should take with a grain of salt: 1. If you're making sentence cards in Anki, you're going to have solid passive recognition of that vocabulary, even without using word lists. So maybe you should do one or the other, but not both? 2. I'm not sure how this would work if you don't know any German at all. Translating an unknown language with nothing more than a grammar book and a glossary can be pretty rough going. 3. It might be nice to get the matching audiobook and do some Listening/Reading. In any event, you'll want to listen to something. (For Harry Potter audiobooks in German, check out Pottermore.) I've certainly learned a huge amount of French by enjoying native media and occasionally looking stuff up and adding it to Anki. But I started that after I finished Assimil. Anyway, maybe somebody will be along with better advice soon. :-) Have fun with German! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 32 19 June 2013 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Listening Reading may be one way as emk pointed out.
Or I think just getting the same book in English and in German might make your life much easier and your learning more efficient than searching in the dictionary all the time. I think you might succeed with "only" this but I think you could make your life easier again by reading a grammar overview or grammar book of German. As you're not that interested in active skills, you don't need to dwell on exercises but knowing what to expect, which words are functional parts of the sentence, recognizing which words are probably just another form of the same noun or verb, that could be useful. For listening, I think a few tv shows will move you way up once you are ready for them. Hard to advice something beginner but not textbookish. Audiobooks for you novels might be the easiest choice. Your project sounds very interesting, have you considered writing a log about your progress? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 4 of 32 19 June 2013 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I have no experience whatsoever learning German, but I would say this: do a few grammar lessons before tackling the novel. Get some of the basics down first, like basic conjugations, some common irregular verbs, gender, etc.
As for Anki, unless you have an e-book and/or you have lots of time, inputting sentences from your novel will be tedious. At least, it is for me. What I do is, while reading, if I need to look up a word in the dictionary, I jot it down, or highlight it in the book, whichever is easier. Then later on, I look for an example sentence with that word in it on the Internet, and just copy-and-paste into Anki. That saves me the hassle of typing it in manually. I also think that it helps your memory somewhat. You see and understand the word in both the example sentence and in the novel, so you have two contexts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 32 19 June 2013 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Just to add the icing on the cake, or gild the lily or whatever, I'd add the audiobook
to having a German and an English version of whatever book or books are involved. Although I don't use Anki or any automated SRS, I'm basically doing the same as you: read books (and listen to the audiobook version if I can get it), write down words quickly for later looking up: once looked up, add them to a word list (or a Huliganov- style Gold List (or I sometimes compromise between the two). At the moment, I rarely look up every unknown word. I take a fairly relaxed view, and only look up things that strike me of interest, or nice phrases, or occasionally a grammar point I notice. (I also listen to podcasts). I should say I've been learning German a long time, so this process is a lot easier for me, but I don't see why it shouldn't work for a less experienced learner, provided they are patient. I'm also doing it for Danish, in which I'm still really a beginner, but I'm making it a bit easier for myself by reading (fairly slowly) books that I have already read in English and German. EDIT: sorry, I hadn't noticed what you were doing with sentences. I don't do that, but I don't say it's not a good idea, but it's potentially a lot of work, as has been suggested. I think it should definitely help though, if you can keep it up. EDIT: apologies to non-native English speakers: it's "gild" the lily; now corrected. Wiktionary article Edited by montmorency on 19 June 2013 at 1:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jingwumaster Newbie United States Joined 4668 days ago 33 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 32 19 June 2013 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I wanted to let you guys know that I have read your posts and will give a more complete reply to them later, but right now I have to study for a Trig test tomorrow. I'm already thinking on some ways to improve my approach based on advice/opinions in these posts, after only skimming, definitely good info. Thanks again and I would love to see even more suggestions.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 32 19 June 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I do similar stuff but without the word lists. Though as a linguist I have an overview of most languages before I even start them. And of course I love grammar, though I hate boring exercises, especially translating.
I highly recommend the podcast "Deutsch? Warum nicht!" by Deutsche Welle. It's fun and it should be a good beginning for you. and yes, LR. see the posts by the member doviende too. he found it easier to learn new vocab by both reading and listening to L2, perhaps because some cognates are more obvious in speech but others in writing. that's also how it works for me in Danish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4280 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 8 of 32 19 June 2013 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I create the web site Readlang which provides a nice workflow for this kind of
method. It works like this: 1. You import plain text documents to read. If you have novels in ePub or pdf format, you can use Calibre to convert them to plain text first. 2. You read the book with the built-in reader, which includes one-click translation using both Google Translate and WordReference. 3. Every word you translated is remembered, along with the sentence for context. You can practice cloze detection within Readlang's SRS flashcards, or you can export the words to Anki, Quizlet, and other SRS programs. Would love to hear how you get on if you do decide to give Readlang a shot. There's another program called Learning With Texts (LWT) which is popular on this forum and does a similar thing, you may like to try that too. Edited by SteveRidout on 19 June 2013 at 10:12am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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