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Memorization Strategy for classification | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5562 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 9 of 38 13 January 2014 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some (or possibly one) of my German teachers have used "r,i,s" as markers when writing out vocab, but don't know if that was meant to make it clearer, or they were just too lazy to write it in full all the time. I think that also corresponds to the swiss pronunciation (dialects may vary).
My tip (well, it hardly rates as a tip, more of a speculation, but anyway) would be to really concentrate on the easy words that you use all the time (punish yourself for mistakes, revel in your successes), so that you build a "grammatical gender model" in your mind, and then hopefully as you come across new words, your brain will start to tell you that it's also relevant to learn the gender. Hasn't worked for me yet, mind you. Edited by schoenewaelder on 13 January 2014 at 2:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5132 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 10 of 38 13 January 2014 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Everybody here seems to treat gender acquisition as an exercise in memorization or logic. Let me suggest an alternative. Instead of going through something like this: word --> retrieve some rule --> determine gender --> retrieve more rules --> determine article / ending / agreement, how about aiming for: word --> choose article / ending / agreement which "sounds right". How to get there? Massive input (- no analysis). How to get massive input involving a single noun? Get access to a decent corpus of German and look at a zillion of example sentences with that word. You can anki 10-50 of them to aid acquisition, for instance as plain reading cards (front: sentence, focus noun phrase highlighted; back: empty), or cloze deletion cards. Don't overdo the cloze deletion, though, this shouldn't be an exercise in memorization. Don't forget to make plain reading cards of typical collocations, for instance if the word in question is "Kraft", make 5 cards with "aus eigener Kraft", 5 with "stärkste Kraft", 5 with "neue Kraft", 5 with "viel Kraft" (zB. wünschen), 5 with "ausser Kraft", 5 with "in Kraft treten", 5 with "Kraft schöpfen". Add sentences from your own reading and listening, if you feel like it. Alternatively, you can just read through those sentences, copy them, maybe by hand, read them out loud, revisit them again the next day, and a week from now, etc.; it doesn't have to be Anki.
I'm pretty sure that if you actually did this, you'd develop a feeling for what's right and what's wrong. You might end up not knowing what the gender is (or, rather, only upon reflection), but you'd be able to choose the right articles and endings automatically. Edited by Bakunin on 13 January 2014 at 5:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 11 of 38 13 January 2014 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I also find that memorizing der this, die that is useless. Somehow, due to the syllable structure, to me einen, eine, ein are much more different than der, die, das. So I remember the gender better if I've seen the noun in the accusative.
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| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 12 of 38 13 January 2014 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
I like that idea... the differing rhythm would help a lot. Since Hindi doesn't have an article, following the Landour Language School Hindi textbook, I used to learn every Hindi noun with an appropriate adjective. I imagine the same thing would work for other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4084 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 13 of 38 14 January 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I am now trying out an experiment to use a different system of memorizing genders by
using different prefixes. Masculine: r-Mann Feminine: die Frau Neutrum: Ω-Auto Plural: Δ-Männer I write the definitions in different colors, but that hasnt seemed to help. Maybe I need to make seperate colored paper lists, with the blue paper containing only masculine words, and so on. When I list all the genders on one page, I tend to tune out the colors. Anyone tried any other memory tricks, eg, the memory palace construct? Serpent: einen, eine, ein indeed are much better than der,die,das. Bakunin and Patrick: Germans in their infinite wisdom mix up articles in various cases. So we have die Frau in nominative, and der Frau in dativ (I am assuming this was done to make non-nativ German learners want to kill themselves in frustration). So going by sound alone is a bit dicey for new learners. Edited by Gemuse on 14 January 2014 at 12:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 38 14 January 2014 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
That is exactly the point where you should heed emk's advice. Look for gender markers on articles, adjectives, participles and pronouns. Now, I would say that massive exposure without paying conscious attention to those markers may work for some people, but won't teach noun gender to the vast majority. But when you pair it up with working intensively on gender agreement every now and then, you should be able to build a model of gendered noun class that you can just access without thinking about it, except for a few rare words that don't make sense at all/are used with several genders by natives. What I would do is: Look at a text I can understand, sentence by sentence. Find the nouns, figure out what their position in the sentence is, and for every noun find the words that are modified by it. like subject (plural/singular) <-> verb: tells you if 'die' is plural or actually f noun <-> pronoun: plural sucks, singular tells you the exact gender noun <-> articles, adjectives/participles together: should tell you the gender for many combinations Of course, when you look at a single occurance, there might be many words of that you haven't figure out the gender. After all, it's a pretty chaotic system. But when you see the same word several times and pay attention to agreement you should see the pattern and there'll come a time when you automatically decode that kind of information, and, hopefully, can store it for automatic access. I personally am an impatient person who tends to ignore all those little tidbits of information. Particles, articles, agreement ... as long as I more or less understand what a sentence means, I tend to not remember if it was a 'speak up' or 'speak out' I just read or heard. Neither textbooks or more exposure fix that for me. The only strategy that helped so far is to memorize bits of language word by word. Song lyrics, movie dialogues, lesson texts. And then, maybe, do FSI style replacement drills, but only orally, and do them quickly, so that either I can do them correctly or not, but not do them correctly when I can think about it for quite a while. I think doing that convinces my brain that it should pay attention to those little details. And then, more exposure. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 38 14 January 2014 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||
Well obviously we are talking about the singular accusative case. :) Actually if you ask a German what the gender of a word is that is a bit hard, in my experience they always say the word out loud in this way. For instance, ask someone what the gender for Tofu is, and they will say something like "das Tofu" or "der Tofu". In much the same way if you ask me where the letter 'm' on a keyboard is, I'll move my right hand to the where the appropriate key is and then know where it is. Taking a step back: I would not overly stress about gender so much. At this point I am mostly, but not always right about gender. It's not as hard as it looks. The distinction between feminine vs masculine/neuter is pretty clear, and within masculine vs neuter there are still quite a lot of cues that will give you an indication, which is which. It's a bit like knowing whether some random child's name, for instance "Suxey", refers to a boy or girl. You don't know with certainty, but you generally have a reasonable idea. Of course you'll need to learn the exceptions, but they tend to stick out. That's not to say that you shouldn't try to learn the genders, but even children take some time to get them correct. I like the idea of learning gender naturally though massive input. Over the past year I have read about 11000 pages of German, and watched 332 films. At this point I have gone from A1 to B2 in comprehension (e.g., I am currently reading the first Jo Nesbø book with 97% comprehension), but my grammar is still not that great, or at least it's hard for to me judge as the 'problem' with this approach is your knowledge is implicit. My feeling though is that while massive input works, it really is massive, and perhaps I'll need to read 50000 pages before things settle. But who knows? One thing that gives me hope is that children don't ever use Anki and they certainly learn gender. When talking about the Massive Input approach I think it's helpful to make a distinction between "prediction" and "extraction", which I think Bao was referring to above. At this point my brain can extract the meaning as I read (and has been able to do so since the first book I read a year ago), but to do this it really doesn't need to know the gender of words and their associated declinations to get 95% of the meaning. It doesn't actively predict the declinations/gender was I read. Or at least I don't have the sense that it does. Perhaps when I get to another level my brain will predicting what the gender/declination should be, and be surprised when this is wrong - I certainly hope so. But as I said my knowledge for gender etc is implicit, so I don't really know how much I know. I guess a test would be to give me a series of sentences, and then force me to choose which have the correct gender/declination and which don't. Edited by patrickwilken on 14 January 2014 at 9:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5132 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 16 of 38 14 January 2014 at 9:46am | IP Logged | ||
Even if it's meant tongue-in-cheek, the idea that someone, some central body, or a group of speakers, deliberately create grammar is not helpful at all. Grammar emerges as a description of how we speak, not the other way round. The idea that someone concocts a grammar system that you then have to memorize is really not how language works. What's strange about "der Frau [etwas geben]"? There's nothing strange about it. It's the only correct way of saying certain things. It's only strange if you think that "der" is masculine. But that's not the case. There are certain verbs, prepositions and constructions in which we use "der Frau", for instance "der Frau antworten", "der Frau etwas schenken", "hinter der Frau steht ein Mann" etc. The idea that you "use the masculine article with a feminine noun" is not a helpful analysis of this situation. My general point is that this kind of prescriptive analysis is not helpful, to the contrary it can often be harmful. You eventually have to get used to the way we speak. We don't perform calculations with dative and masculine turning into feminine or whatever in our heads when we speak. We just use those articles, verb forms, endings etc. that sound right, and they sound right, because everybody else also uses them all the time. Below are a few example sentences with "der Frau". You need to get to a point where you perceive those sentences and constructs as normal, and the use of other articles etc. as wrong. To use it correctly in a live conversation, I don't really see an alternative to having read, heard, and used those constructions many hundreds of times. Performing a color-based grammatical analyis or calculation just won't do it. Ich antworte der Frau auf Bengalisch, dass es in Deutschland sehr kalt ist und das Kind seine Mutter vermissen würde. antworte der Frau wahrheitsgemäß auf ihre Fragen, lasse dir keine Vorwürfe machen, bleibe sachlich, diskutiere es aus, ... Ich antworte der Frau: Dann macht doch eine kirchliche Trauung auch keinen Sinn. „Catch-22“ – so würde man im Englischen dazu sagen. Ich antworte der Frau auf der anderen Seite nicht und warte ab was sie als nächstes tun wird. Ich laufe rot an und antworte der Frau: „Ehm..wir wollten auch grade gehen, also machen sie ruhig ihre Arbeit." Mann, ist das peinlich. Ulf wollte sich nicht bei einer Lüge erwischen lassen, er antwortete der Frau nicht. „Er hat ihn angebunden!", schrie das Mädchen. „Ich hab es selbst gesehen!" Unser Held, der mit dem Trenchcoat, fliegt aus einem Fenster, landet im benachbarten Gebäude und ehe er der Frau antworten kann, ... Bevor ich der Frau antworten konnte, gingen wir hinein und dort ... Was würden Sie der Frau antworten? Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Vorschläge, schreiben Sie uns! Der Bub dankte der Frau, hing sein Gewehr um und trieb sein Vieh gleich rechts und immer weiter rechts bis an den dunkeln Wald. Belinda dankte der Frau und ging nachdenklich weiter. War dies vielleicht ein Fall, wo ihre Hilfe gebraucht wurde? So sagte ich allen Lebewohl, dankte der Frau und reiste ab. Ich dankte der Frau und machte ihr ein Kompliment, wie schön ihr ... Doch als er der Frau danken wollte, war sie schon verschwunden. Ich weiß gar nicht, wie ich der Frau danken soll, aber sie hat meine Freude gesehen und sagte mir, das würde ihr reichen! Warum man das neue Auto nicht der Frau geben sollte (Humor) Ich gehe hinein und gebe der Frau die Hand. "Ach, das ist ihre Große?", fragt die Frau. "Ganz die Mutter." Freudig überrascht drücke ich die rote C-Taste, gebe der Frau den Euro, den der Automat wieder ausspuckt, setze mich auf einen freien Platz ... Ich gebe meiner Frau ihren 50%-Anteil, auch wenn der Verkauf unterm Schätzwert liegen sollte und bin mit der Reduzierung meines %-Anteiles einverstanden. Kommt wirklich nicht häufig vor, aber ich gebe meiner Frau in allen Punkten Recht :) Nächste Woche rufe ich dann in der KiWu Klinik an und gebe meiner Frau Doktor Bescheid was Stand der Dinge ist. Ich gebe meiner Frau auch oft die Möglichkeit Zeit für sich zu finden. Ich gebe meiner Frau gern Tipps, was sie kochen kann. Leela, die Hebamme hilft der Frau bei der Geburt der männlichen Zwillinge. Doch es kommt zu Komplikationen und die Frau verstirbt wenig später. Nachtkerzenöl hilft der Frau, die pre-menstruale Periode bequemer zu überbrucken, hilft bei der Flexibilität der Artikulationen, hilft eine schöne Haut zu behalten ... Das hilft der Frau, sich zu entspannen, was wiederum ... Als er der Frau helfen wollte, zückte der Mann ein Messer. Sein Entschluss war gefasst: Er würde der Frau helfen. Als das Auto in rund drei Metern Tiefe auf den Grund gesunken war, konnten die Polizisten der Frau helfen, die Fahrertüre zu öffnen. Bei der Frau unterscheidet man vier Arten von Haarausfall: ... Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig und liegen etwa zur Hälfte beim Mann und zur Hälfte Bei der Frau. Erste Symptome hätten sich Bei der Frau auf ihrem Rückflug aus China am 27. Dezember gezeigt. Der Drogentest reagierte positiv, so dass Bei der Frau eine Blutprobe angeordnet wurde. Dass das letzte Wort Bei der Frau liegt ist eigentlich auch klar, denn sie wird ja schwanger und trägt auch die gesundheitlichen Risiken einer ... Die Beamten bemerkten Alkoholgeruch Bei der Frau und der Vortest ergab überhöhte Alkoholwerte. Er liebt mich, aber ist immer noch bei seiner Frau. Er weiß aber jetzt nicht, ob er bei seiner Frau bleiben, oder die jetzt schon 10 Jahre dauernde Ehe „wegschmeißen“ soll ... Als ich ihn fragte wieso er denn nie zuhause bei seiner Frau ist und immernur draußen sagte er ... bei seiner Frau sei eine fortgeschrittene Nierenschädigung festgestellt worden, ihr gesundheitlicher Zustand habe sich in den vergangenen ... Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit der Frau des ehemaligen Bundeskanzlers Helmut Kohl. EDIT: There are some strange typos (Gross- und Kleinschreibung) I somehow can't correct. The updates are not going through... Some instances of "Bei der Frau" should be "bei der Frau". Edited by Bakunin on 14 January 2014 at 10:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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