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Good strike rate for German grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 17 of 70 26 December 2013 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This, with a twist. You'll spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out a meaningful (scientific) way to measure stuff in most of language learning. Even if you get somewhere, I don't think you'll be able to actually measure how you're doing all the time to check how much you're improving, so in the end, impressionism ("hey it seems this is working out") is the only practical way to go about this. Except that you may have much lower / higher standards than people around you. I'd say that you're fine with it when both you and the people you want to communicate with are happy with how many mistakes you make. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 18 of 70 26 December 2013 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Or how few :) Nobody is happy with how many mistakes they make :D
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 19 of 70 26 December 2013 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I dont't know any German, but I think the noun gender problem is similar that faced by English-speakers
learning French where there are only two genders. Noun gender assignment has to be the number one problem of learners from languages without grammatical gender. My piece of advice, that may or may not be applicable here, is to not learn the words and genders in isolated fashion. The fundamental problem of grammatical gender isn't assignment per se, it's gender agreement along the sentence. Getting the gender wrong of a word by itself is really not a big deal. What really strikes the ear is making an adjective + noun agreement mistake - among others. Learning words just with an article, e.g. le livre - das Buch, is not useless but just inefficient and usually leads to confusion because it does not address the fundamental problem of morphological agreement. What is more efficient is to learn at least some associated syntactic form that highlights the agreement. For example, one could learn "le bon livre." The is particularly important in French when the definite determiner artlcle may not really indicate the gender at all. A particular problem in French is homophones and homographs with different gender assignments. Le poste and la poste are two different things. If you learn only le poste and la poste with their respective definitions, you are pretty much guaranteed to mix them up. The only way to nail these two words down is to learn them with some syntactically distinguishing word, as in le poste intéressant and la poste canadienne. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 20 of 70 26 December 2013 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't know how useful this advice is, but as I originally started learning German I learned a lot of nouns with both the gender and plural form at the same time (some thousands) with Anki over the course of a year. This helped me start intuiting gender for nouns. It's not absolute, but you start getting a reasonable feel for gender after a while.
Now I basically just read/listen to German and speak without worrying too much about gender. I have no idea what my strike rate is but I don't get the impression that it's a huge problem at the moment if I get gender wrong sometimes. People certainly understand what I am saying and as I get more fluent I assume (hope) that my gender assignments will get more and more accurate. Edited by patrickwilken on 26 December 2013 at 7:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 21 of 70 26 December 2013 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I find that I remember the gender better if I've seen the word in the accusative and with an indefinite article. ein/eine/einen all have a different syllable structure, whereas der/die/das are more similar with regards to the rhythm of the sentence/phrase. Edited by Serpent on 26 December 2013 at 11:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 22 of 70 27 December 2013 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I beg to differ, and with all due respect @beano. To say that a strike rate of 80% is acceptable is to say that one in five nouns and all the attendant morphological constraints can be wrong. This might be the reality of many speakers, but I for one do not think that it is acceptable. I don't believe that speaking a language badly is acceptable. Sure, we all make mistakes but we should not aim to be content with 80% accuracy in our target language. We should strive for 99% accuracy. I am, of course, aware of the enormity of the task of mastering a grammatical gender system. But here is where I believe strongly in mastering totally a small(er) number of words instead of making mistakes with a larg(er) number. In other words, use the small number perfectly (as possible) and creatively rather than show off your imperfect knowledge with a large number of words. When I speak of mastering a small number of words, some people who shall remain nameless, here at HTLAL, get all worked up and claim that I believe that one should aim to learn 300 and none more. That is not what I am saying, but I don't want to debate that red herring now. The main point here is that you should aim for total or native-like accuracy with what you have before venturing on to other things that you cannot use properly. Edited by s_allard on 27 December 2013 at 6:19am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 23 of 70 27 December 2013 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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No matter how much you polish them, 300 words are 300 words.
For an exam, using the words you know well is a good strategy (although the examinator will probably try to force you out of your comfort zone). In real life though... obviously in some situations it makes sense, but if you artificially restrict your speech so much, you will forever sound like a very good intermediate learner. If 100 of your 300 words are nouns, then how are you going to replace 19% of your nouns with them? And we're speaking of the words you actually know, just aren't sure about the gender. In general, of course it also depends on whether the native speakers are used to foreigners, whether they are nice to them (s_allard is now reinforcing the stereotype about French speakers :D) and whether your pronunciation is clear. Just a little anecdote: back in 2007 I visited Paris with my parents, and we had a few excursions with local Russian-speaking guides. I once noted to my dad how the guide's grammar was flawless, but he was like: "was it? the accent was so horrible that I couldn't even tell." He was much more impressed with the guide that had an average accuracy and an average (but clear and pleasant) pronunciation. Two native speakers, two opinions. Edited by Serpent on 27 December 2013 at 3:13am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 24 of 70 27 December 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I said, I have no intention of revisiting that red herring. I prefer to move on to more important issues.
The fundamental problem of learning how to master grammatical gender systems is learning how to keep in mind or keep track of the gender of the head word or the antecedent. It's similar, albeit more complex, to learning how to use pronouns and even grammatical number in the sense that you have to always refer back to the antecedent. From my little understanding of German, the placement of verbs at the end of sentences forces the speaker to keep track of the necessary information for the proper verb form. When it comes to grammatical gender, the English-speaker tends to equate the gender marker with the article in English. Even if the speaker gets the right gender, it is immediately forgotten, as would be the case in English, and then everything goes downhill, morphologically speaking, from there. Add to that verb forms and number agreement. The result, of course, is a kind of fractured grammar where the whole agreement system goes bonkers and the sentence sounds terrible. The point of mastering the basics with an initially small number of words is to get the system right from the beginning and not start with the assumption, "Well, we all make mistakes and I am a foreigner so people will just have to put up with me." If you get the system right from the beginning, when you add new nouns to your vocabulary, they will fall into place properly nearly all the time. This is exactly what we do with verbs. When you get the conjugation system right from the beginning, all the new verbs are easily mastered because most of them fit into existing patterns, even the irregular ones. All you have to do is worry about the real exceptions or unusual forms. Edited by s_allard on 27 December 2013 at 6:18am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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