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Multiinput Germanic log | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 20 12 April 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Brief introduction
It's like a month that I started to study German. I started by using Duolingo and I learnt around 300 words and basic grammar. It is certainly a nice tool but not necessary to learn a language. Anyway, I decided to change strategy. Firstly, I've been inspired by an awesome log called "Bootstrapping Turkish" of the user Bakunin to postpone the learning of the active skill (speaking and writing, consequently the study of the grammar) after a strong passive assimilation part in which I build the understanding of the language to both the written and spoken aspects. The total bootstrapping method that is using Bakunin for Turkish, by the way, may not be the best pick for me since I'm not a visual learner and I have already shared vocabulary from English, Dutch and romance languages. The idea The method I'm developing and experimenting takes instead advantage from translating and learning shared vocabulary. Wether it will work or not I don't know. The idea is to target one language or two (in my case, German and Dutch) that are closed and share structures and vocabulary, assimilate the language with different inputs and do the same also with other related languages. I initially observed that my knowledges of English and Dutch are boosting my ability to assimilate German, and the study of German is also strengthening my comprehension of Dutch. I therefore decided to include the scandinavian languages in the process to observe the results of this inclusion. In this log, the only goal is to gain an understanding of German and Dutch is written and spoken forms, although the understanding of the scandinavian languages is a huge bonus but it's not what I aim to. Tools The basic tool here is Assimil. It allows to work with the audio, the original text and the translation plus provides notes and quick exercises still in a passive assimilation fashion. I therefore take use of: - L'allemande sans peines - Dutch with ease - Le danois sans peines - Le norwegian sans peines - Le suédois sans peines Rule for this tool: - only a lesson per language a day Another tool that is revealing very precious to me to build vocabulary is Memrise. For this tool the rule is: - only one level per course and only one corse per language a day. To complete and refine the learning process, I make use of native resources like youtube videos or podcasts for the spoken comprehension and texts like books or comics. For the native resources I have a couple of strict rules: - never lookup the words I don't know - never come back to read or listen again and again. The uncertainty and confusion are part of the process and the perfectionism can make the process boring and overwhelming, as happened to me in the past, so it is not a prerogative for me. While the basic work is to learn something new of Dutch and German everyday, I work with other languages only if I studied those two first. That to avoid to lose the focus. The successful comprehension of native resources will be for me the indicator of my progresses, though I will use them since the beginning. When I will be able to understand native resources to a good degree I will use only them to keep building confidence in the language before to start activating the language. Edited by tristano on 12 April 2014 at 5:57pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 2 of 20 12 April 2014 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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In this post I will link the Memrise courses I'm following:
German - 1000 words of elementary German Dutch - The 1001 most common Dutch words Danish Unfortunately at the current moment there aren't a lot of courses for Danish. - 500 most common Danish words Norwegian - Norsk - 1200 high frequency words Swedish - 3000 most common Swedish words Edited by tristano on 12 April 2014 at 6:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 3 of 20 12 April 2014 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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In this post I log the native resources I use.
German Podcasts: - Slow German Dutch Comics: - Donald Duck Books: - Het Chalet (Suzanne Vermeer) Podcasts: - Nos Radio Edited by tristano on 12 April 2014 at 8:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 4 of 20 13 April 2014 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I discovered LyricsTraining, great tool. I gave a try with French and successfully finished a song without too much
problems. Anyway, with German and Dutch is a whole different story, but I will give it definitely a try to see if it works despite of my too much basic understanding of the languages. About my work with Assimil, with German and Dutch since now I have a 85-90% understanding of the lessons directly the first time I listen to the dialogue without reading the text and around a 95% of success in the exercises. This rate is much lower in the scandinavian languages, let's say 50-60% of understanding and 70-80% of success in the exercises. This is due to the much smaller vocabulary and a smaller shared vocabulary between them and the languages I understand. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 5 of 20 13 April 2014 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I read Donald Duck in Dutch two weeks after the first attempt.
The first time was a complete disaster: my comprehension was close to nothing and I was extremely slow in the reading. Today I saw really big improvements, I was able to understand even entire phrases and to guess words from the context. At the end I read a complete comic and I understood well the situations in every story. The nice thing of reading a comic is that is possible to learn from the context that is well represented in the drawing. The other nice thing is that I love Donald Duck since I'm child and I'm still reading it in Italian so it is not boring at all and this makes the process more effective.  Edited by tristano on 13 April 2014 at 11:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 6 of 20 23 April 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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In these Easter's holydays I head some time more to read and I read a quarter of the book
"De Alchemist" of Paulo Coelho (the Dutch version). I started wednesday evening during my flight for Italy. I was able to recognize lots of words that I knew and figure out new words; but the words seemed to me to be quite disconnected and I wasn't able to understand the general meaning for most of the sentences. Monday afternoon, during my flight for The Netherlands, I was reading it (after having studied with memrise 100 new words and did a couple of assimil lessons, other than the same work with German and reading some pages of the book) and I noticed that I was able to recognize more words and not only, the words appeared to be much more connected and the meaning of the sentences was much more clear, making the read less painful and me starting to feel engaged in the book. Edited by tristano on 23 April 2014 at 12:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 20 23 April 2014 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Wow. That sounds amazingly ambitious. I started with things like Harry Potter, using a cheap Kindle with pop-up dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5129 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 8 of 20 23 April 2014 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Agree, that, and your project in general sounds really ambitious. You'll end up knowing a lot about the various German languages. I'm curios to see whether this propels you forward (synergies) or holds you back (confusion).
That Donald Duck thing is a great idea. I'd love to get a stack of those in Thai, would be a great source of casual language :)) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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