Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 1 of 13 20 March 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged |
Hello everyone. I have been reading a blog and one of the topics was called "Hell Yeah or No"... or something to that effect. The point of the topic was that when you are presented with an option to do something, if you are very excited about it you say Hell Yeah and indulge yourself in it. If you are not that excited or are on the fence about it then don't do it. The passion must be there. I have been thinking about this in regards to languages. There are a few languages that I do want to learn but as of right now I only have one that screams Hell Yeah! at me right now and that is German.
I am maintaining and improving my Spanish but I want something different as well. I used to believe that I wanted to start French next. Although I plan to learn French, it is not at that point where it excites me to the point that German does.
Here is the thing though, I am not going to blitzkrieg German like I did with Spanish (I almost burned myself out on it), instead I am going to relax and very calmly look at German materials at my own pace and leisure without stressing myself. If I do one lesson a day of a program...that's great, if I miss a day I will NOT beat myself up about it.
Right now, thanks to the efforts of Ericounet, I will be looking at FSI German Basic. I have not seen a good deal for any Assimil German with ease that includes the book AND the CDs, but if anyone knows of a good deal please let me know. I will try to update this often but again, I am not going to stress myself out about this but I want German in my life right now. I have plenty of other things in my life that are stressers but I will not make this one of them.
Thanks for reading.
Edited by Irish_Goon on 20 March 2013 at 11:10pm
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Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5846 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 13 20 March 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
Irish Goon, could you please give your log a meaningful title, otherwise nobody will tag this log? A title should refer to the languages you study in this log.
Fasulye
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Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 3 of 13 21 March 2013 at 4:16am | IP Logged |
FSI German Unit 1 completed. The male speaker doesn't seem to pronounce things as fully as they female speaker, for example "Ihnen." It just sounds like he says "Ihn" also "haben" sounds like "hab" to me. Drüben as well.
I like the sounds of the hard consonants. I have spoken to a few people that say they think it sounds horrible but I find it quite pleasing (especially spoken by a female).
I now understand the difficulty people have spoken about regarding the gender and simply having to memorize the article. I'm definitely going to do this lesson again before moving on.
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Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 4 of 13 21 March 2013 at 5:46pm | IP Logged |
Don't have much time to post something meaningful at the moment. Relistened to and analyzed Lesson 1. Have not done all of those drills yet. I might or I might not do them.
Possibly take a look at lesson 2 later on this evening.
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Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4843 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 5 of 13 21 March 2013 at 7:14pm | IP Logged |
Irish_Goon wrote:
FSI German Unit 1 completed. The male speaker doesn't seem to pronounce things as fully as they female speaker, for example "Ihnen." It just sounds like he says "Ihn" also "haben" sounds like "hab" to me. Drüben as well. |
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This is probably due to the fact that the final syllable -en is mostly pronounced as a syllabic n. The vowel is clipped in that case.
By the way, good luck with learning German!
Edited by Josquin on 21 March 2013 at 7:15pm
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Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 6 of 13 22 March 2013 at 12:42am | IP Logged |
Thanks Josquin. I did a few of the drills to help get a sense of using die, das, der. I may go back over them this evening, but I want to go ahead and skip to lesson 2. Some of these umlauts present challenges already such as möchte(n).
The r is really different for me, example: rot. But the more I hear it the more it doesn't seem so hard.
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Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 7 of 13 22 March 2013 at 7:37pm | IP Logged |
FSI Lesson 2 completed...well the dialog portion anyway. Went back over some of the drills in unit 1.
There is a woman on Youtube, Sonja Hubmann, who has videos on learning German through Spanish. It's called Alemán con Sonja. It allows me to listen to my Spanish while getting some German input. While I am not expecting to get much out of those videos, it is relaxed input while allowing me to continue maintaining and improving Spanish.
I'm still wondering why I can get the Assimil French with ease book and cds for less that $40 yet German will cost double that....maybe just the supply I guess.
Trying to really distinguish the sound between ö and ü. They sound very similar to me.
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Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6414 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 8 of 13 25 March 2013 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
Went back over lesson 2. Did most of the exercises and looked at the notes. I will definitely have to go back over the three forms.
It is slow going right now but speed is not my objective.
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