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Fluent German by the end of the year | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4469 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes  Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 70 04 March 2012 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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For your stay in Germany - to get most of it, there are some tips from me:
- in conversation with native speakers, forget about grammar nuances. Don't ignore it completely, but use the simplest grammar you have internalized. Don't sweat the genders and cases for now. - tweak your knowledge level towards output: for a learner at B1/B2 level, this means no trying to formulate as complex sentences as in your native language, in your case in Romanian or in English. Optimize what you know and let your conversation partner to enrich your vocabulary and grammar - notice what words, phrases and grammar they use. - when speaking or thinking in German - when lacking a word, try to reformulate first. Only when this fails, look it up. Notice the word you wanted to say, write it down in your native language and once a day look all these words in dictionary. - when reformulating (the point above), don't be afraid of false starts. Meaning - you speak, run in a wall and then notice other way how to get your point across. Let the sentence "Lass(en) (Sie) es mich anders formulieren/sagen/erklären." be your friend. - in the evening, revisit the German conversations you had during the day. If you noticed any errors, look up vocabulary and grammar and formulate it correctly. Revisit the parts, where you had to switch to English. Analyze the reasons - is it far above your level? In such case, forget it for now. Do you think you could get your point in writing (meaning the problem is solved when there is no time constraint and you have enough time to think about it)? Write it out in German, read it aloud. - sometimes, you know what themes will be spoken about the next day. Look up the vocabulary, prepare yourself. Even when you spend the next day with listening to a meeting, for example, you'll get much more from it if are not constantly running in unknown words. And good luck to you! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4500 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 10 of 70 04 March 2012 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Something that hasn't really been clear to me is what exactly people mean when they say "mistake" in speaking.
How do you define it? Technically, using the wrong gender or case for an article is a mistake, but it's also the sort of thing that I wouldn't really expect to eliminate entirely ever (I'll try my best, but let's be realistic). Or do you mean using a word that means something wrong and might impede understanding? Speaking a word with clearly incorrect accent or pronunciation? I know it's not a clear subject, but people talk about whether or not you're speaking "with mistakes" or with "many mistakes" all the time (see, e.g., the HTLAL fluency definitions), and technically, no one I know speaks his/her native language in a way that would strictly speaking qualify as "mistake free," so I know THAT can't be what we're talking about here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4996 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 11 of 70 04 March 2012 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Majka
Thanks for your tips, especially the part about trying to reformulate things. It's sometimes frustrating that I can't say things exactly the way I want to, but it's always better to find some way of getting my point across in the target language, rather than switching to English, even if it's done in a less elegant manner. Regarding noun genders, I consider them relatively important since my native language also has three genders, and getting them wrong leads to some really weird sounding sentences. @geoffw I think "mistakes" fall into two broad categories: semantic errors, where the speaker fails to express his intended meaning in a way that is understandable to his interlocutor and style errors where the intended meaning is conveyed, but in a manner which is inconsistent with correct usage of the language - bad accent or grammar, bad choice of words, inelegant or inefficient expression etc. As you correctly noted, speaking error free all the time is not possible even in your native language. However, correct speech is not a discrete state that you're supposed to reach when everything is "perfect" and loose when you make the smallest error. It's rather an expectation most people have, regarding the error rate and, most importantly, the type of errors that you make. So, if a person's error rate is below a certain threshold, they are said to speak "correctly". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4996 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 12 of 70 05 March 2012 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Back in Germany ... the plane landed on time in Frankfurt, but all the trains were
delayed for some reason. I was thinking about how to better learn noun genders. A few days ago I looked through the list of public decks in Anki and found one that contained the 6000 most frequent German nouns. However, the nouns are not translated. The deck is meant only to test whether you know the genders, not the meaning. At first, I considered it useless as I would also need the translation for many of them. What's the point in learning the gender if you don't know the meaning, right? But then it struck me ... you don't need to know what it means! I saw a study which showed that native speakers can figure out the correct gender of unknown nouns. The study even went so far as to make up words which didn't exist, but which sounded plausible (phonetically), and asked the participants to guess the gender and plural form. Of course, there was no "right" gender as the word was made up, but the vast majority of native speakers were in agreement about its gender and plural form. This suggests that there is a pattern behind genders, and if your goal is to get a feel for it, you can train yourself without knowing the meaning. All you need is knowledge about correct pronunciation, so you can associate the sound of the word with its gender. I'll try to use this deck in parallel with my "home made" deck, which also contains translations. Edited by valkyr on 05 March 2012 at 2:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4515 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 13 of 70 05 March 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||
rules for noun genders in Dutch. Granted there are only two and some are governed by rules, but others seem to just be totally random to me. I will try looking for something like this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5694 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 14 of 70 06 March 2012 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
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About this subject of pattern behind genders for German, there is this study:
Gender Assignment to German Nonsense Nouns: What Does the Native Speaker Know that the Non-Native Speaker Doesn’t? Glenn S. Levine University of California, Irvine Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2, 397-406, 1999. A preliminary comparison of native vs. nonnative knowledge of the German gender system is made, based on questionnaire data collected from native (NS) & near-native(NNS) speakers (N = 50 each). Part 1 of the questionnaire sought information about informants’ German language learning, language usage (when and how), and language use in bilingual households. Part 2 consisted of a list of 40 nonsense nouns for which informants were asked to assign gender by supplying the definite article der (masc), die (fem), or das (neuter). Results showed that the nouns that had the highest percentage of gender assignment agreement among NSs were those for which gender could be predicted based on their affixes; the majority of these nouns also shared the characteristic of multisyllabicity. The performance of NNSs closely resembled that of NSs, suggesting that gender assignment rules in German are learnable, even by nonnative speakers. Possible explanations are offered for inconsistent gender assignment on a short list of nouns. It is suggested that these nonsense nouns, which resembled actual frequently used nouns, may be strong enough to be separately stored & easily accessed. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4500 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 15 of 70 06 March 2012 at 2:16am | IP Logged | ||
OK, well this makes more sense now. Doesn't this seem to just say that natives were more likely to remember the rules for noun forms that follow gender patterns (e.g., nouns ending in -ung and -keit are feminine), and that in some cases nonsense nouns looked really similar to known actual nouns? This is very different from saying that German nouns OVERALL have predictable gender, isn't it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 70 06 March 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||
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There are a handful of Anki decks for learning the rules for German genders, such as "German Gender Rules and Tips" decks 1-3.
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