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Fluent German by the end of the year | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4996 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes  Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 65 of 70 11 July 2012 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
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The last two weeks I've put in quite a few hours improving my German. I'm not sure if I'm making any progress, but if I am, it's very gradual at this point.
I'm up to date with Anki and doing 10 new words / day now. I'm also listening to a lot of podcasts. I started watching a German comedy show named "Was guckst du?", which capitalizes on the poor German language skills of immigrants. Not sure how politically correct it is, but it's certainly funny. The good part is that I manage to understand most of it. Which reminds me, I should be watching more talkshows to get a better feel for the spoken language. Not sure about the active skills though, since I hardly use them. I try to think in German sometimes, but because of the complex grammar it always requires effort, and few constructs have become reflex. Maybe I should be memorizing sentences for the purpose of accelerating production ... Another, rather artificial goal that I have right now, is to reach 5000 words in Anki. Right now I'm at 3340. I figured that going past 5000 would make little sense since by then it would probably be more efficient to pick them up from context. I have several ways of gathering words: - look up unknown words which I encounter in articles / podcasts - try to talk about a certain topic and notice which words I'm missing - look up domain-specific words (e.g. vocabulary related to politics, sports, economy etc) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4640 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 66 of 70 12 July 2012 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
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@Valkyr:
Hi, I haven't used Anki to be honest, but it's possible you do actually know more words (even passively) than your Anki "score", which you might have picked up by watching shows, etc. If you can get a high level of comprehension in a native language TV programme, you must have a reasonably large vocabulary, I would have thought. There is an exercise that either Iversen or Prof. Arguelles (or perhaps both) has (have) mentioned, with a dictionary. Take a smallish dictionary and choose any page at random, and count the number of words you know, and the number on the page and work out the percentage. Multiply the percentage by the number of headwords in the Dictionary, and that is a very rough approximation to your vocabulary. I'm not sure if this would be an encouraging or a depressing exercise; I haven't done it :-) But it's an interesting "thought experiment" at least. On podcasts, there are some interesting ones on NDR radio, in case you havent come across them, as well as Deutsche Welle, of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4996 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 67 of 70 12 July 2012 at 3:11pm | IP Logged |
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@montmorency
You're right about Anki not reflecting the actual number of words I know. I rarely add flashcards with very obvious meanings. Also, since German is an agglutinative language, learning a few thousand base words will allow you to understand many more. I tried Iversen's method once. I don't remember the exact result but it was 5x to 10x higher than the size of my Anki deck. Quite surprising! Anyway, the size of the deck remains a reasonable measure of your level assuming you add most new words to it and that you're doing more than just flashcards: 1000 - A2 2000 - B1 3000 - B2 5000 - C1(?) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4996 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 68 of 70 19 July 2012 at 11:26am | IP Logged |
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I've stepped up vocabulary acquisition. I'm now learning 15 new words / day. I spend about 30 minutes daily on Anki, another hour or so reading newspapers, and another 30 minutes listening to news and podcasts.
I also attend a weekly course at work where I get to do some conversation practice. Reading newspapers has become easier, especially due to increased vocabulary and familiarity with the language patterns used in news reports. Editorials however, still pose a challenge since they make very liberal use of idioms and are less predictable in their structure. I have a book with C1 mock exams on the shelf. Last time I browsed through it more than a year ago it appeared totally incomprehensible (I was about A2 / B1). I might try out one of the tests to see how I fare and maybe get an idea of what I need to improve. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4640 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 69 of 70 20 July 2012 at 11:09pm | IP Logged |
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Hi @Valkyr,
I've looked through all the thread, and you seem pretty clued up about finding material and tools, etc, so I don't want to risk "teaching granny to suck eggs". However, I was wondering if you are still interested in reading books, and wondered if you had considered using audiobooks (not necessarily using "L-R", but that could be a possibility), as part of your approach. I had a look on amazon.de and unfortunately, there are no unabridged versions of "Der Beobachter". I looked for audiobooks versions of other books by Charlotte Link, and unfortunately they were also all abridged versions. Perhaps it might be better to approach it the other way, and find an audiobook in unabridged form of a book, then find the book (or e-book), and ideally a translation into Romanian (or possibly English if that would work for you). It obviously has to be a book you'd be interested in reading, and that would keep you turning the pages/keep listening. Perhaps you could find something suitable in a local library to begin with, or local bookshop? (Or perhaps you could borrow them from the Goethe Institute by post, if it operates that way in Romania). I've found, even without doing "L-R", an audiobook is a great way of keeping up the momentum of reading a book, and of course, you have the benefit of hearing it read by a native professional speaker. Of course it doesn't take the place of listening to "real world" speech/conversation, but it's another tool in one's kit. I'm also not saying it's a magic bullet for learning vocabulary, or anything. But it is quite a good way of getting into reading full-length books, and for me anyway, quite a pleasant one, although of course it might not appeal to everyone. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| crno_srce Diglot Newbie Australia yetanotherlanguage.b Joined 4513 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 | Message 70 of 70 11 March 2013 at 2:40am | IP Logged |
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Hey Valkyr! Did you do the C1 exam at the end of last year as you planned? I hope your
studies are still going well! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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