HMS Senior Member England Joined 5106 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 1 of 15 05 May 2011 at 8:12pm | IP Logged |
Is anybody able to offer an opinion on these learning methods? I have downloaded Series 1 & 2 of 'Warum nicht', Radio-D and Mission Europe.
Is it worth pursuing these as a method for efficient learning?
With Warum nicht I find all the musical interludes very irritating, although the storyline is quite engaging. I have started listening to mission Europe today and find I can understand passively but once again - it suffers from far too many interludes and unneccessary English interjections: "Do you want to play x5) etc.
Has anybody here used these methods?
Thankyou.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
LeignAnn Newbie Algeria Joined 4954 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes
| Message 2 of 15 05 May 2011 at 9:04pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for asking this question, I have been wondering the same thing. I have not used it enough to have much of an opinion yet.
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
maecenas Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5548 days ago 21 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: French, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 4 of 15 06 May 2011 at 2:02am | IP Logged |
I recently started going through 'Warum Nicht' after having completed Radio D several months ago. I found the first level too easy, so I jumped up to level 3. The content at that level is good, in my opinion better than Radio D (which is basically the same format, but with a different story). I can only assume the content in the other two levels is similarly good. I've listened to Mission Europe in the past, and really didn't learn much- it's fun to listen to, but not enough target language content.
At the end of the day, though, I only really use it as a supplement, for variety (I'm using assimil as my primary course). There's so little dialog and so much English that I don't know how you could really make a lot of progress. The music break drives me NUTS, but I use a podcast app that lets me jump ahead with a swipe.
Another DW resource I use is the podcast 'Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten', where they read the news slowly. I understand very little, but I'm using it for "listening practice", and it's nice to hear uninterrupted German spoken clearly. If nothing else, I try to recognize sentence structure, connect the seperable prefixes, etc.
6 persons have voted this message useful
|
Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4980 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish
| Message 5 of 15 06 May 2011 at 8:49am | IP Logged |
I've used Warum Nicht pretty extensively. I found it good, I mean yes sometimes stories
are just annoying, but if you get past that and just listen to the conversations it can
be useful. There's nothing too complex and you get to pick up new vocabulary in a short
little program that you can do if and when you have the time.
Go through it, but as another poster said above make sure you use it as a part of your
learning, don't expect it to simply gift you German. I used the course, but I also kept
up with going through my German books, like Teach Yourself and Essential German as well
as reading the news in German even though I didn't understand very much.
Edited by Alexander86 on 06 May 2011 at 8:50am
3 persons have voted this message useful
|
HMS Senior Member England Joined 5106 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 6 of 15 06 May 2011 at 10:25pm | IP Logged |
Thanks
1 person has voted this message useful
|
LeignAnn Newbie Algeria Joined 4954 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes
| Message 7 of 15 06 May 2011 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the feedback.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6551 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 8 of 15 07 May 2011 at 12:56am | IP Logged |
Have you compared this to Slow German? I was using 'Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten' but found it too boring and monotone. I found the Slow German podcast a good improvement.
3 persons have voted this message useful
|