dleewo Groupie United States Joined 5818 days ago 95 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin
| Message 1 of 35 01 August 2011 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
I'm creating this thread for those of us studying German for the 6 Week Challenge that starts today (Aug 1st).
My plan is to start on FSI German. I'm hoping to do the first 8 units within the 6 weeks. I have done Pimsleur I-III a few times over the last few years and I just finished it again 1 week ago. I expect I should be able to do the first 3-4 FSI units in the next 2 weeks and then move to 1 unit a week.
Depending on how much time FSI takes up, I may also start Living Language Ultimate German, but FSI will be my top priority
For all others studying German, please let us know your plan of attack.
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booze007 Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5092 days ago 41 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German
| Message 2 of 35 01 August 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged |
wow! Good job! I was searching for this!
well i am mainly focusing on the listening part of the German!
My resources would be
1.TV
2. series like two and half man, how I met your mother and friends in German with
German subtitles
3. however my priority would be finishing and revising assimil ,now I am in lesson
number 73 :
Well I am not sure how to get the best of watching tv and serials ! half of the time I
get lost in watching the video !
For all the newbies who hasn’t got Michel Thomas on your resource list ,please get him
!:)
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Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5828 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French
| Message 3 of 35 01 August 2011 at 9:50pm | IP Logged |
I plan to go through all of Michel Thomas in a day or two straight through, and review it later when I have a chance
to listen to it with my significant other, who is also doing the challenge (although not online). After that it's just
going to be trying one course after another. I have downloaded a number of them- linguaphone, TY, Hugo, etc-
and as I've never tried those in any language I don't know if I like them, so I will be trying all of them out until I find
one I like.
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booze007 Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5092 days ago 41 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German
| Message 4 of 35 01 August 2011 at 9:57pm | IP Logged |
well Michel Thomas and assimil is the best combo! And it would get you easily to b2 .
but it’s advisable that you at least finish the foundation course before you start
anything else
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Rikyu-san Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5528 days ago 213 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, French
| Message 5 of 35 01 August 2011 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
I am using Assimil German as my language course. I am at 93 passive and 44 active as of today.
Plan of attack (all goals should be reached by the end of the six weeks):
* Complete the passive phase and reach lesson 85 active by the end of the six weeks.
* Listen to the Deutsche Welle Nachrichten. I would need to look up many of the words they use but I will restrict myself to look up only 10 words per day. The looked-up words will be filed in a dedicated Deutsche Welle Nachricthen wordlist. My goal is to be able to understand such a podcast at normal speed without looking up any words.
* Shadow two weeks of Assimil lessons every day, beginning from lesson 1 and simply going through all 86 dialogues over and over and over and over. At this speed, it will take about 7 days to go through the whole course. I will therefore have gone through the whole course six more times by the end of the challenge.
* If possible, I would like to do even more shadowing.
* Listen to the "dialogues for listening" from the FSI German Basic course (49 minutes in length) as much as possible.
And now for some books: I would like to complete the following books, one every ten days or so, the most important one of them being the fourth and last:
Fit fürs Goethe-Zertifikat A1
Fit fürs Goethe-Zertifikat A2
Fit fürs Zertifikat Deutsch (B1)
Fit fürs Goethe-Zertifikat B2
* Daily readings of Easy Readers that I get from the library. There are four levels, A, B, C, and D, and they have 600, 1200, 1800, and 2400 words, respectively. I have recently read two books in the series (one about Till Eulenspiegel and the other one a collection of short stories by Hans Fallada ("Erzählungen"), and for the first time, I could actually understand 99,99 % of them which is very gratifying. So more of that, as much as possible. I don't know what CEFR level the easy readers are but if I can read the most difficult of them, that would be great.
* Finally, I would like to attempt a version of the "Fluent in 3 months" approach and Moses McCormick's FLR technique. Whereas all of the above is course directed (that is, the courses or the books or the Deutsche Welle Nachricthen determine what I learn), the Fluent in 3 months is learner-needs directed. So, I will need to find out what exactly I would like to be able to say to German speakers, the subjects (and related vocabulary that I would need to learn in order to be able to hold conversations about it (I am, for instance, interested in learning more about the growing Wutbürger movement), and I think such subjects would be excellent B2 conversational material.
My goal is to reach basic fluency (which I define as being able to converse at a reasonably fast conversational speed, grammatically correct, with 80-90 % native pronunciation) by the end of the challenge:
The Assimil course, the FSI audio, the easy readers, the Nachricthen and the Fluent in 3 months/FLR approach will give me the grammatical structures and vocab to converse at my target level. The Goethe-Zertifikat books will be my way of testing that I have actually achieved it.
Part of the fun of being part of this challenge is the inspiration we can get from one another. If some of you posts easily accessible content on the Internet that I could add to the above, I would check it out and adapt the menu accordingly. So I look forward to seeing your suggestions.
Edited by Rikyu-san on 01 August 2011 at 10:10pm
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booze007 Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5092 days ago 41 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German
| Message 6 of 35 01 August 2011 at 10:58pm | IP Logged |
@Rikyu
how are you revising Assimil?
could you please share the edited version of fsi?
good to have people along side to learn !:)
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datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French
| Message 7 of 35 02 August 2011 at 2:46am | IP Logged |
I have 30 lessons of Assimil to finish, and I will start FSI as soon as I can. I plan on studying German and Spanish as much as I can, and watching little to no tv unless it's native material. I will complete Assimil, start FSI (and finish it hopefully by December) and repeat Assimil again, while going over "German: How to Speak and Write it" I know this is a 6 week challenge, so I will do as much as I can in those 6 weeks, then continue afterwards. I hope to reach a high basic fluency by March.
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dleewo Groupie United States Joined 5818 days ago 95 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin
| Message 8 of 35 02 August 2011 at 2:47am | IP Logged |
Today was a good start for me. I completed the whole of unit 1, doing all the substitution and variation drills twice. I'll move on to unit 2 tomorrow. My goal was to get the first 4 units done in the first 2 weeks of the challenge, but I should be able to surpass that.
@Rikyu-san Thanks for the links to those 4 books. I wasn't aware of them from before, but they look like something I'll want to get. Not for this challenge, but certainly in the next 2-3 months
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