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Level D1 on the CEFR | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | CEFR Language Levels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 25 of 50 26 March 2011 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've read it three times now and still have no clue what it's talking about. I understand the words, but I have no idea what they're saying. Having briefly learned about the "Beat Generation" and reading Jinx's explanation of it certainly helped, but there's no way I would be able to figure it out on my own without studying the culture and the specific language he uses. EDIT: I just showed it to my mother and she was just as perplexed as I was while reading it. Edited by ellasevia on 26 March 2011 at 6:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 26 of 50 26 March 2011 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
-Douglas Adams Mind you, this was written for the amusement of children. Were I to encounter a similar passage in German, I might well decipher the literal meaning of the sentences, might even catch a pun. But I would be sure to miss the real meaning of the passage, which isn't about Fridays and fried eggs, but about how the little words in language can shift and change things in ways that native speakers don't even notice but which can really be quite absurd. Edited by BartoG on 26 March 2011 at 9:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| AeOeUe Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5219 days ago 16 posts - 31 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Dutch Studies: Russian | Message 27 of 50 26 March 2011 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think when you get to that level, you are more testing the intelligence and cultural
literacy than actual language ability. The German text from the original post has quite long sentences, and none of them is without at least one cultural reference. It surely isn't as hard to read as a text by Kant, but I can imagine some Germans wouldn't want to go through the effort of reading it either. I did not understand what the quoted sentence ("Der Erfolg der unterweltlichen Dumpfmucke...) was about until I read it in context either. As for the Douglas Adams quote, maybe I am missing something an English native would see in there, but I think I understand the idea behind it and I definitely enjoy reading it much more than the German text from the Eulenspiegel - probably just a matter of preference, humour, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 28 of 50 27 March 2011 at 3:15am | IP Logged | |||||
Hate to jump in here, but you're absolutely wrong with your reasonable expectation. Late last year I attended a seminar in which I heard about the DLPT test, and for levels 4 and 5 they specifically said that cultural, social and historical knowledge become as important as knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. According to their rankings, a lot of native speakers would only qualify as a 3 or 3+, and that that level is a reflection of the level that we usually speak to each other. Level 5 is only for people who could create texts, like authors, university professors and people who are well versed in public speaking. An example they gave (half-joking) was that Bill Clinton could earn a 5, but George W. Bush couldn't. The main difference, according to the person leading the seminar, was cultural knowledge. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5987 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 29 of 50 27 March 2011 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think some of this is about having enough exposure to the language that the hinted words come to mind easily, so that you get all the puns. It's like being able to complete a sentence that has a blank in it...you need enough exposure to the patterns to just know what's there.
This also comes into play in real error-correction situations, like listening to someone talk quietly in a loud pub, or understanding all the words in a poetry performance. Easier language is language that's more predictable, using the more frequent words and frequent sentence patterns. Sprachprofi's example had normal sentence patterns, but the words made reference to other infrequent words, and then you had to know why those other infrequent words weren't actually used. At its core, this mean to be at this D1 level that Sprachprofi refers to, you not only know all the really obscure words and collocations, but you also recognize when they're *not* being used, and why. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6539 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 30 of 50 21 April 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Maybe there could also be level F that involves prose that is so nonsensical that it's only found on propositional/predicate logic exams that test for the ability to mindlessly translate garbage into symbolic language. This I can do. But Shakespeare, Derrida, Kant, and Faulkner will always be out of my reach when it comes to actual understanding.
Do you understand the following? No one is a biologist if I'm generous only if I'm gentle; furthermore not both not cars and either planes and trains will win if the sun rises tomorrow, then I'm a winner, if germs only come from Germany. Thus, not either not President Bush will win or some dancers are short and frivolous. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 31 of 50 21 April 2011 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The kind of German used by civil servants, contract lawyers and big companies' letter-
writers is also very hard to understand for foreigners. It's also hard to understand for Germans, though it claims to be universally accessible. Sie sind als Mieter zur Preisminderung dem Vermieter gegenüber berechtigt, sofern der Vermieter seinen Verpflichtungen nicht nachkommt oder der Mietgegenstand nicht in dem angegebenen Zustand vorgefunden wird. I had to deal with a landlord yesterday and today I made a list of the 10 "magic" German words which are essential to convincing such people that they can't pull the wool over your eyes. EDIT: @Kugel I can parse it thanks to some computational linguistics lessons. Edited by Sprachprofi on 21 April 2011 at 9:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5694 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 32 of 50 22 April 2011 at 4:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Okay, let me give this a crack. Having dealt with renting an apartment in Germany and having to go buy the Mietvertrag myself because my landlord wasn't around to get it for me, I have a tiny bit of experience with this. My guess on first glance without going to a dictionary or analyzing the passage word by word is something like this (this is a very, very rough, vague, and conceptual interpretation!): "You as a tenant have certain rights in regards to the landlord [plus something about a lowering of the price], as long as the landlord doesn't fail in his duties, or if the rental is found to be in a condition not as advertised." Did I get the gist of it? The part that confused me the most was the "Preisminderung" thing. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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