17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
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 17 of 17 20 March 2011 at 4:14pm | IP Logged |
What's important is not how many months or years you take, but how many hours you spend on it. If you spend only 1 hour per day, then a year might not be enough. If you spend more than 3 hours per day, then you might be at basic fluency in a matter of months.
Also, I have to agree with Bao that there's no guarantee that you'll be at a certain level just by finishing a bunch of textbooks. In my view, textbooks can be useful for giving you some of the straight-up foundations of the language, but they also tend to have a lot of boring or useless stuff, like "Schalthebel", as was mentioned. I had to look that one up, and I'm quite confident in my German vocabulary in most situations that apply to my life.
In order to keep working on a language for a year, I really think you're going to have to find some more interesting materials than those textbooks. I suggest going to native materials as soon as you feel the slightest bit ready, mainly because they'll be more fun. It would take me a LOT of effort to work on textbooks for even a month, but I'm still watching 1 or more hours of German TV even after I've done it for a long time. I've watched hundreds of hours of German TV, and there's still new stuff that I learn all the time, and it's continually interesting. Can you say the same about textbooks?
In the end, I suggest you go with whatever feels the best to you. If that's textbooks, then great. But my prediction is that you'll get bored, so I suggest you strongly consider finding some real German books when that happens, and start working through them. Maybe start with a translation of something you already know, or something that you know has simple language (such as a translation of either Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist", or John Boyne's "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas", both of which have interesting plots but simple words).
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