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Starting German 1 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ohlawdy Newbie United States Joined 5504 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 1 of 4 04 November 2009 at 5:09am | IP Logged |
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Well first of all I understand that this site is about teaching yourself a language and not other teaching you but I am taking a German class to help me a long, especially with the grammar and what words I should learn. However we do virtually no listening or speaking exercises except for on tests so I usually just think of random sentences in German when bored. Plus sometimes I listen to German TV/Radio at least for the background noise when I am not studying even though I barely understand anything and only a few times have I understood what they were talking about.
Now on to what I have done so far. I have 130 flash cards, basically everything I have learned so far. I go through them at least once every day to review what I have learned before and I have at least a 80% or 90% success rate, though it is usually nearer to 100%. In my class we just started the "describing a room" section and we have covered 1. Saying our name and asking others their name 2. Saying our age and asking others their age 3. How we get to school 4. Asking and answering the question "do you want something to eat/drink" 5. Plus everything else I forgot plus random other tidbits Soon I will be going to the library to pick out some audio tools for learning German and maybe a grammar book or something since our textbook doesn't explain really anything. I hope I will be able to type some of my posts in German by the end of the year through the combined efforts of self-study and classes. My posts may come every other day or even less because I might not of learned much since I spend a lot of time on a few words. I'll also try to end every post with a random German sentence I made up that I like. So feel free to correct any errors in those. Ich habe viel Spaß lerne Deutsch =D 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5577 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 4 04 November 2009 at 5:34am | IP Logged |
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Three resources I found indispensable:
Grimm Grammar FSI German Basic Course Viel Glück! EDITED: removed link to copyrighted material - moderator. Edited by newyorkeric on 24 April 2010 at 1:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ohlawdy Newbie United States Joined 5504 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 3 of 4 06 November 2009 at 1:25am | IP Logged |
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Well I had a wake up call today.
Why did I ignore the advice of the internet to learn the gender of every noun. I have been ignoring the gender so I only know a few noun's gender. Well today we did an "es/it" exercise where we had to put the proper version of "it" in sentences for nouns. Luckily it was just a matter of looking at the pre-written sentences to find out the gender but it told me nicely to learn the (bleep) genders! Luckily I only know about 131 words and probably less than half of it is nouns so it isn't too bad. What I am going to do now is make a copy of my flash card sets, remove everything but the nouns, and then change it so instead of English on the backside, it is the gender. For example: front: wasser back: das After that (no idea how long it will take me) I will not move on from learning a word until I know the gender. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ohlawdy Newbie United States Joined 5504 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 4 of 4 02 May 2010 at 3:40am | IP Logged |
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Okay, it has been 6 months without me updating. In that time I dropped out of the class (but got a free .pdf of the book), learned some Russian words, and pretty much forgot all the German I knew before. But recently I picked up German again and quickly picked up everything I forgot.
I lost my old flashcards but at least I managed to go back and learn the gender for all the nouns this time. Now I need to go back and learn the plurals. I am almost half way through the book but I did skip the "Telling time" section where they explained expressions such as "a quarter after" and "half past". I skipped it because I never use those expressions and I keep a watch or phone with me at all times. Though I can still say what time it is, just not with those expressions. Currently I am farther than I was before, yet have less flashcards, and I make flashcards for pretty much everything. Maybe I added numbers before? My study plan is pretty much this: -Look in book what to learn next, read the grammar section, try to read their phrases, and learn any new words I see -Watch a little German TV even though I understand practically none of it, even word wise. Though it helps me pick out the words I do know. Strangely enough German has started sounding like French to me. -Use the three column wordlist method for learning any words from either the book, or that I think I should know -Go through the flashcards with Anki -Talk obsessively to anyone who will listen about my progress I've actually been trying to get my cousin to start learning German. He is only 12 but he finds it fascinating when I speak what little German I know. The problem is getting him to start. He already has the interest but he puts higher priority on other things, even for just 10 minutes. I also think it kind of discourages him that there would be no one at his exact skill level. Hopefully I will actually update this time around. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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