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Learning German, about time! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| jables Newbie United States Joined 5374 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 32 19 March 2010 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Well after reading some truly inspirational logs here such as numerodix and Jiwon, I've
decided to put my goals down as well to give myself the extra motivation to accomplish them. Much like numerodix, my main goal for the first year is to prove to myself that I can learn a new language. I've been reading a lot here over the last few days, and feel that with the suggestions and logs that I've seen, I now have the tools I need to stay motivated and actually stick with German. Eventual goal is fluency. I have no deadline set for this. I do know I love the sound and look of the language and have wanted to learn it since I was in high school which was a while back. That desire hasn't left, and I'm excited to finally be doing it :) Goals: 1. Prove to myself that I can learn a new language! 2. Be able to fully read/understand Krabat. I've read the English translation more than a few times, and heard the German movie is so/so, but I absolutely love this book and want to read it in the form it was intended. After Krabat, I'll most likely move to Momo, and Die unendliche Geschichte (also books I loved as a child). 3. Be able to follow written conversations at a decent speed. One of my best friends is German and I'm lucky enough to get to IM with her about an hour a week. I'd love to move this talk out of English and into German, if for no other reason than her English is probably better than mine ;) 4. Be able to watch German TV/Listen to German Radio/Blogs and get the gist of what is going on, even if I don't catch every word. Deadline: 18/03/2011 Background: I've dabbled with German off and on for about 6 months now. I started a 101 class back in August, but ended up having to work 95+ hours a week which made it impossible to give it the attention it deserved. I'm now away from those work hours, and plan on going back and taking 102 version of the class. When I was in the class, I did what I could between work and sleep. Usually this consisted of flashcards on the bus. Unfortunately, most of that is forgotten to some extent, though bits of it do still pop to the surface. Tools: 1. German class (Seattle Language Academy) - I'll be using this class to get me the grammar portions of the studying, as well as working on actually speaking, as my tongue likes to get tied up even when my brain knows what to say. 2. Pimsleur - I've read it's a bit slow, but as I'm stuck to no real deadline other than my own goals, I'll give it a shot. So far (9 lessons in) it seems relaxed and I can do it while not fully awake, so perfect for late night, or early morning! 3. Michel Thomas - I picked this up and plan on doing it along with Pimsleur. One of the two pure audio courses will be used on my 2 mile walk to work. Not sure yet which is better suited for this. 4. Assimil - I've not found a place to buy the German versions of this as of yet as everyone is sold out, but as soon as I can get this, I plan on it. Too much positive talk here not to. Any help on finding it would be awesome :) 5. A textbook/workbook of some sort - Not sure what one as of yet and I'm totally open to suggestions, but I want something to work on after the audio courses are done so it's not all passive learning. The book I have right now is called, German: How to Speak and Write It, by Joseph Rosenberg. Amazon had good reviews on it, so I picked it up a few months back. Not sure yet as to how decent it is. 6. Books, Radio, TV - Anything I can get my hands on and my brain wrapped around ;) 7. My friends in Germany - Last but not least, what chance I have to talk with them has always been helpful on helping me along with problems and practice. Hopefully as I buckle down and accelerate in learning, their help will be even more meaningful. Methods: 1. These first ones are all going to be more or less happening at the same timeline. Go through all of Pimsleur and Michel Thomas. Not sure which order to do these in yet, or if Pimsleur really is slow enough, I'll do them both to keep interest up. Go to class and work like hell to get my head around grammar. I'm weak in grammar. Even in English I don't remember all the rules. I just know how it works, and forgot the rest. So relearning all of this so I can actually point out the indirect object when I need to will be a huge help. Talk to my friends on IM every week. I get at least 1 hour a week on this. I want to get to using as much German as I can with them. 2. Assimil - Once Pimsleur and Michel Thomas are done, I'll be moving onto Assimil! 3. Mysterious Textbook - I'll then be moving onto whatever textbook is deemed worth working on :) 4. As soon as my head wraps around things enough to make it worth doing, I'll be reading and listening to as much as I can in terms of radio, podcasts, movies, and TV. I do listen to radio now on Deutche Welle, but for the most part I just feel happy picking where words end and start and catching the occasional known word here and there. Okay, so I'll wrap up this overly long first post now. I'll be keeping track of hours spent on each item, as well as updating this first post with milestones. Thanks for reading and any suggestions that might be given! Edited by jables on 19 March 2010 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5738 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 32 19 March 2010 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Good luck with that.
Since you don't seem to need to produce very early, why do you put so much emphasis on grammar? You don't need that to understand things. If you want my advice, have a brief look through the shortest grammar book you can find, learn the most common 1000-2000 words by whatever means is fastest, and then start reading Krabat (whis is one of my favorite books too :) ) with a dictionary. You can start with more intensive listening once you're better at reading - in the beginning you'll just waste your time with pimsleur, MT, textbooks, etc. Also, why would you do four newbie materials one after another?! The problem isn't the newbie stuff, but the thousands of words you have to learn to get good... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5568 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 3 of 32 19 March 2010 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I would agree with your programme - Assimil after MT and Pimsleur works a treat (this is based on my experience with French). I am doing them both together with German and I just think they don't work well together. But MT and Pimsleur is like the 101 familiarisation course and then Assimil is where the learning really starts. If you can get the 90s Linguaphone dialogue course (the one in a big black case) - it is great to do with Assimil. Easier to get on UK ebay I think, as it sells for between £15 and £35 normally.
I would personally do Pimsleur after the MT Foundation course as I find that Pimsleur drills and builds on MT. I would also buy a subject arranged word list like the one from the Collins Easy Learning series or Barrons Mastering German Vocabulary. The free FSI Programmitic German course might also be a good starting course to do with MT: its from the 80s so its not too out of date - it has phonology, dialogues and drills that cover beginner areas that MT and Pimsleur miss out. Edited by Elexi on 19 March 2010 at 10:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| jables Newbie United States Joined 5374 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 4 of 32 19 March 2010 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Wow, thank you both for the suggestions! I put 50 minutes into 2 lessons on Pimsleur 1
yesterday and have now gotten up to Lesson 10. It's helped me quite a bit with my pronunciation. I think it helps a good bit that I remember a lot of the vocabulary from the class 6 months ago, so I know about 85% of the words being used, but did I ever need help with pronunciation ;) I also took Pyx's advice and looked up a most common 1000 words list. I then figured out Anki based on some posts here, and started using it to enter in and go over the first 20 words. I'll probably finish up Pimsleur 1 and then take a listen to the MT Foundation course based on Elexi's comment. I'm excited about the verbal courses as they are perfect for my walk to work, and will leave my nights more open for vocabulary and time with my wife :) In response to Pyx's question on grammar. I had 2 reasons for looking into grammar so much. The first was just wanting to be able to actually chat with my friends over IM without sounding like a toddler. After putting some thought into what your suggested with jumping into Krabat, I think I could probably pick up sentence structure and things like that to help me by just seeing it in action. The big reason behind the grammar push though, is the worry on Akkusativ and Dativ cases. I have in the back of my head that we barely touched on them in the class I took, and from looking over my notes it was just the rule that Direct Objects always went Akkusative, and Indirect Objects always went Dativ. That was enough for me to realize I had forgotten most of what my old English classes had taught me on grammar other than what I used without realizing it. I'm mainly looking for a review on it all, and think Pyx is right in I'd probably feel safer if I at least went over a quick grammar guide explaining it all to me again so I could drudge it up from the depths of my memory. So after that huge brain dump, first day = success! I feel like I've started :D I have a clear goal, and I'm more excited about it than I probably should be hehe. Pimsleur (review course 8 and did course 9) 50 minutes Anki (vocabulary and set up) 45 minutes Radio (I had no clue what they said, but I've read it helps) 45 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5738 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 32 20 March 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I have *honestly* no idea what an Akkusative and Dative case is. Which tells me, that it can't be that important to have an explicit understanding of it, to produce native German ;) It just seems such a waste of time for me to spent three months (or however long it takes to go through all that) going through the most basic grammar and a minimum of words, where you could do so much more with your time, especially when you don't have to start talking right away.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachjunge Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 7168 days ago 368 posts - 548 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 6 of 32 20 March 2010 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hey Jables! Or perhaps I should say, naaa!
To preface, I very much respect Pyx's opinion. That's not being a Schleimer; it's just fact. That said, I STRONGLY disagree with the idea that you should forget about grammar and just worry about input, and think that your idea of getting an explicit understanding of the way German works is right on track. It is true that enough exposure to any language should eventually allow you to produce grammatically correct output (it's how we all learned our native language(s)), but frankly, the amount of input that is required for German compared to (I imagine) English is staggering. In my opinion, it is much more efficient (and will lead to cleaner German in the long run) if you learn for instance cases and adjective declensions explicitly. For the average learner, German is just too complicated to pick up by osmosis (and speak it fairly properly) unless you expose yourself to more German than I think most people can fathom. You can save time and speak more correctly if you just learn many of the rules. Why should you take what I'm saying into consideration? Well, this is anecdotal, but I think it helps: I started learning German from ground zero when I studied abroad between high school and college. There were about 200 other Americans in the program, and I got to know many of them at the beginning before we were split up to live with our families. We met again midway through and then at the end. At the end, for those who didn't know any German, the ones who spoke reasonably clean German were invariably the ones who had studied the grammar explicitly (because of course I would ask them how I learned--I am a language geek, after all!). Those who just "picked it up" spoke without hesitation as well, but it was error-filled. It was not the kind of German that you want. Many Germans have no idea of the "4 Fälle." That's fine; they don't have to. That's why they're native speakers! I in turn don't have to know the rules for ordering English adjectives (e.g. it's the "big, red car," never the "red, big car," although grammatically there's no reason why it couldn't be the latter. But it isn't. Blew my mind when I read an English grammar on that! But I digress.). The point is that we, as non-native speakers, most certainly do need to know about the cases, and the adjectives, and what the heck a subordinate clause is. I'm not saying it's the Mount Everest of languages (for English speakers, that's probably Chinese or Korean), but it could easily be a Kilimanjaro. Again, note that I am talking about speaking German well. It's just that kind of language. Viel Erfolg! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5738 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 32 20 March 2010 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Or "Gude"! I like that one :D
Despite your disagreeing it's nice to hear that :D Haven't heard anything like that before :)
I don't know.. why would you need less input to speak correct English, than correct German? That being said, you DO need "more input than most people can fathom" :) But in my opinion you need that anyway if you want to speak a language really well. For me, the goal is always native fluency, so I expect to read the equivalent of a couple hundred books (and more) anyway, and that, in my opinion, should be enough to get a feeling for that kind of stuff. Of course, if you want to produce earlier than that, explicit grammar study *might* be helpful. But I wouldn't know, because for me, for example, grammar is so terribly boring, that I just can't get myself to study any, not matter how beneficial it might be :)
I've said it before and I will say it again: I don't know any more about the grammar of English than about the grammar of German. I have read hundreds of English books by now though...
I'll let you know how my Chinese is once I've read a few hundred books. Right now I'm still struggling with my first handful ;) Little anecdote: The other day I talked to some other foreigners here in Beijing that started studying Chinese just half a year ago. They spoke better than I do, and I've studied for nearly 1.5 years (and lived here for nearly 9 months). This is not because they're studying harder than me, but because they're focusing very much on output: Explicit grammar instruction, speaking practice, etc., whereas I'm just inputting as much as I can (sounds tough, but consists largely of me reading comics, Sherlock Holmes, and watching TV) and am hoping to reap the fruits of this later. There's no way of knowing now if that'll really be like this later, but I have a hunch that a lot of these guys will end up like the grammar wizards back in my university: The teacher would say something, and they'd be like "But it's the continuous past present participle in the pterodactylus case where the intransitive object is the passive verb, so shouldn't be it 'was' and not 'were'?" and I (and the teacher) would be just like: "WTF? This is just how it's said! Get over it!" Funny enough, those guys always had problems handling real, native English, and had severe problems speaking fluently (not to mention *naturally*). Anyhow, this English experience of mine, and the fact that my way of learning is just A LOT more fun that sitting over a grammar workbook are why I'm learning how I'm learning. We'll see if my English was just a 'freak incident', or if it's actually repeatable with Chinese :) PS: Sorry for getting off-topic into that again O:-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| jables Newbie United States Joined 5374 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 8 of 32 20 March 2010 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Well after looking over the upcoming chapters in my book I'll be using for class, I do
think I'll need to do some grammar just to not lose pace there. I will be taking Pyx's advice on vocabulary however, and have been adding things to Anki before bed each night. Yesterday went well, and I tried the first hour of MT course, which was odd, but it seemed to stick decently well! I do like the native accents better on Pimsleur, but the teaching style on MT is a nice change of pace. Sprachjunge, I never thought about the big, red car things before. Makes me glad I'm not learning English ;) I'll be taking a lot of what you said to mind. I don't have to produce right away, but my friends over there are close enough to feel comfortable making fun of me butchering the language (good natured of course) and I'd rather shut them up sooner rather than later. I also know from my 101 class that the teacher I'll be having for 102 does like to explain grammar, usually using all the rules I've forgotten from English to do so. I'll be reviewing those if nothing else for the near term so I don't feel so lost when class starts up. Thanks everyone again for your feedback. I've gotten great ideas from all of it :) Yesterday: 25 minutes of Pimsleur 60 minutes of MT 45 minutes of Anki 30 minutes random grammar reading over lunch at work 15 minutes of DW radio (where I think I actually figured out what they were talking about on one news item! I had no clue about details, but I figured out the general headline hehe) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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