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My Journey to German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 17 24 November 2009 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm already on lesson 5! Though my pronunciation definitely needs work I seem to be picking up vocabulary fairly quickly. It's so exciting to see progress.
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| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 10 of 17 27 November 2009 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have learned lesson 5, but just barely. I'm planning to review it along with all the previous lessons over again until tomorrow when the loan period will be up. I'm also hoping to listen to a few of the upcoming lessons, just to get an idea of what's ahead.
I'm beginning to feel some of the harder work that comes with learning a new language, and I'm wondering if I should begin to modify my approach a bit. I find myself hankering for a larger vocabulary, but I feel obligated to work out my pronunciation first because I don't want to learn any bad habits. Many of the words I know so far are not difficult for me, but for the ones that are my attempt at pronunciation is so horrible it hurts even my own ears! I feel that if I could just understand more of what they're saying I could pick up a lot of the accent through immersion on the TV channels. I'm wondering if I might even want to back away from speaking for a bit and focus just on understanding what I hear in German first. I know there's a whole forum about learning methods, and I do plan to get around to that...eventually. Right now I rather enjoy the process of figuring it out on my own, but if I'm way off track or someone has a suggestion that might be helpful I welcome the feedback! Edited by Dainty on 27 November 2009 at 5:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6440 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 17 27 November 2009 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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It might help to just forget about any perceptions about pronunciation that you have gained from speaking English, your native language. Learning a new language is like learning a whole new phonological system. You have to pretend that all the sounds you learn are completely different from the ones you already know, especially with sounds that don't exist in your native language. In German those would be sounds like CH and R.
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| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 12 of 17 27 November 2009 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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So far I'm doing okay with the CH and R but certain vowels are what's giving me problems. If I can't even make the sound all by itself even once then the words that contain it are rather doomed.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6443 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 17 27 November 2009 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
Only sort-of. If a few phonemes are problematic, it will be a problem for you when pronouncing words in isolation, but if most of your phonemes are ok and your prosody is good, people can get used to picking out what you mean from context and adjusting to how you speak. It's not ideal, but communication isn't necessarily doomed. How serious it is basically depends on how difficult native speakers find it to map the sound you make to the sound you meant. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 14 of 17 03 December 2009 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, has it been a week already? Medical problems have kept me from study, but the good news is I've got "my" program back so at the very least I should be able to maintain what I've learned so far through listening until I'm able to progress again. And this time I was able to figure out the ebook that goes with it, so I should be able to reference it as needed. Edited by Dainty on 03 December 2009 at 5:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 15 of 17 16 December 2009 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm basically posting this to keep my thread new enough for me to find easily.
Studying has not been going well lately. I'm really excited to study, but various health problems are imparing my speach (even in English) so that part is frustrating to me. However, I knew it would be like this so I plan to just keep going. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Dainty Newbie United States Joined 5489 days ago 38 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 16 of 17 06 February 2010 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm back!
I'm coming back to studying after over a month's break from it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much familiarity I've retained of the language despite my neglect of it. I'm beginning to recognize that I may need to vary my approach a bit and experiment with which methods work best based on my unique situation. Due to severe health problems involving cognitive function my efforts are going to have to be an on-again off-again endeavor. This intermittency is clearly not ideal for language learning, but I believe it's an obstacle that can be worked through with a little extra time and determination. I've already proven as much to myself through the memorization of large passages of text--even though I sometimes have to go months without studying and forget nearly everything I've learned I re-memorize it as soon as I am able and thus I slowly inch toward my goal of memorizing the entire Bible. My goal of learning German will be similar both in its setbacks and in its progress, and I'm ready for it. I think this time around I'm going to focus my efforts on increasing my vocabulary of words I understand. I seem to pick up a lot faster on understanding than on speaking, and if I can get it to where I'm understanding whole sentences at a time when I watch German TV channels then I think the pronunciation and my brain beginning to form its own sentences will naturally flow from there. I also think the foundation of understanding what I hear is a good one to fall back on the next time my health crashes and I'm forced to take another break. I'm probably making a lot of errors in all this; my inexperience is painfully clear and almost embarrassing around here in front of all you experts. But I'm eager to grow and to learn, and to hopefully speed up that process by learning from the rest of you. It's good to be back. Edited by Dainty on 06 February 2010 at 5:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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