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Movies/books in TL for beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| akeed Newbie Sri Lanka Joined 3715 days ago 22 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 10 30 September 2014 at 3:39am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I am halfway into my second week of learning German now and am progressing quite well.
I am using Assimil and Michel Thomas and it is really great. Something that I keep hearing is that it is important to watch lots of movies, read books, listen to podcasts etc etc, basically expose yourself to as many native materials of your target language as possible. But as I am in the early stages of learning, does this also apply to me or should I wait until my German is a bit more solid? (maybe until after I finish all 100 Assimil lessons?). If the answer is "No!, you should start now itself even if you don't understand anything", then I would like to know how I should go about it.
Maybe I should read and listen to content aimed at children (because they would be less complex)? I've also heard of websites like Lingocracy,FluentU etc. Are they good? Summary : I would like to know how to integrate native,real life German content into my language learning plan at this early stage of my journey Thanks in advance for any replies. I would be forever grateful! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 10 30 September 2014 at 4:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Two threads which might help, one started by iguanamon, and one started by me: - The multi-track approach. How to mix different learning strategies. - The cheating and consolidating method How native materials actually help you learn, as best as I can explain it. In a nutshell: 1. It seems to be a good idea to start experimenting with native materials as early as you can. You could theoretically put it off until after you finish your beginner courses (when native materials become absolutely essential to your progress), but it seems to help many people if they get started sooner. 2. To get the most out of native materials, you need to be able to "kinda-sorta" understand them—you don't need 100% comprehension, but you definitely need more than 0%. This may be fairly hard to find in the beginning unless you're clever! A good exercise is to take a short, interesting piece of text, and try to puzzle it out. Start with just a sentence or two. Maybe try to puzzle out some of the lyrics of song you like. Look for a fun comic book. If there's something that you love so much you're willing to watch it twice, watch it once with English subtitles (to figure out the plot), and a second time with German subtitles (to try and match up the German with what you remember). There is one related question which comes up sometimes: Should you listen to lots of audio, even if you don't understand anything? Maybe this will help you get used to the sounds, but you certainly won't learn the language magically by listening to news radio in the background. :-) You need an initial "hook" of comprehension to be able to learn from context. There are ways to get that in the very beginning—I could just start reading Harry Potter in Spanish and I'd probably be able to puzzle something out, thanks to my French and my knowledge of the story. But I could stare at the Chinese translation for a month and learn basically nothing. Find yourself something where you can get that initial "hook", however, and pay close attention, and you'll learn a lot. And in any case, don't stress out about this now. By Assimil lesson 40 or 50, written German should be getting easier to decipher, which will open up your options a bit. But it's an ongoing process, and you'll need to rewire your brain a fair bit before it all starts coming together. The good news is that it works! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 10 30 September 2014 at 9:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Personally, I think native materials have little use until you reach a baseline of
understanding. You should be able to understand most (>50%) of the content, in my opinion. Otherwise you're better off working on more comprehensible material. However, you can cheat by improving your comprehension using a dictionary. For listening, this requires a transcript of the audio. Work through the transcript with a dictionary and try to understand what it means. Then listen to the audio and it will improve your listening skills, as well as your vocabulary (this is basically what you do in an Assimil course, but with a difficulty gradient). Extensive practice, however, like watching entire movies, it probably of little use at this point. You could still watch German movies with subtitles and it can help your motivation and probably do a little bit of good, but it's not very efficient practice for you at the beginner stages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 10 30 September 2014 at 9:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
There are no hard and fast rules. We are all climbing up the same mountain, but some so of us take a more scenic route, some drag themselves up sheer cliff faces. Despite rumours no one has found the express chair lift. No one knows what's the fastest way to the top. Some people even argue that the view from the foothills is as good as it gets, and it's just a waste of time and effort to go further up. I found native materials really helpful, so I am definitely in the start-early-and-often camp. You will neither need to understand nor be able to reproduce the grammar in a book to be able to read it for enjoyment. However, without sufficient vocabulary, you will be severely limited in your ability to read. You can offset gaps in your vocabulary, by using an e-book with a pop-up dictionary (I recommend the non-paperwhite Kindle (50 Euros/dollars) plus the PONS German dictionary about 10 Euros). However, you still need to have some sort of base vocabulary before you start. I haven't used Assmil etc so I don't know how much vocabulary you learn, but I strongly suspect that its not enough. So I would start using SRS this week to build vocabulary. To start with I would input all the words in your lessons, which should keep you busy for a little while. In addition to single words, about a third of my cards were sentences that I picked up from lessons, the Internet etc. These can be very helpful to learn vocabulary in context, but also start getting a sense of the structure of the language. Every sentence is a grammar lesson! As a general rule of thumb you should be able to learn about 25 cards/day. After 2-6 months of Anki drilling you should be able to start on your first book. Have a look at my log if you want suggestions for titles to read. I started watching movies earlier, which I found helpful, but in the early days I didn't understand much. Still it certainly trained my ear. However, it only worked as I was training on Anki and building vocabulary at the same time. Edited by patrickwilken on 30 September 2014 at 9:32am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 30 September 2014 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I had a bit of a moan around this sort of thing in my Mandarin log. I really hate being a beginner and using those language courses. So I am all for reading and watching native stuff from day one. Here are the advantages I think you'll gain from it.
- You'll begin to aquire an "ear" for the language and how words are pronounced, even if you don't know what they mean yet. - You'll aguire more vocabulary than you'll get in your lessons. - You'll see the things you are learning in your lessons in "the wild". So my advice is: - Try to listen to audio books in German and at first just try to figure out where then word breaks are because when you start a new language it seems like natives string sentences into one big long word! - Watch a movie in German and try to see how many words you can pick out that you know from your lessons. Personally I try to avoid subtitles, the translations are not always accurate and I feel it makes you depend on reading. - People say you can't read a book because you don't have enough vocabulary, but I say books are just full of vocabulary waiting to be learnt. So if you want vocabulary then read. So what if it takes you 2 months to read an adult fiction book, then next one will be easier, etc, etc, etc. At the start you'll keep looking up some words again and again, but these "common" words are the ones you need to know and they'll begin to stick in your head. As regards to the question of which native materials to use; use the ones you like. If you hate German metal bands then you are just making a whip to beat yourself with if you try to listen to that. Find as much of the stuff you like as possible! If you like astronomy then go to the European Space Agency and read their blogs in German. If you are interested in Politics read German newspapers. Whatever you like outside of languages, whatever hobby you have, try to find some German material related to that. Now to start with you might not know the words for some hobby you want to look for, but Google translate will give you a close enough translation to search on. For example I punched in "read comic books online" into Google translate, "lesen Comic-Bücher online" did a search for that and found some free comic strips to read in German. The main thing about using native materials is to try to make it enjoyable. My personal view is while the lessons might be a necessary drudgery, they are only useful if they give me a launch pad into native material. You don't want to do German lessons, just so you can complete German lessons, you use them so you can get to the meat of the language. So keep at the lessons because they give you a "nutcracker" which will let you into the meat of the language where all the good stuff is. Read Iversens "Guide to learning languages" thread. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4908 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 6 of 10 30 September 2014 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My answer would be the sooner the better. In practice for me, it was a small but regular portion of my study time in the early days. (I listened to the 10 minute "Journal en Francais Facile" about 2-3 times a week in my first few months of really studying French).
This involves a lot of personal preference, but just go with what you want to do. I still (3 years in) usually use English subs with French films because I'm doing it for enjoyment, and because well-matching French subs are hard to come by. But even in the early days, I did watch some shows which just didn't have subs of any kind, and I find both are worthwhile.
This isn't something I've ever done (except while using Assimil), but some people swear by it.
I would say definitely yes to this. DW has a podcast of news in slow German Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten, and you can hear the same report at normal tempo. There is also a podcast for learners called www.slowgerman.com. The author of slowgerman.com also makes more advanced podcasts. The advantage of the news podcasts is that you are more likely to be able to get the gist of the stories (if you have any awareness of current events), they come out regularly, and they are short. So getting into a daily habit of listening to German news would only cost you 6-7 minutes, but you will really be encouraged by seeing your comprehension grow from next to nothing to actually getting it.
My preference is to watch native TV and films, but I realize this is a controversial point. There are 3 advantages to native video. First, to really learn how to pronounce a language you need to see people's faces while they speak. Second, native video gives you an insight into how people interact. Do they shake hands? How close do they stand when they speak to friends? To strangers? Pay attention to these types of details. Third, you get an introduction to the culture as a bonus. The advantage of dubbed TV shows is that you get to watch something you already know, and it might be easier to find them. Also, you might be able to find German transcripts of English-language TV series. Studying the transcript while working through a series would be an excellent way to learn loads (I haven't done it, but emk studied French with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and French transcripts).
Obviously the best choice is music that you like. The second factor is that the lyrics are fairly clearly well sung. Another factor to check out is how clear the lyrics are. A lot of "arty" bands have really obscure lyrics that even natives don't understand. I don't know much German music, but when I was actively studying German I got into the music of Jupiter Jones: http://jupiter-jones.de/. This is the song that got me hooked: http://youtu.be/ZFJ6QupDYzI. I only discovered one German band, but I've discovered a good handful of French bands that I would enjoy listening to even if I wasn't studying French (and kudos to Ari for mentioning Jean-Louis Aubert on another thread, who I probably listen to more than any other artist right now). I also listen to a lot of Hindi music. Music in other languages has really enriched my life.
Honestly, I have no idea about those sites. I have had mixed feelings working with children's books, because it turns out they are almost as hard as simple adult books! I prefer the reader + CD books made for adult learners, of which there are a lot in German. People complain about the price, but if you use and re-use them a lot, it's not a huge investment. I prefer reading one book five times to reading five books once. Search Amazon for "Felix und Theo" (aimed at adult learners), and for "Leo & Co" (aimed at teens), and pick a level 1 book which interests you. I second the value of a Kindle with a popup dictionary, but for adult books I would wait until you're at least a strong A2 or so. I quite enjoyed my "easy readers" in French, and still review the more interesting ones from time to time.
I think you're making the right choice to use native materials right away. Besides all the learning benefits mentioned by patrickwilken, you focus your language study on what you want to do, and you find the fun in the language. I do understand what Ari means about there being more benefit later on, but a bit of regular listening right from the start will go a long way to helping you develop an ear for the language. Even when you don't understand 20% you will get used to the rhythm and flow of the language, and you will be happy when you pick out a few words or phrases you've recently learned. But as I recommend above, just a bit on a regular basis should do the trick. Edited by Jeffers on 30 September 2014 at 9:55pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 10 01 October 2014 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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See the various techniques here.
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| akeed Newbie Sri Lanka Joined 3715 days ago 22 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 10 02 October 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Thanks a lot for your insight. Right now I listen to some easy German songs (for native input)and I'm thinking of branching out later (dubbed TV shows/Harry Potter translations etc.) I also went through your Cheating&Consolidating story and it was really interesting! I will surely consider trying out your method in the near future. Edited by akeed on 02 October 2014 at 2:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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