Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4083 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German
| Message 9 of 16 22 March 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
Even if its 8 hrs, that is only 112hrs in total.
I would never be able to work 8 solid hrs on a language. 4 hrs five or six days a week
is my max.
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Glarus Girl Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4576 days ago 50 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swiss-German
| Message 10 of 16 23 March 2014 at 2:11am | IP Logged |
But this is just an experiment to see if it can be achieved in a short space of time. As with most things, it all
depends on how much you truly want something as to how much effort you will put in to get it and everyone is
different with different priorities.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 11 of 16 24 March 2014 at 12:17pm | IP Logged |
The intensive courses I'm aware of around here for German are 6 hours a day, 5 days a week; in a month, they aim to bring students from nothing to A1, with a lot getting A1+.
On the other hand, LR can be handy for better than B1 comprehension in 2 weeks.
The 'experiment' doesn't say much. A positive result means that it's positive; a negative result means that it wasn't for that person with that method at that time.
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I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4174 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese
| Message 12 of 16 30 April 2014 at 2:31am | IP Logged |
It's 4 weeks after her test and the results are in.
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Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4309 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French
| Message 13 of 16 30 April 2014 at 9:11am | IP Logged |
She has done amazingly well for only two weeks of study, and for this result, though
technically a fail, she and SmarterGerman should be congratulated. Unfortunately, I am
still a skeptic, only now about what a B1 proves. Even if one worked 12 hours a day for
14 days it would not, in my experience, add up to enough time to engage with a native
speaker in a non-didactic environment. Even if you focussed entirely on communicative
skills, I think it should take hundreds of hours, not dozens of hours, to develop an
ear which can interpret the speech of the TL in real time (and I speak as the native
speaker of a Germanic language, unlike Ewelina). And in addition, it takes a few
thousand words to communicate readily with generic descriptions and "workarounds." I
think that a student at an "intermediate" level (in the spirit of the usage of the
word) like B1 should have these skills, even if they are not yet very smooth, and
require some patience for the native speaker.
That said, I could be a slow learner compared to Ewelina and I haven't experienced the
B1 Goethe Institut exam. Perhaps true "intermediate" skills (3000 words, a good ear for
native speech) can be achieved after 2 weeks (minus weekends, apparently). I can't rule
it out just because my experience is off by months of work with hundreds of hours.
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Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 14 of 16 30 April 2014 at 5:40pm | IP Logged |
You cannot even memorize genders and plurals of words needed in 14 days.
And I doubt people correcting your test would let you pass without getting them right ;)
I guess I could pass this test with only 14 days of learning [15 hr a day of study],
but it's because I studied German for 9 years (in elementary school and in high school),
but that was 10 years ago. ;)
what I would use:
a)Basic German Vocabulary (Langenscheidt Reference)
b)Modern German Grammar: A Practical Guide + Workbook (Routledge)
c)a book with articles and short stories (I would learn them by heart, so I can improvise
during the oral exam).
Reviewing is different than learning from scratch though.
Edited by Medulin on 30 April 2014 at 5:53pm
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Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4083 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German
| Message 15 of 16 06 May 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
I dont know how she managed it. I would expect that one would need a vocabulary of at
least 1000 words to perform as well as she did. That is 70 words per day for 14 days
straight.
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 16 of 16 06 May 2014 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
Medulin wrote:
a)Basic German Vocabulary (Langenscheidt Reference) |
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And how would you actually learn this vocab?
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