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From B1 to B2 German by May | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Waldheim Newbie United States Joined 4856 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Studies: German | Message 1 of 6 05 February 2011 at 6:01pm | IP Logged |
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I've been dealing with German for over a decade now. As an undergrad, I took
intermediate Spanish to build on my high school classes, but two years in, I discovered musicology. I knew then that German and I would have a lifelong relationship. I haven't really kept up my end, though. I started with the Living Language book/audio course, which I undertook only casually. Two years later as a master's student, I enrolled in a German reading course that equipped me to read current German-language scholarship in my field without too much dictionary help. My first trip to Germany, though, showed me that I needed to work much harder to learn to generate words in German and not just understand them. Listening was hard, too. I had a textbook case of foreign language anxiety. A much longer dissertation- stage trip to Vienna back in 2008 helped me to overcome this and gain a lot of confidence (and the wine certainly helped). But in many ways I'm still far behind where I'd like to be:
Right now, I'm pretty sure I'm at B1 proficiency. I get by, but sometimes it's really tough for me as well as the other party. I can enjoy an episode of Tatort, but I often get lost and have to rely on context clues to get the details of the plot. B2 proficiency would be a dream, and it seems like a reasonable goal for, say, May or June. My strategy: 1. The "overlearning" of simple, useful phrases. I got this idea from the FSI course. I write, read, and converse with myself every day about "Where is the glass?" "Did you like the film?" "Is the milk good?" The goal is to over-memorize sections of material week by week to the point that they occur to me automatically. I want to cease the pausing and the deliberate thoughts like "Hmm, Lampe, that's feminine, so how do I adjust this phrase for that? What pronoun replaces it? etc." As I go, I'm going to try to find handy ways of translating from English to German and vice-versa with this. 2. Substitution drills and variation drills, sometimes borrowed from FSI and using the phrases mentioned above, will help me master vocabulary (including gender), and it'll give me constant practice with declension and conjugation. Again, the point is overlearning as mentioned above. 3. Flashcards for vocabulary. This doesn't take long and can be done anywhere. Nouns are my focus, but I'm going to get into verbs in earnest in a couple weeks. There's no reason I shouldn't know the "501 German Verbs" forwards and backwards by May. 4. My wife... She's from Germany but moved to the U.S. when she was about 8. Her colloquial German is fine (very regional...) and her grammar is mostly perfect, but she can't explain it to me. She's great for conversation, so one strategy is to design phrases and vocabulary that will be useful for us. The first few weeks will be basic stuff (apartment-related nouns, chore- and home entertainment-related phrases), and I'll find a way to build from that. Mainly I'm doing a public journal so that people might notice if I'm doing anything stupid, but cheerleading is always welome, too. I'm very excited about how I will feel when I'm at B2, especially the part about "a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party." Thank you for this resource! Edited by Waldheim on 05 February 2011 at 6:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Matty Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5105 days ago 31 posts - 35 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 2 of 6 06 February 2011 at 2:53am | IP Logged |
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I also found automaticity for German to be pretty difficult, mostly because of all the cases. FSI should definitely help with that. It did for me, although I never actually finished it.
Viel Glück! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 5935 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 6 06 February 2011 at 10:14am | IP Logged |
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Although I'm a student of Italian, not German, I'm interested in your plans to "flashcard" your 501 verbs to learn them "backwards and forwards" by May. Can you detail the plan please? Are you just talking about the infinitive or are you going to put the different tenses and conjugations in for each verb? Single words or phrases? I'd be interested to follow your log and see how you go.
;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Waldheim Newbie United States Joined 4856 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 6 06 February 2011 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
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Kmart: in the first stage, I'm making sure I've mastered the meanings of the verbs; for
that I'll keep them in the infinitive. After that, I'll work through the conjugations in all of the indicative tenses. For this, I plan to use simple sentences in which as many verbs as possible can be used, along the lines of the FSI substitution drills. I don't know yet whether flashcards will work the best for those; I'll think about that more next week. Since I'm already familiar with the meanings and (some of the) forms of many of these verbs, I've developed this notion that the task shouldn't take more than a few months. I'm also completely prepared to discover how wrong I am about that (well, at least I think I am). By the end of March, the remaining trajectory of this project hopefully will be clear. This is one of my two most serious weaknesses (the other being good, consistent use of case endings). I never took a general college course in conversational German, and since 90% of my interaction with German has been reading, I've never had to produce the correct forms of verbs on any regular basis--well, not with any serious consequences, anyway. It's time for me to stop making excuses and improve these skills. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Waldheim Newbie United States Joined 4856 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 6 06 February 2011 at 6:28pm | IP Logged |
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Matty, it definitely feels difficult right now, but I'm optimistic that at some point
(sooner than later, I hope), the learning curve will start to flatten out a little for me. Seems like the better you get at things, the easier further improvement becomes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 5935 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 6 07 February 2011 at 11:42am | IP Logged |
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I've recently started to put a lot of infinitives in my flashcard program too. I've been using the program mostly passively, and while I was initially excited about the rapid improvement in my passive vocabulary, I've become rather frustrated at how little of it has settled into my brain for active use, so I've been setting the verbs up to make myself produce the target language, not just recognise it.
It seems I have similar problems with my language learning as you (without declensions of course, and without the benefit of a target-language-speaker for pillow talk, sigh) and a similar goal, although mine is more slower-paced, my B2 goal being for the end of the year (well aware of how distractable and down-right lazy I can get). Keep posting, I'll be interested to see how it goes (and if my efforts follow a similar trajectory...) ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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