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AlOlaf German TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes  Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 113 of 211 24 March 2014 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||
Deine Antwort hat mein Herz gewärmt. Manche können es sich gar nicht vorstellen, dass ein Tier zu einem Teil von einem Menschen werden kann. Ich finde es bewunderungswürdig, dass du sechs Katzen hast. Jetzt weiß ich endlich, woher dein Deckname kommt. Edited by AlOlaf on 24 March 2014 at 7:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 114 of 211 07 April 2014 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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In der letzten zwei Wochen habe viele deutsche Videos über verschiedene Themen angesehen. Ich finde es eine willkommene Unterhaltung, nachdem ich mich eine Zeitlang mit dem unverständlichen Dänischen beschäftigt habe. Edited by AlOlaf on 08 April 2014 at 2:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3863 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 115 of 211 08 April 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Al, have you posted your journey to the GDS certificate?
I've heard people say here that its difficult to go beyond C1 unless one has been living in the TL country for several years, but you have pounded that theory to a pulp with your D level competency. How did you do it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 116 of 211 08 April 2014 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Warning: Gigantic post!
Gee, first I have to tell you that my level is not what you seem to think it is. In fact, it makes me kind of uncomfortable to have C2 next to German in my profile, like it's something I have to live up to; I didn't know it would pop up automatically when I added the GDS certificate to my info. I suppose I might have been in the ballpark of C2 for a minute while I was in Germany, after two weeks of intensive instruction and constant German conversation, but as soon as I got home, I could feel the edge start to slip away. As my German Skype partners will tell you, I make plenty of gaffes in conversation, and the reason I don’t make more in writing is that I have time to consult Google, Linguee and dict.cc. I don’t see how anyone can achieve and maintain the level of C2 described by CEFR without being surrounded by the language all the time. I know I can’t do it, anyway. All I really wanted to do was to see how far I could get with German, given my circumstances and using the resources I had available to me. I guess I can tell you about that. I hope you weren't joking when you said you wanted to know. After “studying” the language for two years in high school (learning stuff like “Wo ist Monika?” “Im Boot.”), I took four semesters of German in college. There I learned the grammar fundamentals and liked it so much that I wanted to change my major from journalism to German. My dad, who was financing my studies and who, as a fighter pilot during WW2, had seen his buddies shot down one by one by the Germans, would have none of it. “What?” he asked, “Do you want to be a German?” I ended up tanking my entire university career anyway and didn’t study German or any other foreign language for another 29 years. I picked up German again in 2007, when I unexpectedly got the opportunity to go to Germany for the first time. I bought the FSI I course and feverishly crammed for two weeks prior to the trip, but to no avail. The dialect of the Black Forest blew me completely out of the water. This humiliating failure to communicate combined with the fact that I liked it there even more than I expected to gave me a fierce determination to seriously learn the language. Back home, the first thing I did was buy a big, honking Collins German-English dictionary and begin thoroughly working through the FSI I course. At some point I realized that, if I ever wanted to truly grasp German grammar, it would behoove me to know the grammatical terminology. Since I had never learned (or needed) this knowledge for English, I stopped and taught myself the proper terms before moving forward again. After plowing through FSI I, I got lucky and found what was probably one of the last surviving FSI II courses available anywhere, complete with cassettes. Using a dual cassette deck, I put pauses into the audio, made CDs and drove around in the car for a solid year repeating after the drills from both courses. I did the same thing at home for hours on end. Through doing this, I started to really get the hang of declensions, case, noun gender and plurals. I made color-coded flash cards of the strong and irregular verbs and proceeded to hammer them into my brain. In the meantime, I joined the local German club and awkwardly tried to weasel my way into conversations with native speakers. I worked through Living Language's "Ultimate German Advanced", put pauses into that audio, too, and repeated after it until I practically knew it by heart. I began watching German movies, starting with American versions with English subtitles, like "Run, Lola, Run", "Big Girls Don’t Cry" and "Goodbye, Lenin".Then I discovered Amazon.de and went nuts. I bought a code-free DVD player and ordered stacks of German-dubbed versions of American movie favorites like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Pulp Fiction", with German subtitles. I learned a lot of vocabulary from them in a very painless way. Then I moved on to German-made films and documentaries, including the 12-disc set “Die Berliner Mauer”, which is absolutely brilliant. I bought “Lehr- und Übungsbuch der deutschen Grammatik” and worked through it twice. I also bought “Übungsgrammatik für Fortgeschrittene”, although I admit I still haven’t gotten past the fourth chapter in it. I got Duden dictionaries and most of their little fat books about grammar and proper usage, plus a whole box full of audiobooks. I got both the Diary of Anne Frank and a two-volume Elvis biography with the corresponding audiobooks and English translations and went through reading and listening while highlighting unknown words. Then I went back and looked up all those words, wrote them in a notebook and made them into flash cards. I got a couple of great workbooks from Hueber devoted to prepositional objects, turned the content into flashcards and drilled the crap out of them. I found an archive of videos with matching German transcripts on Vienna's municipal website and spent months watching and reading through all of them, learning quite a bit about Vienna and getting a big earful of Austrian German in the process. I went back to Germany (and Austria) for two weeks in 2010 and it seemed that my efforts had paid off. I was able to successfully communicate and conduct all necessary business in German. There was, however, a misunderstanding in a Vienna pizza parlor over whether I wanted to eat in or take out. Even though the people involved weren’t native German speakers and it probably wasn't all my fault, it was clear that continued study was in order. When I got back, I found a native German woman who I basically paid to regularly sit and talk German with me in a Starbuck’s. I bought Assimil’s "Perfectionnement Allemand" even though I couldn't understand the French text, put pauses in the audio and used a guitar trainer to slow down and loop the hard parts until I could pronounce them clearly at normal speed. I bought a computer program from Digital Publishing with voice recognition and practiced with that until I got hoarse. I discovered Anki and turned the over 7,000 paper flashcards I’d made into computerized torture devils, which I forced myself to review daily. Then I discovered HTLAL. I got the answers to a lot of questions and found out about some great resources (especially Beaton’s “A Practical Dictionary of German Usage” - thanks, translator2, wherever you are!). And since there was a chance that a native speaker might actually read it, the forum gave me motivation to try writing stuff in German. For a while, I had a German-English email exchange with a woman on the forum. When that ended, I started another with a local German woman I met through the German club. Then I signed up for a Fernkurs from the Goethe Institute, where I wrote essays in German and had them corrected via email. I was so impressed with the instruction, that I booked a two-week super-intensive course at the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt. I didn’t plan on taking the GDS, I just wanted to go to Germany and learn as much German as I could in the time I had for vacation. It wasn’t until I got there that I decided to sit the exam. Five years of pretty much fanatical study (on top of what I remembered from school) made it possible for me to just barely pass the thing. And to think that German children have this stuff down by the time they’re four. If all this sounds extreme, it’s because it is. I know there's something wrong with me. Being obsessive can be helpful in achieving single-minded goals, but it can also be a real impediment to becoming a well-adjusted human. Getting up at three in the morning and studying for 14 hours at a stretch isn't conducive to relationship nurturing and my inner anal retentive likes it when I take everything so seriously that I forget how to laugh at myself. I'm also not proud of the fact that I sometimes need to be reminded that language learning is supposed to be enjoyable. I guess I'm just funny that way. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3863 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 117 of 211 09 April 2014 at 3:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Being "well adjusted" is overrated. I wish I could be as obsessive, and have as much
stamina as you :) I burnt out after 4 hours of study, and even for 4 hours, I cannot keep it up for more than 3-4 days. Thank you for the detailed post, it showed how much work is required for German proficiency. Regarding GDS, the description form your profile says that its above even C2, and that it's "D" level. And I dont think German kids have this stuff down by the time they are four. Your vocabulary level, and the complexity of German constructs would have been way higher. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 118 of 211 08 May 2014 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Seit einem Monat lerne ich fast ausschließlich Dänisch und es hat mich fertig gemacht. Jetzt klingt Deutsch wie die Stimme eines guten, alten Freundes.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 119 of 211 25 May 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Manchmal kommt mir mein Versuch, Dänisch zu lernen, wie eine Achterbahnfahrt vor, die man rückwärts sitzend mit verbundenen Augen nimmt. Das Erlebnis ist zwar spannend, aber bald fragt man sich, ob es wirklich eine gute Idee ist. Erfahrene Sprachfachleute raten davon ab, Dänisch als erste skandinavische Fremdsprache zu wählen. Die Sprache sei unheimlich schwer zu verstehen und noch schwerer auszusprechen. Es sei vernünftiger, mit Norwegisch oder Schwedisch anzufangen. Darauf habe ich nicht geachtet. Dänisch zog mich schnell in seinen Bann.
Nun habe ich aus erster Hand erfahren, dass die Experten recht haben. Es ist in der Tat keine leichte Aufgabe, die Sprache zu lernen, zumindest für mich. Nachdem ich stundenlang mit einem dänischen Film oder Podcast auseinandergesetzt habe, kommt es häufig vor, dass ich immer noch nur Bahnhof verstehe. Ich finde das schwer zu ertragen. Um eine vollständige Verdunstung meiner Leidenschaft für Fremdsprachen zu verhindern, brauche ich dringend Erholung. In solchen Momenten ist das Anschauen deutscher Videos genau die richtige Gegenmaßnahme. Es ist eine Erleichterung, mich mit einer Fremdsprache zu beschäftigen, die ich ohne große Mühe verstehen kann. Und ich liebe den Klang des Deutschen wirklich. Nachdem ich ein paar Videos angesehen habe, kommt die Leidenschaft zurück. Binnen kurzer Zeit habe ich den Mut, mit dem Dänischen weiterzumachen. Bis jetzt habe ich eine Anzahl von deutschen YouTube Videos heruntergeladen, deren Größe 94 GB beträgt. Wahrscheinlich werde ich noch mehr herunterladen, weil sie dafür sorgen, dass ich mein dänisches Selbststudium nicht aufgebe. Eine Neuigkeit: Mir ist etwas ganz Besonderes passiert. Ein Deutscher in meinem Alter, der in meiner Stadt wohnt, hat mich zum Grillen eingeladen. Heute bin ich zu ihm gegangen. Beim Essen haben wir uns unterhalten und bald stellte sich heraus, dass er Gitarre spielen lernen möchte. Also haben wir uns darauf verständigt, dass wir uns gegenseitig helfen sollen. Ich helfe ihm, Gitarre zu spielen, und er hilft mir, Deutsch zu reden. Edited by AlOlaf on 25 May 2014 at 10:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5628 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 120 of 211 26 May 2014 at 8:11am | IP Logged | ||
Das ist ideal, wenn du in der eigenen Stadt jemand zum Deutsch sprechen hast. Das ist ein toller Austausch: Sprachkonversation gegen Gitarrenunterricht! Hoffentlich wird das ein regelmäßiger Kontakt. Das erscheint mir besser als dein "wechselhafter" Deutschclub. Viele Grüße Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful |
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