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Did you teach yourself to become fluent? | ||
Tags: Teach Yourself | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4639 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 9 of 12 24 May 2013 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some more podcast links:
WDR podcast overview There is a pretty big range there. Wander through and see if anything attracts you. Schlaflos in München The incomparable Annik. (In Hochdeutsch not Bayrisch! :-) ). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bobb328 Groupie Canada Joined 4396 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 10 of 12 24 May 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for all the fantastic advice! Seems like everyone agrees it's a better to just jump in and start using native
materials. Fuenf_Katzen, I'm in the same situation, I have no one to speak with and am literally counting the cents to pay for college, food, and rent so traveling isn't really an option. I have a PDF of How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman and will probably read that soon. Judging from these post it seems best that I do something like LR. I have German and English editions of Harry Potter and a copy of Er ist wieder da by Timur Vermes which I've been holding off because I'm nervous to start using native materials. Also, would forcing myself to think in German be beneficial or just reinforce mistakes? Has anyone managed to learn to speak without actually having another person there? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6408 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 11 of 12 25 May 2013 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Don't be nervous to use HP! And yeah, LR or audiobooks are an excellent idea. It's also a way to stop f*cking thinking and carry on reading! doesn't matter if you didn't understand something - if it's important, it'll come up again.
Don't FORCE yourself. Have enough input to make you want to think in German. Don't doubt the power of independent learning! (starting with "don't" again just looked good :D) Many members here have taught themselves to fluency. I've taught myself Finnish. I did visit Finland once a year, but most of the work was done at home. On the techniques page, see scriptorium and especially shadowing. Don't neglect listening. Back when I was a beginner in Italian, I expected to take a route similar to Finnish. Writing fluency, reading fluency, then a lot of shadowing to reach speaking fluency. I did so much listening that I didn't find it necessary to shadow, other than to improve specifically my pronunciation and intonation. This time I didn't need it just to get my speech to the level of my writing. Edited by Serpent on 25 May 2013 at 12:08pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6783 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 12 of 12 26 May 2013 at 5:54am | IP Logged | ||
I would not call myself fluent in German, but I have reached a point where I can speak automatically and correctly on common topics without thinking about declinations, word order, genders or other basic grammar points. This was the result of lots and lots of speaking practice that ingrained certain habits in my head. I believe German is easier than other inflected languages because it only has four cases, and most of these only change the ending of the article/adjective slightly. These declension rules and patterns for creating plurals are fairly straightforward and just require practice until they become automatic. I would recommend that you get as much speaking practice as you can, either in the form of drills, talking to yourself, or through language partners, but focus on correct output. If you already know most of German grammar, you should be able to tell when you are making mistakes. I would suggest that in your initial speaking efforts, you should focus on taking the time to produce largely correct output (to your best ability, and with self-correction as necessary) rather than just rushing the words out without worrying about whether they are correct. The speed and fluidity will come with time, but fossilizing mistakes or ingraining bad habits will be detrimental in the long run. Additionally, I would suggest that if you are concerned with speaking automatically and fluidly at this point in your learning, you might want to focus on mastering the more simple and common grammatical forms, sentence patterns, and vocabulary before moving on to "advanced" communication/grammar/vocabulary. I had my greatest gains in the first few weeks of intensive studying because I spent that time talking about essentially the same things over and over again with my host family and language partner friends - what I did that day, my plans for the next day, my thoughts about the news, etc. Over time, I could easily use the most common verbs, tenses, nouns, etc. with complete automaticity. Later on, I could fit new words and sentence patterns into my speech because I had a good base. And I found people were more willing to speak German with me because I spoke more fluidly and correctly, which further increased my speaking opportunities. It sounds from your original post, for instance, that you are planning to study 30 new vocabulary words a day and that you feel speaking is difficult in part because the nouns themselves often do not indicate their gender. I think vocabulary cramming, while useful in its own way, doesn't help that much with developing automaticity and an ability to speak fluidly in German. And as for the gender issue, I would suggest that you just make sure to memorize the gender at the same time as you learn the new word. This will initially be hard, but gets easier as you train your brain to chunk the noun and gender as a single concept. Edited by mike245 on 26 May 2013 at 9:24am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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