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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4632 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 1 of 4 12 September 2013 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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An audio based German course, aimed mainly at the spoken language.
Starts at beginner level, but I'm told it progresses quite quickly. Similar idea to Michel Thomas, and the Say Something in (Welsh, Spanish, Dutch, etc) series, although I think it also has some original features. http://youspeakgerman.com There are 4 free lessons. I'm giving them a try at the moment (in between Welsh, and other things). As I've posted about elsewhere, my reasonably good passive skills of listening and reading haven't automatically translated well to active ones, especially not speaking. I can't get to Germany very often, and there aren't many speaking opportunities where I am, so I'm happy to give this a try as a direct approach to the spoken language, especially having seen how effective SSiW is. I guess I should go back and have a listen to Michel Thomas, and see how it compares. Edited by montmorency on 13 September 2013 at 11:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4337 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 4 13 September 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I am interested what you think. I am giving a workshop in a month for people here in Berlin interested in self-learning methods so it would be very interesting to know what you think of the classes.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4632 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3 of 4 13 September 2013 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||
OK Patrick. I haven't made it a priority at the moment, but my regular evening classes start in early October....probably my next opportunity of speaking (some!) German with others, at least face to face, so it would be good to have quite a few of these lessons under my belt before then, and hit the ground running, so to speak. So that gives me a sort of deadline. I am very much not a beginner though, not even a false beginner. My problem is a deep lack of confidence in speaking, which I usually get over after 2 or 3 days in Germany, at least in the right environment, and after a week I'm quite confident. The occasional speaking opportunities I do get this country don't give the level of immersion required to build up my confidence. I will be interested to see if this "Michel Thomas plus"- type approach does the trick. Most of the material will be familiar, I suspect (and in that sense, my experience will not be representative of a beginner), but hopefully I'll get a lot of experience in building up quite complex sentences from similar elements "on my feet" (as it were), in a "safe" environment, until it becomes at least somewhat automatic. Edited by montmorency on 13 September 2013 at 12:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4632 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 4 of 4 01 October 2013 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
Sorry, I meant to get back to you before now on this subject: I've now done the 1st 10 lessons. (which means I did sign up, as I thought I probably would). While I have some minor quibbles, I'd say my view is overall very positive. I was impressed that by lesson 4 (the last free one), he was already using some fairly advanced structures that normally aren't taught to beginners, like the verb being sent to the end in subordinate clauses. It has some similarities with Michel Thomas, and even more so to Say Something in Welsh. One difference is that he is not afraid to throw in grammatical language, so grammar bugs would be happy. People who really hate grammar might be frightened a little bit by that, but I think they still would and could learn from this. For the first part of the lesson, it's only him that you hear, first giving an English prompt, leaves a space for you to fill in the German, then he gives the German twice. In the second part of the lesson, you hear only a native speaker giving all the structures he has given, in a varying order, increasing in speed. This is described as a listening exercise, but you could also repeat, or shadow this if you wanted, which is what I tend to do. None of the material was new to me, although it did help me revise some points on which I was a bit rusty. I can't judge it as a beginner would judge it, since I'm far from being a beginner, but I think a real beginner would get a lot out of it, They'd probably have to take it a bit slower than I did, and repeat the lessons a few more times. There is only a Course 1 for the moment, and this is not yet complete. I think there will be 25 lessons, and there are about 19 or 20 now. I'd say it's at least as good as Michel Thomas, and probably better because: His accent is closer to authentic German than Michel Thomas's was (although the later MT courses are voiced by native speakers, admittedly), and you also hear a native speaker. I think potentially, you could go a lot further with this than with MT, assuming he completes Course 1, and goes on to Course 2, which I think he has promised. I hope that's enough of an assessment. If you have any questions, I will try to answer them. On a totally unrelated subject, but since I know you are very interested in reading books, and we've discussed this before: I've been going through Professor Arguelles' old posts here, and I thought this one was quite interesting. He has said similar things in videos, but I found this summary of his approach to reading and vocabulary simple but useful: Prof Arguelles on dictionary use 1 person has voted this message useful |
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