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German starting B2: resources & old deck | ||
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| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4279 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes  Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 1 of 6 30 April 2014 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am looking for ways to expand my vocabulary in a systematic fashion.
At the moment my grammar may be at a B1 level, but I still have gaps in my vocabulary for such a level, and now I'm looking to proceed to an upper intermediate level and I want to build up in an efficient way. I'm starting an intensive course for B2, but we will use just a textbook, and in my experience it's just not enough. Although I usually like DW, I think that their offer for B2 is not interesting and too much time consuming. 1 - What resources would you suggest? 2 - I'm tired of my actual Anki deck, with about 1800 words, and I'm always behind with the repetitions. Should I start a new deck for whatever vocabulary I'll meet in the following months? Any help is really appreciated. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4344 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 6 30 April 2014 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I gave up on Anki altogether after having used it for a year when I was at your level in German and just started reading books on the Kindle with a Collins German-English dictionary. I'd recommend the cheaper NON-paperwhite as the cursor makes looking up words much easier.
I was originally worried that my giving up Anki would mean my vocabulary would inevitably go down, but this hasn't proved to be the case at all. I completed the Super Challenge last year (10000 pages - so a double SC by today's rules) and it proved immensely helpful getting my reading/listening level up to a very strong B2 level. You might want to consider taking part in the next SC, which starts tomorrow and runs or 20 months. I wrote a similar post for FelixKatze earlier today, so rather than rewrite it I'll just copy-and-paste below: --------- If you want children's books I could recommend the Pippi Longstocking's stories. They are Swedish (?) originally, but well loved as an anarchic feminist icon by German children and an easy read. I have heard Hesse is pretty easy - not sure about Kafka. A lot of the ease in reading comes when the text is fairly concrete. As soon as it gets too philosophical it becomes very difficult. I spent the first year just reading teenage/young-adult literature. Harry Potter is excellent and gets progressively harder. The Percy Jackson series is easier than HP and good (no comparison to the horrible movies). I also read the Hunger Games trilogy (a bit harder than HP) which has the advantage of being all written in the first-person present tense. For more adult literature I would recommend Murakami. Make sure it's an edition translated direct from Japanese-German and not Japanese-English-German as some of the earlier books were. I read and enjoyed his latest book this month and pleased/surprised to realize that the English translation won't appear until late in the year. The crime writer Jo Nesbø is also excellent and pretty easy. As you can tell I am not really wedded to German writers per se, but my perspective here in Berlin I am reading what I see others reading in the bookstores so don't feel under any strong pressure to start reading German classics just yet. If you want to try out contemporary German literature I have heard that Wolfgang Herrndorf is pretty easy and good. Check out his books "Sand" and "Tschick". The author sadly died fairly recently. Have a look here: http://www.new-books-in-german.com/english/1047/335/335/1290 02/design1.html Edited by patrickwilken on 30 April 2014 at 7:38pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3893 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 3 of 6 01 May 2014 at 3:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread might be of interest:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=38096&PN=3 This book has vocabulary with example sentences: http://www.amazon.de/A1-B2-Lernwörterbu ch-Grund--Aufbauwortschatz- lex/dp/3589015594/ Edited by Gemuse on 01 May 2014 at 3:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4279 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 4 of 6 02 May 2014 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry for not replying sooner, but the db server is incredibly slow every time I connect.
Thank you both for your suggestions. However I have a couple further questions: - how do you manage to retain the nouns gender and do you translate every or most of the words? That was the only reason I used anki for. - in your experience does reading books help cover most areas of interest? Edited by drygramul on 02 May 2014 at 3:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4344 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 6 03 May 2014 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
My sense of gender seems to be relatively OK, but I did use Anki for about a year and generated about 8000 active cards before I gave it up. Still I haven't used it for about eighteen months and my sense of gender hasn't seem to have weakened (if anything it is stronger now). I guess I am not super worried about gender as I am not super worried about generating grammatically correct sentences yet. Still I think it's hard not to read a lot and not to start to incorporate knowledge of gender as you read. And your sense of the gender in the language becomes much stronger the more you read. But I don't know it would be more effective to put every noun you want to learn into Anki first and drill the gender there. I guess it would be possible, but I doubt you would learn the language as quickly - if for no other reason that the time you spent on Anki could be (in my opinion) better spent interacting with the language reading/listening/speaking/writing. Until recently I would quickly translate any words I didn't know that I could find easily in the in-built dictionary. There are a fair number of words there,and looking up trennbar verbs is a bit of a pain, so I generally just made a guess of these. Recently I have been just reading extensively, without bothering to look up more than word every 2-3 pages (more out of curiosity than anything else).
Sure. Why not? As my reading has become stronger I am moving into newspapers, but as long as you read broadly why wouldn't books cover most areas of interest? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3893 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 6 of 6 04 May 2014 at 6:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Some discussion here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=37852&PN=1 Edited by Gemuse on 04 May 2014 at 6:55am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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