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jbadg76421’s TAC 2015 log(Rätsel) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 17 of 28 30 January 2015 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil
So far the lessons have been much more varied and interesting than those I studied in German With Ease...messages left on an answering machine, some moron trying to show off his car's new GPS, etc...I think I'm getting better at the translation exercises, and today I was shocked to realize that I'm only 17 lessons away from the active phase (gulp!). FSI Sometimes boring, sometimes motivating...Mostly boring. I'm on Unit 4. I have to say, there's a lot of vocabulary I doubt I'll be using anytime soon, but it's fun to try to speak German at full speed to match the recordings. I'm also going to try to "drill to kill", I didn't do as well as I hoped on some of the drills in Unit 3 so I'm going to revisit them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 18 of 28 01 February 2015 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I signed up for the 6 Week Challenge, we'll see how it goes. So far off to a good start, I'm finishing up Unit 4 of FSI. I really want to go back through and review some of the drills before I move on to the next unit though. It's easy for my attention to wander sometimes, and that's how I make silly mistakes. If I could really internalize the grammar, I would feel more confident in taking my German to the next step - actually trying to speak and write!
Assimil is still my favorite course...the dialogues are much funnier than German With Ease, and it's very encouraging to see how much I can already make out without clicking on the translation for help. And I'm excited to see that in later lessons the course will cover various dialectical differences...I've really only heard Hochdeutsch, so I'll be interested to hear what German sounds like when spoke by people from Switzerland and Austria. I'm still a bit nervous about hitting the active wave though...just two more weeks! It seems like the time flew by so fast...I'm spending about an hour per lesson currently, I'm sure that figure will grow quite a bit when I hit lesson 35. Also, bis dann! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4005 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 19 of 28 01 February 2015 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with the 6WC, teammate!
One question: what do you mean that Assimil is funnier than German with Ease? Isn't German with Ease part of the Assimil series? Anyway, just a heads-up, be careful when you hit the active wave: the lessons tend to be much harder (they double or triple the time required to finish) and this makes people drop halfway through the course. So don't overburden yourself with too much work, take it easy and save your energies to face the Active wave ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 20 of 28 01 February 2015 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Sorry, I should have been clearer...I meant to say that the lessons in Assimil Perfectionnement Allemand are funnier than Assimil German with Ease. Thanks for the heads up...I agree, finishing up the active wave can get kind of tedious. I'm sure that this advanced course will be tougher...I may put FSI aside if Perfectionnement Allemand gets too time consuming, I'd much rather spend my time on an Assimil course if I'm forced to decide. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 21 of 28 05 February 2015 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm thinking of changing the name of my log to All German All The Time :-), because according to Toggl, I spent 25 hours on German study (out of 36 total). I still manage to get in my daily Assimil lesson for Russian, but German is by far the dominate language. And I feel like I'm making good progress...the language is almost always buzzing around in my head, and I'm starting to notice that I'm able to catch grammatical mistakes much more quickly.
Assimil Today's lesson (22) was on Albert Einstein, very interesting stuff. Still loving this course, and the exercises are getting a bit easier for me. FSI I finally finished studying the dialogue for Unit 5. I'm starting to think that once I hit the active wave for Assimil, I should probably start doing FSI in smaller doses, and most likely not every day. Still, FSI has its uses, and I'm finding it easier to speak German more rapidly...something I thought I'd never achieve! I am starting to read actual books in German...I'm reading a Star Trek novel and also the German translation of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm hoping that reading about subjects that interest me will help make the process a bit easier. So far, it's just a matter of vocabulary, and that's why I think my Kindle may have been the most intelligent purchase I have made recently...I love that every word I look up gets put in the Vocabulary Trainer, which I can review later as flashcards. My favorite part is that the word is shown along with the sentence I first encountered it in... I really makes recall much easier. That's all for now...bis dann! Edited by jbadg76421 on 05 February 2015 at 1:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4323 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 22 of 28 05 February 2015 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love the Kindle with pop-up dictionary too.
If you use Anki, I can recommend reading occasional books with Readlang. You can easily export books into Anki, with context sentences etc. Also Firelang (for Firefox) allows you do the same thing while reading the web. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 23 of 28 10 February 2015 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil
I'm on lesson 28, and in a week the "active wave" begins. I've decided not to stress out about it too much...the instructions for the course say that this part is optional, so if it proves to be too much I'll just slow down and work on it when I can. I'm still going to finish the course through the passive wave though, and on that front things are going well. The last two lessons were business-oriented and therefore kind of boring, but overall I still think this is an excellent course and a must-have follow-up to German With Ease. FSI I'm going to try slow down on FSI, I'm at the end of Unit 5 and it is starting to get dull...that is absolutely the last thing I need, because that's a surefire way to halt any progress I'm making. I also realized that there's no real hurry...I plan on finishing this course and re-using it in the future for drilling, so I think it's best if I work on it every other day rather than every single day...Assimil is becoming demanding enough! Schaum's Outlines German Grammar I'm almost done with Chapter 5, which covers adjectives and adverbs. Not much to report here...things are starting to become much clearer. I'm also about 30 percent through my German-language Star Trek novel, reading it pretty much every day. Apart from unknown vocabulary, I'm very pleased with my progress...Reading is becoming much easier, almost as easy as French. Again, it's mainly the vocabulary that trips me up, but that's what the pop-up dictionary is for! As far as TV/radio, I am extremely happy with my listening skills...I can understand anywhere from 50-70 percent (news broadcasts) to 80 percent (TV shows, especially sitcoms), and so I've been really trying to improve in this area. I downloaded a lot of German-dubbed TV shows that my daughter enjoys (trying to nudge her into learning German!) like Zoey 101, iCarly, etc., and I can usually understand about 75 to 80 percent of everything. Not the most interesting material, but you gotta start small! Edited by jbadg76421 on 10 February 2015 at 1:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jbadg76421 Groupie United States Joined 4178 days ago 51 posts - 92 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French, Esperanto | Message 24 of 28 14 February 2015 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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German:
Still plugging along with Assimil Perfectionnement Allemand. I'm on lesson 32, and so the countdown begins to the active wave...three more days. I've got lesson 1 down pretty well. The cool thing about the e-methode is that for the active wave, when you do your review lesson, you simply click on each line of the dialogue and are give the French translation. You then click on the record button and orally give the German translation. The bad thing about the e-methode is that for the active wave, when you do your review lesson, you simply click on each line of the dialogue and are give the French translation. You then click on the record button and orally give the German translation.. So far, this is my favorite Assimil course, although I regret not also buying the hard copy...I still might, at some point, just to have for shadowing. However, as the passive wave already takes about 1 hour of my time to complete, I've decided to abandon other courses (except for Schaum's Outline of German Grammar) for now and stick to Assimil. Once the active wave hits, I imagine I'll be spending about 1 hour 30 minutes - 2 hours for each lesson, and additional time reviewing older lessons. But I figure it's time well spent...I'm learning lots of useful vocabulary, and a lot of it has already popped up on TV and in reading. Speaking of reading, I'm more than halfway through Star Trek: Das Klingon Gamit. The more I read (and I've been reading about an hour a day), the easier it gets, and the more I realize how much vocabulary I'm going to need! But the main thing is that I'm having fun, and that really makes learning so much easier. I've been trying to spend less time on courses and more time on native materials...I need to treat the language as a living thing, not an academic subject. It's a very motivating and very rewarding approach...There's a whole world of German literature and films to discover, and I feel like I could spend a lifetime learning this language. I've also been using the Readlang plugin to when I read newspapers like Die Zeit, and importing unknown vocabulary into Anki. I didn't do this with French, mainly because I don't really care as much about French, but I really want to have a large German vocabulary. I don't read newspapers much, mainly only French and German news stories covering Russia/Ukraine (see below), and I especially love reading the comments. I also skim German forums covering some of my personal interests, although I find these somewhat more difficult to read...maybe the level of discourse is a bit above my current abilities. And I'm still listening to a lot of German rock music...I like finding the lyrics on YouTube and memorizing them so I can sing along. Russian I mention Russian only because, although it's not getting as much attention as German (I'm doing the 6WC for German), this language is starting to grow on me! I started Assimil Russian about two weeks ago, doing one lesson per day, and reviewing previous lessons when possible. I don't spend more than 30 minutes on each lesson, maybe 45 minutes tops. I've also started watching Russian dubs of TV series...I'm obviously not able to understand much at all aside from the occasional word or expression, but I really regret not starting to listen to authentic German from the beginning of my studies. I did with French, and when I finished New French With Ease I was already comfortable enough with the language to start reading and listening to native materials. Russian is quite difficult, and I plan on spending many years becoming profficient in it, so I think it would be best to get used to the flow of the language now. I'm not sure what exactly attracts me about Russian, but I've been fascinated by the language and the culture since my childhood. It's not the sound...I don't find Russian particulary pleasant or unpleasant sounding, just very exotic. It could be the writing system...I think it's the coolest looking alphabet on the planet! But, honestly, I really think it's the culture...the history, the people, and especially the literature. Russian, more than any other language, has a corpus that I would regret not getting the chance to study in it's original tongue. And were I given the opportunity to travel to only one place in the world, it would be a hard choice, but Russia would still be first. German may be my first love, and my adopted language, but I think it is extremely likely I'll also grow quite attatched to Russian as well. That's all for now! Edited by jbadg76421 on 14 February 2015 at 4:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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