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| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 1 of 13 25 March 2015 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
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I've been studying German for three or four months now, using Assimil Le Nouvel
Allemand Sans Peine, German for Reading, and German Quickly. My immediate goal is to get a B1 certification from the onDaF test soon, which will enable me to sign up for DAAD's Winterkurs next February. I know it's ambitious, but I took the thirteenth lesson in Assimil as a challenge — ich kann es versuchen! I haven't been able to keep up the Spartan schedule I'd assigned myself, but I've been decently assiduous. If anyone is interested in my routine: I repeat each Assimil lesson ten times the first day and another nine times variously spaced throughout four weeks, plus the Active Wave; GFR gets a round of revision on the following day for the harder sentences; and German Quickly I'm using as Scriptorium fodder, writing down each example and each exercise sentence and reading it out loud, also with repetitions the next day for anything that seems to be worth it. I add all unknown words and difficult or interesting sentences to Anki two days after first having seen them, which has so far gotten me around 1200 and 850 cards respectively. In a couple more days I'll be done with Assimil's passive wave and with GFR; GQ will take me another week or so. Not counting Anki, I guess I must have put in around 300 hours so far. For exposure I've been listening to the Slow German podcast, of which I can understand maybe 60%, playing a little bit of Criminal Case, and sometimes reading the news with a pop-up dictionary, though not as much as I probably should. To be quite honest I've been feeling somewhat burned out and unmotivated. I've pretty much bracketed all my other past-times and obligations in favor of this study, and sometimes I can't really remember why. But I'll go on! I'm not sure when I'll be taking the onDaF – the next opportunity will be in a month, but if any others get scheduled until then, I'll leave it for as late as I can. Either way, I'll try to keep working at least 3 hours a day until this currently scheduled date. After finishing the textbooks I mentioned, I plan on doing some L-R. I have audiobooks for a few Kafka stories (3 hours), Musil's Törleß (7 hours), Rilke's Malte (8 hours), and Hesse's Steppenwolf (7 hours). All of these are books I like and have recently (re)read. I also prepared a parallel text for the first Harry Potter, but I don't like it very much and I'm not sure I'll be able to keep focused enough to L-R it. Maybe I can just R it later on for practice. :) Since my big goal is the onDaF, I wonder about how I could tailor my studies to it. The test is pretty simple, and has no listening or speaking components. You get a series of short texts in which some words have had their last halves removed, and you have to fill them back up. Naturally the big challenge here is declension, but you also have to be familiar with a fair number of words just to be able to infer from context what should go in any given space. I have taken the example test they offer online a few times now and my best score has been 75%, which I think would be enough for a B1, but then again I did look up all unknown words for meaning and gender the first time around, so I'm not ready to feel confident...! I hope this log will help me keep motivated, and any opinions or advice you guys may have would be hugely appreciated. Bis bald! Edited by nystagmatic on 27 March 2015 at 9:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 2 of 13 25 March 2015 at 1:49pm | IP Logged |
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(Just realized my post title may end up baiting people who are looking to learn German.
Sorry to disappoint!) -> easily solved. ;p Edited by nystagmatic on 27 March 2015 at 9:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 3 of 13 26 March 2015 at 11:38am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I did the 29th lesson of German Quickly, about the "overloaded adjective construction", and was pleased at how straightforward I found it. Looks like Assimil and GFR had already eased me into this grammar point.
I have also decided to start L-R earlier than planned, even if that means I'll have to do the last lessons from the books a bit more slowly. I'd been itching to get it going for a couple of weeks, and the first day was a lot of fun. I did three Kafka stories, A Country Doctor, Eleven Sons, and The Judgment, plus the first third of In the Penal Colony. I used parallel texts, reading each sentence in English then listening and reading L2-L2. Too early to speak of results, but I was pleased to feel I could do this all day. I get much more involved with literature when I'm forced to read it slowly; I wish I could figure out how to get in this mode when reading for pleasure! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 4 of 13 27 March 2015 at 2:04pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday: did an initial pass on the last chapter of German for Reading, finished L-Ring The Judgment, did half of The Metamorphosis. Took me around three hours for an hour and a half of audio. So far I cannot easily follow the L1 text with L2 audio, and I'd guess I understand 60-80% of it when doing L2-L2. I think the toughest thing is how much the word order differs between English and German. If I stop and analyze the parallel text I can map everything to everything, but in real time it's still very easy to miss a pronoun or lose track of a delayed verb's objects and so on.
Assimil and German Quickly are stalled; maybe I'll make room for them this afternoon, but I have lots of college-related things I've been postponing and getting nervous about. Edited by nystagmatic on 27 March 2015 at 2:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 5 of 13 28 March 2015 at 1:51pm | IP Logged |
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The day before today: finished The Metamorphosis. An hour and a half of audio, three of work. By the end I was able to do it without stopping the audio, just reading the L1 text as fast as I could and bouncing back to the L2 column and following the narrator. I even found myself going back and forth sometimes. This is very easy to do when the columns are short, but when it's several sentences of text, and especially when the structure doesn't correspond very well (when e.g. the German has a verb after a dependent clause which in English succeeds the verb), then I have to pause. It's a shame that the LF Aligner editor doesn't let me create new rows. It would be much simpler if I could go over the text and separate it as well as I could, instead of having lots of paragraph-length cells. Does anyone know of an alternative? What software do you guys use for making and reading parallel texts?
But, as I was saying... even though I could do the last bits of The Metamorphosis without pausing, I afterwards went back to A Country Doctor and was disappointed to see I couldn't do it. A shame; looks like four hours of audio (plus all that Assimil) wasn't enough to teach my ears to get writing from speech. So I guess I'll have to do the same thing all over again instead of a proper Stage 3 pass. Comprehension seems to be slowly increasing, though; and I found out the obvious, that L-R requires a very high level of attention. You have to forcefully squeeze meaning from that L2 text; just looking at the words and letting the audio flow along doesn't do much. When doing it read-pause-listen, it's also a big help to imagine the story as vividly as you can when reading L1, then replaying that part of the mental film when reading and listening L2. I have nothing specific planned for today, and very little time. I'm worried that I might be doing L-R too slowly to get full benefits from it, but I wouldn't be able fully to dedicate myself to it until the end of this term, and I'm very impatient. Edited by nystagmatic on 28 March 2015 at 2:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 6 of 13 29 March 2015 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
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No work done yesterday. :( I downloaded a trial version of ABBYY Aligner, but the alignment doesn't seem much better than LF Aligner's. It's weird that the software doesn't align certain sentences which look perfectly relatable. It would be terrific if it could do one sentence per cell, even better if it could consider colon-separated clauses as full sentences.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 7 of 13 30 March 2015 at 4:08pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday was quite exciting. I did one more clumsy pass on A Country Doctor and Eleven Sons, pausing to read, then figured I'd try Stage 3 with the physical book instead of the digital parallel text – and, to my surprise, it seemed to work rather well! So I went through these same stories again, plus The Judgment, Penal Colony and a few other short pieces, never pausing, just reading L1 and listening L2. This amounted to two hours of Stage 3. I think using the book was a good idea, because on the computer I tend to get distracted more easily.
I wasn't able to pick out all words, but it was much more fun than the way I'd been doing it before. Three things have become clear to me. One, it's vastly important that the text be enjoyable and familiar to you, not just because then it'll be easier to focus but also because you'll be able to read it faster, half reading and half remembering. Two, I had been doing L-R upside down: the trick seems to be to read as far as you can in the narrator's pauses, then go back and try to match the audio to the text, not the other way around – while holding a segment in your head, listen to the audio and jump all over the text to try to find the translations for what you're hearing. Attention to the audio is more important than attention to the text, and comprehension sometimes comes delayed, when you're already on the next segment. Three, L-R is a skill. You have to learn to do it, and each time you begin a session you have to warm up to a good rhythm. I suppose that's another reason why intense study is best, and why one shouldn't feel discouraged if the first few hours feel like lunacy. It's only vital to keep focused, focused, focused. Afterwards I did an L2-L2 pass through the shorter pieces. Forty minutes or so; unfortunately I didn't understand nearly as much as I'd hoped I would. The good news, though, is that I later listened to half a dozen episodes of Slow German while shopping and cooking, and my comprehension seemed to have spiked up! Save for the episode on TV shows, I understood almost everything from the other ones. I'd already listened to each a couple of times, so it wasn't new material, but I do feel the language settling in place inside my head. Today I'll try to do The Metamorphosis again and one last pass through everything else. I'm delighted at how these stories don't seem to get old even with successive rereadings. Each time I go through them I find some new interesting crumb, scribble more stuff on the margins, underline or erase previous markings. I shouldn't be doing this during L-R, of course, but I can hardly resist. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4111 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 8 of 13 31 March 2015 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday: Stage 3 with The Metamorphosis and the short pieces, except for The Judgment. 3 hours total, but I have other stuff in my head and kept losing focus. L-R demands peace of mind!
1 person has voted this message useful |
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