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Intermediate Methods/Strategies

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
12 messages over 2 pages: 1
robarb
Nonaglot
Senior Member
United States
languagenpluson
Joined 4818 days ago

361 posts - 921 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French
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 Message 9 of 12
16 July 2015 at 8:11pm | IP Logged 
I think the intermediate stage is the peak time for working with things like italki or reading articles on Learning With
Texts.
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Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4768 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 10 of 12
17 July 2015 at 1:30am | IP Logged 
It is not "just" listening/reading, even though it is good to supplement these activities with others. Actually listening and reading huge amounts of material was majority of my way from the intermediate stage to the advanced one. It is not just a passive activity if you take a true extensive approach, not just a lazy occassional one.

How to actively, yet extensively, read/listen: Make your learning curve steeper. If you are reading articles now, grab a book. You might be surprised how much you'll have learnt after four or five novels. Watching tv series: get a more difficult one, one set in a particular region, a historical one, a modern one, one taking place in a highschool for every day language... und so weiter.

The key is the amount. It is not "just reading/listening", if you devote hundreds of hours to it, it is a way forward. It is not a passive activity if you get immersed so deep that you are thinking in the language (that means you don't translate in your head, you spontaneusly think in the language things like "don't go there, it's a trap", and you keep thinking in the language instead of your native one for several minutes after you close the book or shut down the video). But I know this appraoch isn't for everyone as the results tend to be visible only after some time.

Another option is intensive reading/listening. Analysing a book (or several) is a good way forward, I've read a lot of success stories with this approach. If you don't find it boring, it might be exactly the right thing for you. You can analyze subtitles/transcipts of tv shows the same way. A great exercise is repeating things after the charactes of the tv series or movies. Listen to their great and natural sentences and repeat them. Repeat the words, the syntax, the pronunciation, accent, melody. Copy their tone of voice and facial expression if it helps you. :-) (and it can be really fun)

As for more explicit material, I am not that far in German, but based on my experience with other languages, I recommend getting a grammar book suitable to your level. I am now happily snailing through Klip und Klar for the low levels (up to B1), but there is a follow up book. There are advanced grammar books by Hueber and others. Such a grammar can fill lots of gaps and help you move the active skills up really fast.

Other kinds of intermediate/advanced resources:
-a verb book, to help you cover the rest of the conjugations. It might give you some vocabulary as well.
-a monolingual dictionary might be a good tool. It is an interesting gamebook if you follow a chain of links between individual words
-a dictionary of the synonymes. That is a valuable thing in combination with writing practice.

Just a few ideas. I wish you lots of energy for your path through the intermediate plateau. And don't forget to have fun. That is something many intermediates leave out as something unnecesary and they burn out because of that decision.
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daegga
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Austria
lang-8.com/553301
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Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian
Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic

 
 Message 11 of 12
17 July 2015 at 1:59am | IP Logged 
Graded readers can also be helpful.
Especially weird old ones like these, which make boring easy texts suddenly
interesting:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/94888368/Deutsches-Buch-nach-der-n aturlichen-Methode-I


http://www.scribd.com/doc/94888540/Deutsches-Buch-nach-der-n aturlichen-Methode-II


The first few texts should be easy enough to pick up the script ;)

Edited by daegga on 17 July 2015 at 2:01am

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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 4925 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
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 Message 12 of 12
17 July 2015 at 11:00pm | IP Logged 
I tend to have the multi-track approach in mind, it's just that with a tight schedule (learning 8 languages) I usually only have two lanes available daily for each trip I take into a given language.

I went through most of these textbooks mentioned for German, it was just that my approach to textbooks nowadays is to understand grammar when it is supposed to be understood and just get exposed to vocabulary, no word cramming. That means I may even understand the rule for using a case early on but it will take me a lot of time till I learn the actual case endings and their most common exceptions. I would like to add the one I mention all the time: Modern [        ] Grammar: a practical guide, by Routledge. It helps a lot turning implicit into explicit knowledge and putting yourself into a context of the language being actually used. Both at the grammar volume and at the workbook with plenty of exercises. It is one of the smoothest associations of dry grammar and communicative approach I've found, with emphasis on the latter.

I went from 100% textbooks to 50/50 at an early B1 stage and then 80/20 as I finished working on the final textbooks I thought were still worth taking up my time (this one I mentioned being the last one iirc) to a purely native-materials approach, but which still involves that "cheating" method according to my level at each stage. Now I'm 100% native materials, but I take different approaches.

Deutsche Welle's B-range courses Wieso Nicht? and Marktplatzwere were my warm-up for native materials. Then I went for non-fiction which had plenty of international words, always bilingual reading, German text at one pdf window, English at another. I keep the ball rolling for a while. As for listening, I'd try my usual path: double subtitles English/German, then when things got easier, German-only subtitles. It already did. Now I'm at a stage where I pause for looking words up from the subtitles, less on films with less dialogue and a little more often with the dubbed Futurama that has lots of slang or just gibberish.

I switched from non-fiction to fiction and native (non-translated German) just for one single book, and it was a challenge in the beginning but halfway through it it was no harder than non-fiction (still reading in parallel). Then I went back to non-fiction and started L-Ring. Why so much non-fiction? Because German is a major language, we're millionaires and we can be chosers as much as we want. I've always attempted to read, in German, stuff I was crazy about reading regardless of the language, and so I saved up the time if I had to read those in Portuguese or English instead (plus I like to keep the worldwide-famous books such as Divergent, Dan Brown's books, Paulo Coelho's for languages where I do have difficulty finding translated resources for).

What changed with L-Ring? I found it much easier to understand the syntactical role of each term (which is difficult to figure out given German's unusual word order) when I listened to the text at a natural intonation. I'm just at my first book but after 200 pages I see massive gains. The reading speed already starts to feel slow. I have much less trouble than before to figure out the subject of the sentence, which adjectives relate to each noun and so on.

As for polishing grammar mistakes, I may come up to a German grammar in German later, but my idea is activating all this I've read about declension and such in all of my resources just through writing and getting corrected. Btw, stuff such as adjectival declension and problems I'd have with articles in the plural are already starting to be put in order.


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